The question I almost always get from people after they find out we are launching an ICO is: “Are you on ERC20?”

Looking at what others do is a useful tool to lessen the cognitive load we have to do when making decisions, but such decision-making ought to be tempered by diving a little deeper into the reasons behind it.

Our decision to go with Stellar can be described in two broader categories: an alignment in goals, and because of technical reasons.

Goal Alignment

BloomX’s goal is to provide a platform (an app store, if you will) for money services businesses (MSBs). On this platform will exist a suite of applications that serve these MSBs and help them run their business.

“Stellar is a platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people”, and this is a perfect fit for the activity that will occur on the platform. Every exchange of currency or payment these MSBs execute in the network adds to the total liquidity in the network. Combined with the Stellar Decentralised Exchange (DEX), the benefits that will accrue to the businesses and end-users is immense.

The first product on the BloomX platform is Crypto-Fiat Exchange, or CFX. CFX allows neighborhood money changes to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, leveraging the often decades-old trusted brand.

What Czarina would look like buying and selling cryptocurrencies.

Because of The Tech

It’s cheap. Since we’re building a lot of functionality straight on the Stellar network, every movement of funds (customer to business, business to customer, business to business, and customer to customer) will hit the blockchain. Ethereum’s average transaction fee is USD 0.40. In the Philippines, that will get you a small meal — this is far from the expense people will accept when sending from wallet to wallet. In Stellar, USD 0.40 will get you about 100,000 transactions.

It scales. Without fancy hardware, Stellar can achieve 1,000 transactions per second. We want the room to bring on millions of people onto this platform. Stellar has this room.

It’s fast. The average transaction takes about five seconds. A wallet user only needs to wait around five seconds to see their transaction go through.

It’s simple. Stellar’s smart contracts are not Turing complete — this a good thing. The attack surface is way smaller, and this increases our confidence in the security of the smart contracts we take advantage of in the platform.

It introduces network effects. The BloomX platform will benefit from other Stellar user activity. Other players on the Stellar network have a standard way of integrating with our services, and vice versa. The more players there are, the better it will be for everyone involved.

It’s A Match!

Because Stellar provides a simple way to create assets, send payments, and exchange tokens on the network in a cheap, fast, and efficient manner, choosing them was a no-brainer.