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News & Commentary • • 991 Views

Why we strongly believe in the Proton ecosystem (xtokens, Lending, Metal Dollar & NFTs)

Giving newcomers a deep-dive into the history of Proton and why we strongly believe in the Proton ecosystem.

Note: This article was originally published on Medium on Dec 17, 2021

When I discovered Metal Pay in 2017 I was fascinated by the founder and CEO Marshall Hayner. To me it was immediately clear that this man has the potential to disrupt the way we do finance today. If you ever watched some of his interviews you probably know what I mean (otherwise you should definitely research and enjoy watching and listening ;-)). He is a true visionary and he wants to make cryptocurrencies accessible and easy to use for the masses.

Now, about 4 years later, we are finally beginning to see the fruits of him and his teams labor step by step. During all the years I have constantly talked to many of my friends about Metal Pay and nowadays of course also Proton. In terms of user experience and simplicity I am pretty confident that there is currently nothing better and easier than using Proton with Proton Wallet in the world of crypto.

The wallet was relaunched and rebranded to WebAuth.com a few days ago and provides many cool features:

  • Easy account creation for the average user via E-Mail
  • Human-readable usernames instead of complex hexadecimal addresses
  • Send and receive crypto (including stablecoins and wrapped-xtokens) in a matter of seconds
  • High-speed access to DeFi products with zero gas fees
  • Staking rewards that are paid out daily
  • Multi-account support — manage multiple accounts within the wallet by importing private key or seed
  • Multi-network support — send tokens across multiple chains (Proton, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain Stellar)
  • List of verified exchange names to easily send funds to your favorite Proton exchange

If you don’t have an account on Proton yet you should definitely download the wallet, create an account and play around with some Demos like Daily Poll, ProtonSign or Blockchain Voting.

If you like the user experience (I bet you will ;-)) you can start moving some real funds like BTC, ETH or any other supported asset to your Proton account by using the bridge that Proton Swap provides. Metal will secure the original assets in custody, issue wrapped-xtokens 1:1 and credit those to your account. You can then use Proton Swap to easily trade your xtokens and for example buy XPR and stake it. Everything with zero gas fees!

Next to Proton Swap there is also Proton Market where creators can mint their first NFTs for free. Additional mints are — again — incredibly cheap compared to other chains. As NFTs in general are getting hotter almost every day I am expecting this to be one of the major drivers for the adoption of Proton. The initial implementation of the Proton Market is open source which means everybody can use it to build their own custom NFT market! As soon as Proton integrates FIAT transactions (yes, you heard right!) this will be even more appealing for everybody involved. It will lower the barrier to get started with crypto massively and it is a crucial and missing piece in almost every blockchain project I know.

There is even more coming. The launch of Proton Loan is also highly anticipated. Proton Loan is a new decentralized lending market built on Proton. It can be compared with leading platforms like Aave or Compound and thanks to wrapped-xtokens it utilizes cross-chain capabilities from the beginning and allows to participate in lending pools to earn interest or take collateralized loans from different cryptocurrency pools. Everything with zero gas fees!

We will also see Metal Dollar (XMD) in the future. XMD will be a decentralized stablecoin, comprised of a basket of stablecoin currencies and managed by a DAO of Metal (XMT) holders. Not many people are aware of this yet, but I personally am very excited to see this being implemented and released.

So far everybody I have introduced into Proton was fascinated by the user experience. Of course there is always room for improvement but compared to the user experience on other blockchains Proton is already miles ahead. WebAuth.com (Web Version) provides even more simplicity and allows users to sign transactions with Face ID / Touch ID / Yubikey or other authentication methods.

I am publishing this article now because some of my friends and I will get more active in the Proton community very soon (;-)). We think that all the things mentioned above will drive massive adoption to Proton and we want to be part of this story. As we are huge fans of NFTs we aim to build the best NFT marketplace on Proton that has a special focus on auctions, “soon.market”!

For everybody that wants to read more about the story of Proton I collected the (so far) most important events related to Protonchain combined with some meaningful and ambitious statements of Marshall below — have fun reading!

“Our long term vision: Metal is the next Stripe. Only this time, payments are not insecure and they are built on Proton and blockchain rails, everything completely interoperable, not just blockchain interoperability, but full global banking and financial interoperability.” Marshall Hayner

Here some noteworthy statements from the AMA:

“While we were building Metal Pay we felt the pain of the traditional banking system, slow reversible transactions, no ability to connect an identity with an actual bank account or BIN number, we knew there was a better way. Simultaneously, we recognized that crypto lives in a bit of a walled garden where you buy crypto on Metal Pay, Coinbase, Binance, etc and then have to move it into a web3 environment… What if smart contracts could talk to banks and vice versa? All it would require is a simple messaging protocol and a standard to be adopted. This was the impetus for building Proton, bridging TradFi and DeFi.” Marshall Hayner
“Proton seeks to become the interoperable L1 blockchain for banking and payments that connects TradFi to DeFi for every major blockchain. Long term we would like to see every major bank and fintech company look to adopt Proton for identity and cryptocurrency payments (xTokens). Additionally, Proton leading the emergence of decentralized finance connecting legacy institutions, DAOs interfacing with traditional finance in a regulated manner.” Marshall Hayner
“I believe in three years Proton will be integrated with every major bank, fintech and cryptocurrency exchange supporting xTokens and decentralized identity (DID).” Marshall Hayner
“I think interoperability is the ONLY path forward. Another aspect that is very important for the future of crypto that few talk about, is the regtech and core level protocol integrations that allow stablecoins to be compliant in banking and payments. This is absolutely critical and few people talk about it, I guess because it is “unsexy” but in my opinion, it’s the next massive crypto wave about to hit.” Marshall Hayner

Marco

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