Bitcoin Forum

Our Mission
Empowering people to cover expenses using crypto.

What We Do
Ethconomy enables you to purchase gift cards for everyday goods and services from your favorite brands such as Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber using cryptocurrency at lower costs (up to 30% discount)!

How and Why it Works
We are advocates of the privacy of online personal data, and looks to explore the potential and power of cryptocurrency as a payment method.

There are two roles in the world of Ethconomy:
Consumers are people looking to spend their crypto to purchase for giftcards. They can place orders from retailers on Ethconomy using crypto at a discounted price.
Brokers are people looking to purchase crypto. Once a consumer order is placed, it is settled by a network of brokers who fulfill orders on behave of consumers in exchange for cryptocurrency. They benefit from receiving crypto anonymously by paying a slight premium.

Ethconomy provides an automated platform to enable such trades to occur - in a fast and secure way.

Website
For early access, see www.ethconomy.io

I like the idea of using crypto to pay for stuff, but I dont understand the lower cost part. Why would the cost be lower compared to just buying directly from Amazon? Where is the extra money coming from?

I think we'll know the details when they released the full platform. Btw, they're not providing you with another marketplace, but a new payment mechanism that will give you better rates compared to using Amazon's other payment systems (at least that's what they told you).

I think this project does not really have a good proposition because Amazon could simply snap their fingers if they want to accept cryptocurrencies.

This is a decent idea - I've always had the idea of a payment processor that would give low spreads and work on popular online sites like Amazon, eBay, etc.

I believe this could work - purse.io comes to mind for a really popular app and it's the only one out there which allows you to pay for Amazon with your crypto-currencies, works pretty well but the rates are pretty shitty.

Good luck op, this project has a real use.

Means you will be in partnership with those mentioned company, am I right? That's such a high ambition, the question is how would you achieve it since it won't be easy to take a big step.

The extra money comes from the brokers. For example, if you were to place order on a $100 amazon product, you might only need to pay $80 worth of ETH. A broker who fulfills the order will make the purchase from amazon on your behave using fiat of $100, and in return they receive your $80 worth of ETH. That $20 different is payed by the broker.

Thank you for the feedback! The value we are looking to provide is 3 fold.

1. Enable payment of ever day product/services in crypto. (which might be obsolete once all merchants start accepting crypto natively).
2. Provide consumers with discount on good and services.
3. Provide brokers with a platform to purchase crypto anonymously.

Appreciate the kind words. Paxful and purse are both inspirations for our idea as we are users of both. However there are few improvements we believe that can be made.

One of the improvements is to automate the process and make the user experience feel native as if you can purchasing directly from the merchants instead of on a third party platform. As one of the biggest issues we had when using the other platforms was the overhead time spent on chatting with counter parties, disputes, and going back and forth between merchants and the crypto paying platform.

We are also looking to expand the variety of products that can be purchased using crypto, and expand into every day services such as Airbnb, Uber, and Ubereats.

Consumer orders will be fulfill by Brokers using fiat currency, so we do not actually need to integrate with the merchant companies directly! Instead we build a platform that allows the seamless conversion of crypto -> fiat -> product/service.

Hmm, I see what you are saying. Though i'm not fully sold that people (brokers) would be willing to pay premiums to purchase crypto just for anonymity.

@ethconomy_official

I have a question. You say the orders are fulfilled by brokers and their fiats. We, as users don't know your brokers and from where they come from. ...Especially their money/payment methods...
How can we be sure the brokers aren't using a stolen CC or something similar?


There is no problem with Amazon. Check out Purse.io for example, the concept is near the same and they have no problem. Otherwise, we would have heard about it by now.


I used Purse.io a few times before. Either to sell or to buy, but the last times I logged in, none item from my country was listed (look like they all left) and when it's about Amazon USA the rates are horrible, true that. No way I buy bitcoins with a 30% margin

This is a difficult problem for most p2p platforms such as purse.io, LBC, and paxful. We plan to eliminate or at-least reduce the risk of fraud by having in place a staking mechanism for the brokers to disincentives fraud activities. When a broker accepts and fulfills an order, he/she must deposit a percentage of the item price into a smart contract as a stake. The stake is then held for a period of time, allowing time for consumer to file fraud disputes.

For example,
-> a consumer purchase a $100 airbnb gift card.
-> Fraudulent broker deposit stake and fills order.
-> Consumer redeems the card but is contacted by airbnb couple days later for fraud alert.
-> The consumer can then dispute the order, and if he/she can provide sufficient proof for the fraud, he/she will receive the refund as well as the stake of the broker.

We've updated the site (http://ethconomy.io) with a preview look of the app! The release is coming soon  :D ;D ;D