Part I of our Strategy Series with Ethos Chief Global Strategist, Stephen Corliss
As Ethos moves closer to release of our platform, we felt it was important to provide further clarity around our transformational structure and how this enables Ethos to deliver a new financial ecosystem that links the old and new economies.
To better assist our user community, partners and other interested parties in understanding the direction of the company, the following will provide all of you with essential background as to where we’ve been, where we’re going and why we’re taking the actions we will take.
Ideation of new concepts and structures is an area where the entire Ethos team excels. The fact that our team brings together minds from multiple sectors across traditional finance, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, tech, engineering, design and brand experience is not an accident. This skillset was established as a high watermark for the entire organization when the 79 defining words in the Ethos Vision were determined.
The future is for everyone.
Ethos is a people-powered cryptocurrency platform.
Unlock the future of investment. Empower the world. Our mission is to make the daunting cryptocurrency market accessible to everyone, accelerate adoption of blockchain technology and democratize ownership of cryptocurrencies. Ethos harnesses the power of design, technology and social intelligence to create a breakthrough solution that will enable everyone to participate in the New Economy.
We’re putting the power back in the hands of the people — where it belongs.
Clearly our goals and values are lofty but we believe the challenge is not in understanding the meaning of the mission statement but rather how Ethos will make this vision viable and sustainable for future generations. The first step in finding a sustainable solution, in my view, was to extrapolate the most critical elements of these 79 powerful words into just one simple phrase, “We’re putting the power back in the hands of the people”. This phrase is packed with countless meanings, but to achieve this essential objective we needed to immediately decipher all of the different elements involved in order to determine what was most common and critical. At the end of the day, it was clear that we could not achieve our objective without enabling a robust “Fiat Gateway”.
Why a Fiat Gateway? Because most transactions related to Finance and / or Investment can only be concluded by some form of payment. Furthermore, because we are solving problems for consumers, it was clear any solution would also have to involve a monetary unit that was highly fungible in order for Ethos to provide consumers with highly liquid solutions to ensure users could access their funds at a moments notice. However, because current fiat options are expensive and restrictive, we knew that a pure fiat solution by itself would not be sufficient. So we quickly concluded that the best way to optimize our solution would be to also leverage cryptocurrency technology and digital representations of value.
Once we understood that an optimal solution needed to involve a robust fiat and cryptocurrency hybrid solution — one that ensures a frictionless, seamless and cost effective entry and exit-strategy for global users — we immediately noticed that this solution was powerful not just for consumers’ cryptocurrency activities, but also for their traditional assets and investments. This was an important revelation. A hybrid asset solution allows us to build a transformational platform that encompasses both the new AND old economies, while also enabling consumers to manage all of their financial assets and activities through a unified solution and platform. Unification provides consumers with dynamic features including access to debit and credit cards, checking and investment accounts, seamless wireless payment solutions integrated with your mobile phone and popular mobile wallets, and even mobile wealth management.
With this hybrid solution now in hand, it was also clear that the current problems faced by most of our industry peers was not a lack of good technology solutions, but rather a lack of vibrant legal structures that typically relied on lower level restrictive financial authorizations, specifically money transmission licenses. Whether this was driven by a desire to limit operational or financial strains caused by regulation and compliance is not clear, however, it was clear that these decisions were negatively impacting the consumer experience through higher fees or cumbersome operational processes.
With the above fact pattern, it was immediately apparent to us that the best way to ensure the long term viability and sustainability of our industry and the Ethos Platform while also offering consumers a superior experience, was to embrace financial regulation and deliver a superior legal model upon which to build a universally compliant Multi-Sided Hybrid Investment Platform– without sacrificing the many powerful benefits of distributed ledger technology. Ethos is delivering a next generation crypto platform that embraces regulations and compliance, not runs away from it, without sacrificing consumer protection, and with human-centred design at its heart.
Over the coming days and weeks we’ll be sharing more about the many initiatives we are pushing forward as part of our unique approach to building the Ethos Fiat Gateway. As you take in these numerous press releases, articles and general announcements we believe the information shared today will help you better understand what we are doing to
“Put The Power Back In The Hands Of The People”!
Thank you
Source
Stephen Corliss
Chief Global Strategist
Ethos