It’s not often that you see a project enter the space and offer a solution so fundamental that it changes your entire perspective on something. Bancor is one of those projects.

We first heard about Bancor very early in their public release cycle, two of our core-devs had been raving about Bancor’s transformative potential for a while, and after reading through the Bancor whitepaper (and being led-down a mental rabbit-hole of possibilities), we realized how critical integration between our two platforms would be to the success of one another.

For us, the TokenCard — Bancor partnership has some very real implications for communities world-wide.

A primer on Bancor

For the few of you who are unaware, the Bancor Protocol enables new kinds of currencies, ERC20 compatible smart-tokens, to be created, that are intrinsically tradable. This is solving a problem known as the ‘double coincident of wants’ — to facilitate an exchange there needs to exist two parties with opposite ‘wants’, that can meet and satisfy the other party’s needs. With the Bancor protocol, the smart-token contract itself acts as the market maker, removing the need for a second party, and providing continuous liquidity to those who wish to exchange.

The partnership will focus on integrating smart-tokens efficiently so that they can be spent seamlessly worldwide, and establishing processes in which smart-token issuers can easily provide TokenCards to their respective communities.

Exchanging Value

Card transactions are simply exchanges of value; TokenCard’s vision is to provide users the freedom to exchange value in whichever asset they wish, even if the transacting parties’ ‘wants’ don’t match (cardholder’s ETH vs merchant’s EUR). In this way, we solve a similar problem as Bancor — traditionally, transacting parties had to agree on an asset in which to transact with, (historically standardized as a government issued currency) but with TokenCard we uproot this constraint — anything can be used to transact value.

Uncharted Territory

The only caveat of exchanging value is that there needs to be an effective process in which to realize the value to be exchanged. The thinner the liquidity of an asset, the more impractical it will be to transact with. It goes without saying that without Bancor, small-cap niche currencies (with incredibly poor liquidity) would have been completely incompatible with TokenCard, however, thanks to the inherent continuous liquidity afforded to smart-tokens, this will no longer be the case. The Bancor protocol makes small-cap currencies viable assets for TokenCard, and in doing so, will see TokenCard gain exposure to markets beyond the ordinary.

We are very excited about the Bancor Protocol and what it means for the industry. We wish the team all the best in their imminent token sale and look forward to working with them into the distant future.