I think it is safe to say that the majority of us have used Credit Cards. Credit Cards are great because they are portable and safe. By portable, I mean we can use it almost anywhere we go. By safe, I mean if anything goes wrong there is an avenue for recourse. We can simply file a dispute with the issuing bank and the bank creates what is called a charge-back. If the dispute is resolved in favor of the Credit Card owner the money goes back to the card, the seller is sanctioned, and everyone is happy (except for the seller). Now with the birth of cryptocurrencies, things started to change a little bit. People came to know a new method of payment.

The blockchain has allowed for a cheaper way of transacting, however it has also allowed for greater fraud. Cryptocurrency transactions are usually one way: Bob sends money to Alice, and that is basically it. This is problematic with e-commerce. If you decided to buy an item and pay in crypto, you are increasingly exposed to fraud. It is likely that the person won’t send you the item or deliver the service you paid for; many have been defrauded this way. I remember, and I think you can relate to this as well, when I got my first coin which was in BTC. I decided to sell it through a local forum to a guy who proposed a high value for it. In my naiveness, I sent it without considering that the receiver might not deliver the money I asked for. So I just sent the coin and I waited for the money to hit my Paypal account. One hour, two, and three had passed and nothing .... only to realize that I had been scammed. Too bad I couldn't do anything about it; I just had to accept the loss and move on. Many face the same problem. This is where Natmin shines.

Natmin wants to eliminate this burden of being scammed and deliver an escrow solution based on the blockchain. Natmin is building the solution on Ethereum (they have a prototype available too: here) which means their token (NAT) is an ERC20 token and can be accepted almost everywhere. Buyers will no longer have to worry about the sellers not delivering on their promises. Through the platform, buyers would transact safely with the lowest possible fee.

I know you are probably asking "why another escrow service?"; there are already several competitors in the escrow game. But Natmin hopes to deliver their escrow differently. They do not want to do it the traditional way of having someone handle the approval process, this only means more time spent waiting for approvals. For example, in a manual process, when the buyer approves the transaction it is only confirmed once the escrow employee approves it, otherwise you are left waiting. If done with a large scale of transactions, it could take a long time to complete a single transaction; something no crypto user wants. Natmin does this autonomously through a self regulating system. Natmin, in its core, utilizes smart contracts to regulate the transactions between the buyers and the sellers.

The other interesting offering of Natmin is the dispute resolution mechanism. The dispute resolution is also carried out semi-autonomously, without the intrusion of any Natmin employee which can impact the resolution decision. The disputes are resolved through a voting process in the network. When a dispute is raised, supporting documents are provided and NAT nodes vote for the party that the documentation supports. Either party has the option to appeal this decision, and a second, and last, round of voting takes place. The decision from this final vote is then applied. The voting node I mentioned earlier represents a person in the network, who is awarded points for voting with the majority of voters. This promotes a truthful assessment of the documentation by the node as minority node voters lose a reputation point and will not be paid for their vote.

The NAT token is pre-minted with a fixed supply. Any unsold tokens will be split to three portions: 70% will be distributed to the sale contributors, those who participated in the pre-sale or the public sale; 15% will be burnt to decrease supply and increase demand on the token; the final 15% will be sold by Natmin for the creation of new transactions on the platform.

The sale is on-going and if this got you interested here are some resources for more information:

Website: https://www.natmin.io/

Telegram: https://t.me/NatminPureEscrow

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NatminPE Medium:

https://medium.com/natmin-pure-escrow

