We all love cryptocurrency but it’s hard to use for real life basics like buying coffee at Starbucks, concert tickets online, or shopping on Amazon.. Right now the main options are to sell on an exchange, convert to fiat and pay hefty trading and withdrawal fees or find a service that allows you to use your crypto only with costly transaction fees. Let’s agree those prospects are rather grim. Economists call this sorry trade-off transactional friction. That term includes all the costs involved in making a purchase.

Those costs we mention include your time and effort so it’s no wonder companies like Bitpay and Gift Token (aka Bitcoin Gift) are trying to reduce transactional friction and enable payments through their product offerings. However, the crypto community agrees that the best way to limit transactional friction is to avoid it, so adding steps trying to engineer the solution is not the best approach.

Here at Zeex, we’ve built a platform that allows you to use your crypto to buy stuff without paying fees or converting to fiat. Rather than reinvent the wheel scheming up ways to pay for things with cryptocurrency, Zeex decided to work with vendors using the currency they are most familiar with, gift cards. Yes, gift cards, though we call them corporate currencies.

Using gift cards reduces the number of steps for both retailers and consumers when it comes to payment methods, making lives easier. By utilizing gift cards Zeex is solving the greatest pain point in crypto — liquidity. With Zeex’s platform, you can easily use your crypto to buy products without paying fees or having to convert assets to fiat.

Why does this model offer up so much promise for cryptocurrency adoption? Because retailers love gift cards so much! Customers pay for them upfront, rarely use up their entire balance, lose their cards or gift them to friends who won’t ever use them. Every time these things happen, the retailer makes money. How many underspent gift cards do you think you have?

Hint: The 2-year-old Cheesecake Factory card with 2.38$ on it counts.

Currently, gifttoken.io (who are busy rebranding to BitcoinGift these days) offer a similar service. Buy their crypto token BGift with your crypto tokens, then use their token to purchase gift cards on the platform. Gift Token offers 272 stores to choose a card from. While that’s useful, the transactions are monodirectional. You can buy your gift card with tokens, but you can’t sell your unwanted gift cards for tokens.

With the Zeex protocol, you can actually buy and sell gift cards for cryptocurrencies on the platform. Corporate currencies aren’t considered money so we can easily exchange them for cryptocurrency using our ZIX ERC20 token without moving to fiat and without fees.

Bitpay, on the other hand takes the approach of using crypto directly with merchants. To do this you need to use a Bitpay card. Though it only costs 9.99$ to order, you must pay that sum in bitcoin. Once your card arrives you can use it as you would a normal debit but you will be subject to miner fees (when loading your card) that tend to run high when the bitcoin network clogs. Also worth noting, to use the Bitpay card outside of the US you need to pay an additional 3% transaction fee. Finally, Bitpay offers users the option of creating a wallet that lets you buy Amazon gift cards with your cryptocurrencies.

Why is Zeex better than both Gift token and Bitpay? Because of three important factors. Zeex has an affiliation with Zeek, Europe’s leading marketplace to buy and sell gift cards. This unrivaled industry relationship coupled with groundbreaking proprietary fraud prevention technology places Zeex in a unique position to deliver the most value when it comes to the frictionless, seamless exchange of cryptocurrencies and corporate currencies, without the need for fiat.

Last but not least, there’s Zeex’s stellar team, including advisors Daniel Zelkind, CEO & Co-Founder of Zeek and Eyal Hertzog, Foundation Council at Bancor who has been building prototyped social networks, content sharing and blockchain platforms for about 20 years now. It also includes Artūras Asakavičius, as a fintech advisor, co-founder, chief operations officer at WePower, the blockchain based green energy trading platform. When you consider the advantage of having Zeek as our sister company, patented fraud prevention tech, and an unrivaled team, it’s clear that Zeex can bring about cryptocurrency adoption on a global scale for daily shopping, enabling anyone to buy cryptocurrency with gift cards and buy gift cards with their crypto, completely foregoing cumbersome and costly fiat conversions.

Cheers to that, World