Imagine that you have access to an app where you can find other nearby people with the same passion about crypto and who are eager to trade their coins or tokens with you. On a map on your mobile phone, you will see all kinds of people popping up who want to sell or buy cryptocurrency. Do you see someone who is willing to sell one of your favorite tokens for a good price? Well, then just click on that person and start a trade! Of course, you could also try to meet face-to-face since you are already close to each other. Drink a cup of coffee and share some info about the latest crypto gem that you found or just talk about crypto in general. Perhaps, there is a "click" with the other person and you finally found someone that in real-life that shares the same love for crypto. Who knows what will happen next...?
The discovery mode in Hawala.Today (proof-of-concept)
Great, so this is the only feature of Hawala Today?
Obviously, this is not the only feature of Hawala.Today and I might have been exaggerating a bit regarding the coffee part. Anyway, the aim of Hawala.Today is to increase the accessibility, and therefore the global adoption and usability, of cryptocurrency by the general public. They want to achieve this by creating application that will facilitate the buying and selling of cryptocurrency for the average user. Thus, a user that is not familiar with the crypto space.
The application has several features and one of them is thus the map mode, or officially called the discovery mode, which I tried to describe in the introduction. The previous image shows a proof-of-concept of this feature. For clarity, I will now shortly explain this discovery mode in a more offical way. Basically, you create a contract where declare that you want to buy or sell a certain cryptocurrency, which is sent to all nearby traders. These traders can make a bid, and if you agree, the exchange is made. It is that simple and no coffee ;-)
Further, the application will contain an ERC-20 compatible wallet where you can manage your token wallets, but also the integration of your (local) bank account/credit card. The latter is important, because this makes it easier to start buying cryptocurrency as a non-crypto user, since they can use fiat money and do not have to go to some other exchange to buy bitcoin or ether first.
This brings us to another feature of Hawala.Today, which is the cash card. These cards can be bought at shops and stores globally, like mobile prepaid cards. By entering a code that can be found on the card, you can directly use the cash on it to buy crypto.
Example of the Hawala.Today exchange (proof-of-concept)
The Hawala token (HAT)
Hawala.Today also issued their own token, which can be staked in their wallet. A new consensus model is used for the staking called the Incentive for Stake (IFS) model. This is based on the well-known Proof of Stake model. Every year new tokens will be added to the supply based on a certain interest rate, which are visualized in the image below. More information about the usage of the token and the IFS model will be available in the white paper that is going to be released in the next couple of days.
The interest rate per year for staking the Hawala token
Let me end with a kind of conclusion
Hawala.Today is going to be a real-time P2P crypto-fiat currency exchange. Users can directly buy and sell from each other, which eliminate most of the fees that are normally calculated on other non-P2P exchanges. It will also be easier for non-crypto people to start buying coins or tokens, because of the fiat integrations.
Next week, several main events are happening as the white paper, and the IFS model are going to be released. In addition, a coin swap will take place so that the tokens can be used for staking in the IFS model. Finally, they are close to finish the development of the alpha version and the wallet. For more info and new updates, please have a look at their website hawala.today.