A token named FXC (Flexa coin) is currently trending and many people haven’t heard of it yet. We decided to have a look at the project and determine if it is worth investing or not. SPOILER ALERT: It is.

Background

What brings Flexa to immediate attention is their presence at Consensus 2019. First, they are one of the main sponsors of the event. Second, it appears that they also have the biggest booth. They actually have two booths so they won’t go unnoticed. Flexa CEO will give a 1-hour long talk on Tuesday, May 14, the day after a big announcement they are supposed to make. He will also be a panelist in the 30 min session on Wednesday, May 15.

If you go on their website or social media, you’ll also discover that they already have decently big partners like Starbucks, Paypal and Mastercard. Better than that, they actually have a working app that is accepted in some Starbucks. There are a few sources from July 13, 2018, July 30, 2018 or November 28, 2018. So what is Flexa, how does it work, is their coin useful and is it worth investing in it?

What is Flexa

Flexa is a project led and advised by quite skilled individuals coming from companies like Slide, Raise, Amazon, AirBNB, Paypal, Starbucks, TD or American Express. They are currently working on an app that allows instant payment in stores/shops with your smartphone. It allows you to pay as easily as with contact credit/debit cards but without having to register all your economical activity in your bank records, since it goes from your crypto wallet to the merchant’s bank account. So far, nothing super revolutionary you’ll say, but there is more.

The issue with crypto payments is confirmations. If you want to use your BTC or ETH stack to pay for your coffee, the merchant either has to wait or take the risk that it is going to be double spent. Obviously, none of these options are acceptable when you’re running a business that processes thousands of transactions each day. That’s why Flexa proposes the FXC coin which acts as collateral for transactions on their Flexa Network Protocol. If the payment doesn’t go through, the equivalent FXC amount from your or the app’s stack is used to pay the bill:

“anyone can stake Flexacoin and support an app on the open Flexa network. In return for using their collateral to secure Flexa payments, stakers are paid a small percentage of each transaction that’s processed through the app they choose to collateralize.”

Setting up collateral is however meant to be easy and offers an opportunity for the layman to be his own bank without having to deal with all the hassle related to buying cryptocurrencies and storing them safely.

The underlying technology of Flexa’s network is still in its infancy but is surely promising. In the near future, we should be able to connect any app to the FNP thanks to their open API. Flexa is a decent crypto-based solution that can compete against all the current payment systems with a rather simple concept. A simple concept mixed with good user experience (the same one you can get with popular apps like Snapchat, Instagram, etc.) leads to a way more plausible mainstream adoption than all the solutions I witnessed to date. You probably heard about TenX credit card. You can pay with crypto but you need to order the card first, then you have an annual fee + fees on each ATM transaction. Maybe you’ve heard about PundiX payment solution, which is so obscure that no one in the world wants to adopt it. Flexa is already working and its collateral system can lead to highly popular and scalable solutions, like simple but sophisticated loyalty programs that can be used across a broad variety of stores.

Tokeneconomics

As I am writing this, Flexa coin’s total supply is ~ 100B coins and its circulating supply is around 15B coins. The latter is planned to increase slowly over time until it reaches the total supply in 2045. This means that FXC is not a small cap gem: at the current price (around $0.006), Flexa’s market cap is around 100M, which already places it in the top 60 on CMC.

I don’t usually invest in < top 100 coins but the situation here is different. As I described it above, Flexa is kind of under the radar with a slowly building hype that may peak during consensus 2019 (May 13 – 15) since they are supposed to make an announcement on May 13. Thus I expect the charts behaving like a blooming low cap, the main question being: which rank can it reach?

To me, the worst case scenario would be a steady growth until the announcement that would bring Flexa at the reasonable $200M market cap. It would be surrounded by coins like 0x, ICON, Augur and OmiseGo and would naturally overtake PundiX by a pinch. This could happen before or during the announcement period and would get you a nice x2 ROI from now.

The best case scenario would be 1/10 of XRP performance, taking into account that both have an identical total supply and a similar middle term circulating supply. Since XRP market cap is around $12B, that would mean a x12 ROI early 2020 (when FXC circulating supply is around 30B coins). At this point, FXC would be in the top 20 CMC surrounded by IOTA, Tezos and Tron.

Which of these two scenarios is more likely to happen will mostly depend on the announcement made on May 13, so the strategy is up to you. You may choose to sell before/during Consensus or to Hodl until 2020, but either way, it wouldn’t be a stupid idea to at least invest a small amount in Flexa now.