Digital Liquidity Solved — The Remedy’s Been Around For A While

With Guy Melamed

Disruption isn’t just destruction. It’s about introducing something new that revolutionizes the old, changes it for the better, and makes it stronger. Disruption shakes things up without throwing things out.

And disruption is nothing to be feared. So much of success depends on blending just the right mix of innovative and new elements with the tried and true. A healthy forest needs ancient giants alongside fresh saplings, a great artist needs to appreciate the classics just as much as the avant garde, and a great team has to combine experienced veterans with energetic rookies.

Combining the assets of two separate worlds to make a stronger one is a big part of the Zeex philosophy. With the Zeex platform, cryptocurrency is ready and able to positively disrupt the gift card industry.

Gift cards have been around for decades, and they’re great. Everyone understands how they work, they can be converted into goods and services as easily as cash.

Retailers have learned to love them too. Gift cards give them a way to preserve their hard-won customer base and to bring the revenue from future sales into the present. As a result, most name-brand retailers have an established gift card programme.

For all its strengths, though, the gift card business is starting to show its years. For one thing, the infrastructure to distribute gift cards is largely stuck in a brick-and-mortar world. In an age when consumers increasingly use their phones for payment and e-commerce has gone mobile, the worst part about gift cards is the actual card. Physical media are a loss for issuers, consumers and distributors.

The gift card market needs fresh dynamism to reinvigorate it. Cryptocurrency is the perfect candidate, a hot asset with a variety of different options to suit everyone’s needs. Since the ledger of transactions is public, it’s basically fraud-proof.

But even though some powerhouses of the global financial market, like Singapore and Switzerland, have embraced cryptocurrencies, this revolutionary technology still lacks a broad-based infrastructure. Because of the many blockchains in existence, interoperability remains elusive. Few retailers have the know-how or technical ability to accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment, though many are eager to start.

Another obstacle — for the time being — is that cryptocurrency is still waiting on the tipping point. At some point in the near future, enough consumers will be using cryptocurrency that it will seem normal for everyone — like the internet in the 1990s. At the moment, though, cryptocurrency is still unfamiliar. Many consumers don’t see the utility of cryptocurrency because they can’t spend it where and when they want. They can’t yet spend it because it’s too unfamiliar, similar to how electric cars can’t be very popular until there are widespread charging stations.

At a certain level of market penetration, cryptocurrency will be the norm. The question is not if, but when. The threshold between cryptocurrency and the consumer market is a great place to be. That’s where cryptocurrency will hit the mainstream, where it will go from asset to cash. That’s the disruption the world is waiting for.

By letting users buy gift cards with their cryptocurrency, Zeex leverages the familiarity and ease of gift cards to overcome cryptocurrency’s growing pains. As a result, cryptocurrency becomes a payment method like any other, able to compete with credit cards, mobile wallets and, yes, even cash.

With Zeex, gift cards are freed from the physical cards, and they become much more resistant to fraud. Perhaps best of all, a whole new generation, the crypto generation, will get what they’ve been waiting for: a way to spend their cryptocurrency wherever and whenever they want. And they’ll be doing it with the gift cards that issuers love to sell.

Zeex is disruption at its best. We’re changing two industries for the better, and everyone is welcome to join the ride.