Of all the dominant story lines in 2017, few have been larger than the rise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. Interest in the space has reached a fever pitch, and it’s safe to say the proverbial Netscape moment is now behind us — we are going mainstream. You can see the adoption happening real time too, as each day more and more people sign up on platforms like Coinbase to make their very first purchase of cryptocurrency. The numbers behind the growth are staggering — in November alone, Coinbase added more than 1MM new accounts, which sounds crazy until you realize that’s not even the first “1 Million” month Coinbase has had this year. In fact, Coinbase now has more user accounts than the brokerage firm Charles Schwab. It makes sense though — in 2017 the total cryptocurrency marketcap has increased by a factor of 18x. People are getting rich, and the world is taking notice.

But with great financial gain comes even greater incentives for theft. There is a learning curve to cryptocurrency, the concept of digital wallets with private keys is not familiar to most new entrants in the market. One unfortunate outcome of this is that it is extremely easy for bad actors to prey on the unsophisticated. Scan any various crypto reddit, and daily you’ll see threads from devastated individuals posting stories about their wallets being hacked, as they fall prey to another phishing attack or some other scam. Whenever someone’s private keys are compromised, their funds are quickly withdrawn from their wallet and sent to the hacker’s wallet. Because of how blockchain transactions work, there is nothing one can do to reverse the theft, meaning people lose everything. It’s one of the biggest pains plaguing the space, and will continue to be a problem as cryptocurrency grows.

It’s for this reason I’d like to introduce you to my favorite project, one that has quietly flown beneath the radar of many investors. This project aims to solve the exact problem outlined above, and will be a critical component to increasing the adoption of cryptocurrency. The project is called BLUE, and they are bringing secured payments to the blockchain.

The BLUE team is a group of payment experts who previously worked at Visa. While there, the team worked with Apple to help build and contribute to the infrastructure behind Apple Pay. Apple Pay, it should be noted, is currently the world’s most secured form of payment. In fact, the team pitched the idea of BLUE to Visa in the first half of this year, but Visa stated they weren’t interested. Characteristic of large, bureaucratic corporations, Visa has enjoyed its monopolistic control over the payments market and is slow to adopt revolutionary technologies like blockchain. Recognizing the opportunity at hand, the team decided to leave Visa and go build it anyway. Using a playbook they already know, the team started BLUE with one goal: to become the Visa of blockchain.

BLUE is going to directly tackle the fraud and scam problem that undermines the industry. The way they plan on doing this is by creating a trustless 2FA that will make it nearly impossible for scammers to steal your cryptocurrency, even in the event your private keys have been compromised. This technology is currently patent pending, and when released, will be the first of it’s kind to exist. The SDK goes beyond just payment authorization though, as the SDK will also be capable of performing automated auditing of smart contracts, much like what Quantstamp (QSP) is trying to do for Ethereum dapps. In fact, hop into the telegram and you will see that just today BLUE’s lead dev identified an infinite minting problem in Bitcoin Red’s code, the same problem that the eBTC contract had. This is the same dev, mind you, that called out that bug in the eBTC contract to begin with. While this bug was manually identified, it is the type of programming error that the SDK will easily catch in the future.

But returning to our point, how exactly is BLUE going to become the Visa of cryptocurrency? To complete your understanding of what they’re doing, think about it this way — when you go onto a platform like Amazon and make a purchase, the payment is processed by Visa. Visa utilizes algorithmic safety measures to verify that the transaction is being initiated by the real card holder, and then authorizes the payment. But since cryptocurrency payments are trustless (by definition), when someone steals your private keys, they are then able to sign and send the payment. Therefore in adding a 2FA layer to the transactions, you will have the ability to halt your funds from being transferred in the event a transaction is initiated from your wallet without your consent, just like how Visa would halt a payment if your credit card is being used in a suspicious manner.

So why has such a potentially valuable project been flying so far under the radar until now, with the marketcap (at the time of this writing) being less than $10MM? The reason is that the BLUE team did not conduct an ICO — the project has been bootstrapped from day one, meaning the team has as much skin in the game as the investors. I know people might shy away from the token given its meteoric rise in the last couple weeks, but keep in mind that’s only due to the fact the price of this token started at $0, sans ICO. Given that both the SDK is expected to be live and working by Q1 and more exchange listings are coming, this token still has a tremendous opportunity to increase in price many times over — the discovery of this project is just beginning.

If you are curious about BLUE and would like to learn more, then click on the link below and join the telegram, the dev team is quite active there, and will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

BLUE telegram -> https://t.co/RoxhCbc3ku