I've been working the project for the past couple of month.


Ethconomy.io is p2p marketplace between retailer gift cards and ETH (and other token in the future), where buyers of gift cards can buy discounted gift cards using crypto, and sellers of gift cards can buy crypto anonymously using gift cards (while paying a premium for privacy or ease of access in regions without reliable fiat -> crypto gateways).


I'm looking for your feedback on the app:

1. How do you feel about the buyer user experience? Is it intuitive? Any confusions on how it works without looking at the app guide?

2. Are the gift card discounts attractive?

3. Would you use ETH for purchasing gift cards? If not what token would you prefer instead?

4. Which retailer would you like to buy gift cards from? Currently only Amazon gift cards are available.

5. Does the app look trust worthy? What can be done to increase the trust?

6. If you have any other idea or suggestion feel free to share


Thanks in advance

All cards are verified cash purchased with cash receipts.

What is Ethconomy.io
Ethconomy.io is an OTC marketplace between retailer giftcards and ETH (and other tokens), where buyers of giftcards can buy discounted giftcards using crypto, and sellers of giftcards can buy crypto anonymously using giftcards (while paying a premium for privacy or ease of access in regions without reliable fiat -> crypto gateways).

How it Works
A good way to earn money is to save on irreducible every day expenses such as food, groceries, consumer goods, etc.

This is what we set out to do with Ethconomy.io, a platform that allows you to cover everyday expenses using crypto at a discount.

For example, you can purchase Amazon gift cards with up to 30% discount, which can then be used to buy groceries, food deliveries, consumer products, and giftcards to other stores/services.

Here are the steps:

• 1. When you visit the app at https://app.ethconomy.io/, you will be prompt to connect to your Ethereum wallet if it did not auto connect.
• 2. Once you are connected, you can select from the list of available giftcards from different retailers and place a purchase.
• 3. Fund of the purchase will be safely kept in the escrow contract, and will released upon refill or return upon cancel.
• 4. Orders will be filled within 24hrs of purchase, and delivered via email.

Why it Works
We are advocates for the privacy of personal online 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. At the early stage the Ethconomy team will act as an aggregator for brokers (i.e pre-ordering cards from brokers in bulk and fill orders on-demand) to ensure speedy fulfillment.

Technical Details
The platform is ran on the Ethereum blockchain in the form of a dapp and all transactions occurs on smart contracts (complete open sourced contract code can be found at https://etherscan.io/address/0xbea8bcb843ccd1d17ff4b4a4b0850ad5de3607d3#code). Consumers can directly access the dapp using wallets such as Metamask, Trust, or Coinbase wallet without having to create an account or sharing any personal information.

Avoiding Fraud
To avoid transaction of fraudulently purchased cards (e.g giftcards purchased by stolen credit cards), only cards purchased by cash with corresponding cash receipts will be served on the platform.


Visit our site at https://ethconomy.io/

Or go straight to the app at http://app.ethconomy.io/

hmm not sure why this post was moved to the service announcement section. To be clear, the project is still in development, and am looking for general feedback and interest.

In my example I mentioned you could use Ethconomy to save on cost for thing you need to buy regardless of Ethconomy, such as food, groceries, and other thing that you are already planning to buy. So by using Ethconomy you are affectively saving since you are now spending less money than you were before.

I personally make 99% of my daily life spendings on Amazon (i.e using Prime Now for groceries and food, and Prime for other goods), these spendings are inevitable. We can agree that by getting 30% off of all my Amazon spendings, I am saving 30% on all my daily expenditures.

That is what we are going for. We are not planning to run a crowdfund. And we will support major coins such as BTC, ETH along side of stable coins such as DAI, USDT as payment methods.

What we mean is we can help you save money on everyday expenses that you already have.

For example, if you order take outs on Uber eats every so often, you could use ethconomy to save on those orders.

Or if you were planning to buy a pair of shoes on Amazon, you can get a discount on it through ethconomy.

I've updated the original post with some more details and hopefully answering some of the questions you've listed!

In terms of discount, it will be a fixed ratio based on the price of the card. Smaller valued cards will have lower discounts while larger value cards will have higher discounts. The exact discounts themselves is floating, and adjusted based on supply and demand from consumers and brokers.

I see. I will make updates to the post accordingly to be more fitting to the channel.

Apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong channel.

Our project if not yet finished and is currently under development which is why i've choose to post the idea here to get feedback and discussion. I appreciates all the comments and questions I've received so far.

When it was moved to service announcement channel last time there were comments concerning that it was not appropriate for that channel since the service is not even available yet.

Thanks for the questions crwth!

Price volatility is definitely a valid concern, and we will be adding support very soon for stable coins such as DAI and USDT in addition to Bitcoin and Ether as currencies on the platform. This provide an alternative for people what are sensitive to volatility.

Ideation
A good way to earn money is to save on irreducible every day expenses such as food, groceries, consumer goods, etc.

This is what we set out to do with Ethconomy.io, a platform that allows you to cover everyday expenses using crypto at a discount.

For example, you can purchase Amazon gift cards with up to 30% discount, which can then be used to buy groceries, food deliveries, consumer products, and giftcards to other stores/services.

How and Why it Works
We are advocates for 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.

Technical Details
The platform will be ran on the Ethereum blockchain in the form of a dapp and all transactions will occur on smart contracts. Consumers can directly access the dapp using wallets such as Metamask, Trust, or Coinbase wallet without having to create an account on the dapp itself.

When an order is placed by a consumer, it goes into an orderbook and funds are locked in an escrow contract. Brokers can see all orders on the orderbook, and choose which ones they want to fulfill.

Brokers fulfill orders by inputing the code for the giftcard corresponding to the order. The code is encrypted with the consumer's public key.

Once an order is filled, the consumer will be notified and can view the code by decrypting with his private key.

Throughout the transactions, no personal data is provided by either parties.

Avoiding Spam and Fraud
To avoid spam and fraudulent activities, brokers will need to deposit a stake equivalencing to a portion of the order price. The stake will then be held in escrow for a period of time.

If the consumer finds the code inputed to be invalid or purchased through fraudulent methods, he/she can initiate a dispute by depositing the same amount of stake.

Once a dispute is initiated, the platform will intervene as a third party to resolve the dispute based on evidence provided by both side of the transaction. And the winner of the dispute takes all the stake in escrow.

We plan to make this process more distributed in the future and allows for decentralized resolution of disputes with some incentivization mechanism placed in.

Development Progress
We have currently developed a network of brokers to ensure fast fulfillment of orders for a smaller amount of consumers, and we are currently finishing up the consumer facing application. We are also opening up early access to the first 100 people that signs up (limiting to 100 to ensure supply can meet demand). If you are interested in the service, you can checkout www.ethconomy.io.

Any feedback is appreciated! And we are specifically looking for feedback and discussion around the dispute process as we believe that will make or break the user experience.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our Mission
Empowering people to cover expenses using crypto.

What We Do
Ethconomy enables you to purchase goods and services from your favorite brands such as Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber using cryptocurrency at lower costs!

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 goods or services. 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
Please sign up for early access at www.ethconomy.io

Hi guys, we are building an automated market for exchange goods and services with crypto.
Please check our website if you're interested: www.ethconomy.io