tl;dr PCT, a token on Stellar, issued as the utility token of the pay.coupons platform. With that platform, the future goods and services economy can run on algorithmic multi-party bartering instead of money. This grants small and medium businesses their fair share again. Currently, we have an active airdrop campaign for Stellar Lumen holders, with broader airdrop campaigns to launch soon.


1. What’s this?

PayCoupons is a platform enabling moneyless payments in a B2B network. We started to work on this in late 2012 to provide a solution to the gridlocked state of the economy after the Big Recession. We designed it as a solution for liquidity and market access issues for small businesses worldwide. Our product is fully ready to use. See below for details how our technology works. We operate as PayCoupons GmbH, a limited-liability company registered in Berlin, Germany.

PCT, the PayCoupons Token on the Stellar blockchain, is the utility token of the pay.coupons platform. The token can be used for paying the usage fees on the pay.coupons platform. The fee is 2% of the nominal value of issued coupons, and half of that when paying with PCT instead of money. Token supply is capped to 50,000,000 PCT. Exchange rate is determined by the market, but at the pay.coupons platform we accept PCT with a guaranteed minimum exchange rate of 1 PCT = 1 EUR for fee payments.

The PCT token (not coupons) is what’s available on the Stellar blockchain, and we started an airdrop for Stellar Lumen (XLM) holders to get some PCT for free (see below). There will be other airdrop campaigns later, and we'll update this thread accordingly.


2. How does PayCoupons work? What’s new here?

Have a look at the problem we want to solve: current blockchain cryptocurrencies (and all state-issued currencies as well) can’t enable all economic exchange that people want to happen because of a fundamental issue: they derive their value from their scarcity. So, they need to limit the currency supply to keep the currency trustable, while the crowd needs a flexible supply to always have enough liquidity for economic exchange. This is what PayCoupons solves, making it a great next-generation tool for economic exchange — trading in the real-world, goods and services economy

In the PayCoupons system, each business issues its own type of coupons. So coupons are a kind of micro-currency, issued and accepted by only this business. This resolves all issues with collective trust and systemic risks of mismanagement and collapse associated with all "normal" currencies due to their multiple acceptance points. Also, coupons are always legal and can be integrated into business accounting easily, since they use the same units of value as state-issued currencies.

Now to provide everyone with the types of coupons they need to purchase goods and services from the coupon-issuing businesses, we invented a novel algorithm called “network bartering”. That’s what is happening on the pay.coupons platform: it’s an exchange for coupons issued by businesses.

This exchange system performs better than money for small businesses because it “unblocks” the economy for them by finding and executing “economic loops” automatically. (Technically, a loop is a circular barter exchange of coupons in a network barter trade.) Also, businesses need no upfront liquidity (“no money”) and enter no risk when participating in PayCoupons exchanges. And note how price and quality are no longer the only criteria for a sale: now it’s price, quality and a closed economic loop, giving small businesses a new chance in a globalized market even when they can’t compete on price alone. There are several other novel properties of this system, including that coupons as a cryptocurrency that works offline — not just off-chain as the Lightning Network, but offline. You will literally be able to go into a shop and pay digitally with your phone, device to device, even while a hurricane tears down the mobile network. You’re invited to read our whitepaper for more details about the technology.

Note that unblocking economic exchange as described above means creating high economic growth where people really need it: in small and medium businesses, solo and family businesses. Once in global use, PayCoupons would be nothing less than a solution for the destructive kind of economic globalization that is taking place currently. We’ll keep globalization, but we’ll give small businesses their fair share!


3. How to take part in our airdrop for Stellar Lumen (XLM) holders?

Go to our airdrop page between June 15 and October 15, 2018, and follow the instructions.

Every account with ≥5 XLM (on June 13, 2018 when we took the blockchain snapshot) is eligible to participate and will receive 5 PCT plus more for additional XLM balance. In total, we allocated 10 million PCT (20% of total supply) for this airdrop campaign. Undistributed PCT will be allocated for future airdrop campaigns at the end of this campaign.

Airdrop participants can get additional PCT tokens by sharing a referral link to other Stellar Lumen holders (5 PCT per successful invite). Details in the airdrop FAQ section of the airdrop page.


4. Links

• PayCoupons platform
• Airdrop / Token Distribution page
• airdrop launch blogpost
• Whitepaper

5. Disclaimer

This is no investment advice or anything. You agree to use the information provided according to the PayCoupons Terms and Conditions.

PayCoupons project is a payment project without using money and payment with  coupons. I want to ask you sir.What are the advantages and benefits of your project? and I will always keep an eye on your progression progress. Good luck.

How offline payments are possible in the PayCoupons system

I would like to point out a particularly interesting technological aspect of our system (and welcome a discussion about it): offline payments. Not just off-chain as in the Lightning Network or similar, where participants still have to monitor the blockchain to detect fraud. Instead, in our case, no Internet connection is necessary at all – you could pay via Bluetooth between devices in a shop, for example.

While this sounds like magic, it's rather a side effect of a currency design choice we made early on. Whenever you have a digital currency accepted by a multitude of parties, parties have to communicate to allow detecting anyone's double-spending attack (and the blockchain is how this communication and trust is organized). However, when you have "micro currencies with one acceptance point each", like each user's coupons in PayCoupons, no communication with third parties is necessary, and thus no Internet connection. The accepting user can just look into own records to see if a balance has been spent before. (Note that in the case of centralized digital currencies, such as GNU Taler, there is only one issuer and the issuer can detect and prevent double-spending attacks; but here the issuer is distinct  from the recipient of payments, which means that the recipient has to communicate with the issuer to verify a payment has been received. Because of this, GNU Taler, Cyclos3 and similar systems can't be used with offline payments.)

Of course, the reason to have a currency with multiple acceptance points is the very reason of using money at all: to have a universal product that simplifies economic exchange, as bartering is just impractical. So we had to solve that issue differently, and we solved it with automatic, algorithmic multi-party bartering, which is much more flexible than one-on-one bartering.

Offline payments are of course interesting from a privacy perspective, but maybe even more for the potential uses in low-infrastructure regions – the growth markets of the next decades.

For more details about offline payments, see our whitepaper in chapter "4.5. Payments".

We have the dream tool for those who want to see the hacker-and-maker economy succeed

This is of course not the only use case of PayCoupons, not even the major one, but it is an important one for those who are disgruntled about the state of the goods and services economy in "developed" countries, where Big Business rules everything. So today, I took the time and wrote a blog post to explain in some detail how PayCoupons can enable hackers and makers, with their 3D printers and open source machine designs, to succeed even though they cannot compete with Big Business on price:

"Three use cases where PayCoupons is a better tool than money"

Enjoy!

We increased the General Airdrop from 5 to 10 PCT

Until yesterday, the welcome gift you get when signing in to our referral dashboard was 5 PCT. Now it's 10 PCT. I already adapted it in the announcement above. No need for us to be frugal here … the idea of airdropping is, after all, to spread these tokens far and wide!