SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 26, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bee Token, a San Francisco-based startup utilizing an ERC-20 ​utility ​token for its Beenest decentralized home-sharing network, announced a new partnership today with WeTrust, a blockchain-based platform for financial empowerment, to provide a decentralized insurance layer based on crowdsourced security deposits for Bee Token users, and improve risk assessment capabilities by integrating user history on the Beenest platform. Bee Token and WeTrust will collaborate to incentivize good behavior among users by sharing information around trustworthiness and creditworthiness, thus minimizing risks associated with property damage to hosts’ rentals at cheaper insurance rates that cover both property and/or furniture damage.



“We couldn’t be happier about this partnership with Bee Token,” said George Li, CEO of WeTrust. “This collaboration is exactly the sort of innovative use case that we believe will demonstrate the advantages of our platform in managing the complex processes involved with decentralized insurance and insurance-like products across diverse industries.”

This news comes on the heels of Bee Token’s oversubscribed token presale that garnered tremendous support from hundreds of investors all over the world, raising $5 million in just five minutes to complete the total $10 million private and public presale raise. The public token sale begins on January 31, 2018 at 12:00 p.m. PST after more than 100K participants registered to be whitelisted to participate. WeTrust’s own token crowdsale was held back in Spring 2017, raising a total of $5 million.

Beenest provides one of the first zero percent commission solutions for short-term home-sharing, offering incentives for both guests and hosts. Through ​decentralization, ​Beenest disrupts ​the ​current ​sharing economy ​model, using tokenization to allow ​early adopters ​and ​token ​holders to benefit from the ​growth ​of ​the Bee ​network by using Bee tokens in payment, arbitration and reputation protocols. By removing the middleman and introducing a decentralized, automated sharing economy platform, Beenest will reverse the concentrated distribution of ownership, double-digit transaction fees, and avoid the vulnerabilities to security breaches and data manipulation of the existing short-term housing marketplaces.

Public interest has swarmed the crypto housing rental startup resulting in Beenest being one of the top five largest Telegram groups at 50K members — the preferred social network of crypto — and one of the fastest growing Twitter channels with nearly 48K followers.

"The sharing economy began as an initiative to facilitate accessible, low-cost accommodations. However, the business model followed by platforms like Airbnb and Uber has resulted in multi-billion dollar valuations for leading brands while consumers pay guest and commission fees between 10 and 22 percent to cover company costs,” said Jonathan Chou, CEO of Bee Token. “Bee Token is bringing the community back to the sharing economy with a decentralized solution that benefits both guests and hosts by using the automation made available through Ethereum smart contracts to offer zero commission fees.”

The three protocols that Bee Token is building in order to offer zero commission short-term rentals are termed the “P-A-R” protocols which stands for “Payment, Arbitration, and Reputation.” The Payment protocol allows users to send and receive tokens that are held until the fulfillment of service. The Arbitration Protocol solves disputes through trustless voting, ensuring transparent and unbiased conflict resolution. Lastly, the Reputation Protocol manages reputation scores for all peer-to-peer entities that are backed by transparent algorithms defined in smart contracts and accessible to the masses.

In addition to decentralizing the Beenest platform, these native protocols are designed so that existing centralized sharing economy applications (e.g. Airbnb, Couchsurfing, etc.) can also build on top of Bee Protocols and tokenize their offerings, providing wider access to users interested in cryptocurrencies.

For more information, subscribe to Bee Token’s newsletter at beetoken.com/newsletter and join the Bee Token Telegram here and for more information on WeTrust, join their Telegram group here and explore their Trusted Lending Circles dApp, available on the Main Ethereum Network.

About Bee Token:

Bee Token is a decentralized ecosystem for the sharing economy powered by the BEE token. Bee Token’s seasoned team of industry veterans from some of the most disruptive companies in Silicon Valley including Google, Facebook, Uber, and Civic are reimagining the sharing economy by leveraging the efficiency and security of the Bee Protocols. BEE token is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain and used to power both the Bee Token ecosystem and the first application in the ecosystem, BeeNest, a short-term housing platform with zero percent commission and lower fees than competing, centralized platforms. For more information, visit https://www.beetoken.com/ or follow us on Twitter @thebeetoken.

About WeTrust:

WeTrust is an inclusive, decentralized platform that enables fair and equitable financial services (e.g. savings, lending, insurance products) to be built on the blockchain without the need for a traditional trusted third party. The WeTrust team is led by experienced industry veterans from McKinsey, Google, and PayPal, while Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin maintains an advisory role. In early 2018, WeTrust deployed one of the world's first decentralized fintech apps on the Ethereum blockchain, Trusted Lending Circles (TLC’s), to serve as a proof of concept for their decentralized insurance protocol, which will enable collaboration between disparate parties, transparent risk assessment, and decentralized claims validation. For more information, visit www.wetrust.io or follow @WeTrustPlatform on Twitter and Telegram.

MEDIA CONTACT: Transform Group, beetoken@transform.pr