The Storiqa project, founded in early 2017, revealed to the community an idea of a quick-to-setup marketplace with minimal financial borders and global transactional fees. The basis of this idea lies around the issue of cryptocurrency liquidity. Despite the fact that plenty of merchants around the world are ready to accept Bitcoins or Litecoins, there is still a vacant market for selling and buying in cryptos.

The audience of 1.66 bln people

The online retail seems to be a promising direction. According to data used in Storiqa’s white paper, global e-commerce levels are increasing, with a turnover of $2.2 tln expected by 2018, a 20 percent increase when compared to 2017.

The number of online shoppers increases annually by an average of 16 percent and the total number amounts to approximately 1.66 bln people worldwide, according to a Global E-commerce Report marketing study by Nielsen. The majority of customers that spend money online are located in China, US, Great Britain and Japan.

Storiqa’s target audiences are customers who want to buy goods and services with cryptocurrencies. “Shoppers with cryptocurrency is an untapped market for e-commerce. No one before has tried to bring cryptocurrency at common usage in terms of e-commerce,” says the projects white paper.

Cryptos and small entrepreneurs

As for small businesses that are supposed to populate the platform from inside, the new marketplace allows small and medium entrepreneurs to start online selling on global market in just one hour. The project team states that online selling platform meets the interests of small-scale producers that have already established themselves in local markets and want to increase sales on an international level.

Another element of Storiqa’s platform are bloggers and traffic owners who would like to make reviews and monetize traffic. “For example, bloggers take a product for review and publish the video with referral link that leads to traffic monetization if shoppers purchase goods from this link,” says the white paper.

Thinking through the wallet issue

Storiqa recently finished its token sale, having reached its $25 mln hard cap in two weeks before the planned end date. UPS, the global logistics company, has revealed interest in getting traffic via Storiqa, as was said by the startup representatives to Cointelegraph. On March 7, another Blockchain startup Origin Protocol announced partnering Storiqa by sharing expertise in terms of technological development.

As Storiqa reported to Cointelegraph, Alan Wong, ex-CMO of Huawei Devices, has joined the project team as Senior VP of Operations Asia. Formerly an advisor, Alan is a telecom veteran with 18 years of C-suite experience under his belt. He will lead Asian expansion from their regional HQ in Singapore.

Storiqa has recently announced its listing on several exchanges, with HitBTC among of them. The project promises to reveal its product MVP covering the full package of features later this year- between Q2 and Q3. So far, a beta-version of a platform was released in mid-2017.

STQ wallet will be presented by the end of March. An STQ wallet, designed for the marketplace, allows payments in STQ tokens at first, Storiqa’s team reported to Cointlegraph. As for tokens, they provide a variety of benefits for customers. For example, buyers while paying STQ receive higher cash back.

“Blockchain helps in building smart reviews: shoppers will be able to leave feedback on products only after receiving the ordered product. It means no fake reviews on Storiqa,” states the project team.