Opportunity and Importance of Fiat Gateways for Steem

My originally scheduled post for today was an update on my cryptocurrency portfolio for the prior month however something over the weekend caught my attention and I thought it would be more valuable to concentrate my efforts on sharing with the community this piece of information rather than my portfolio. Tomorrow, I will update everyone on my portfolio. As part of my monthly Steem purchase I have been thinking more about the importance of having a Fiat currency gateway in between our cryptocurrencies here in the ecosystem. Right now, there are limited alternatives for Steem in general although they have expanded over the last couple of months. We also see a number of new exchanges come to market and seek assets to list as part of their attracting community efforts. It has been great to see the Twitter Hustlers get on top of these opportunities for us to continue our listings around the world.

Last week, the Steemit blog had an AMA with the Huobi exchange group that recently started to list Steem with their United States counterpart based out of San Francisco. Our great ambassadors on in the community incentivized everyone to engage with them and asked the questions we wanted to be answered. My main question was whether or not it would be possible to lists team against the US Dollar instead of only other cryptocurrencies. They current listed Steem against Tether, Bitcoin and Ether. However, given the popularity of using Fiat in South Korea, I thought it would be interesting to see their interest in setting up a Fiat currency gateway. I was pleasantly surprised when they answered that it would be something that they could explore if there was enough demand for it!

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I have always thought that one of the limitations that Steem has regarding its demand is the fact that there is a lack of fiat gateways to buy in and out of positions. Particularly, given the investor and developer community which needs to "pay their bills“ mostly in fiat. While they mainly earn in Steem on the platform, there needs to be a better way to use their earnings outside of the ecosystem in order for it to be more sustainable. While this is not the case for me as I am tend to build and hold the portfolio for time, others need to prepare for their funding realities as we have learned from a number of projects including Steemit Inc. Despite my seamless experiences with Hive account@blocktrades, a direct Fiat currency to Steem exchange has other benefits. For example, the accounting for tax basis has always been complicated when exchanging between cryptocurrencies. A Fiat gateway would reduce the administrative burden for these processes. it will also reduce both security and technical burdens for those hesitant to go through the process of crypto exchanges just to get to an exchange for Steem. This is why I believe that having an opening in fiat based in US dollars would be a huge opportunity to improve the liquidity of the Steem token.

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As I did a bit of research I was surprised to see that about 45% of the volume of trades comes from Fiat on exchanges that have the pairing available. This is mainly the South Korean Won that some exchanges have listed. I think this in itself demonstrates the interest in having a Fiat pair for steam. In addition, about 12% of volume uses Tether as a pair. So, in essence, over 50% of volume is related to a fiat currency one way or another. I am not sure how that compares to other altcoins but ETH and EOS both have about 44% trading against Tether as a small comparison. Interesting that this pair does not trade at any material discount or premium to other which is good as the liquidity is sound from a volume perspective.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to get the Twitter Hustler crew and others here busy on trying to get this trending here and on Crypto Twitter. I hope Hive account@nathanmars, Hive account@theycallmedan, Hive account@socky, Hive account@coingecko and Hive account@jongolson don’t mind the mentions but this would be great to have some visibility on as it presents and opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of our community as we have in the past. We have tried with Bittrex and Coinbase in the past but this seems to be a great extension given the prior interest Hive account@huobius has had with our ecosystem and the reality is that we should support those that support our ecosystem as well! What are your thoughts on getting a USD or other Fiat trading pair and the opportunity it present? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!