One of the major problems that cryptocurrencies have been facing is how to transact quickly and how to buy things in the physical world. For example, in the US the banking sector is very slow compared to crypto, it takes usually one business day for transactions to settle and if it happens over a weekend, then you are waiting until Monday. There are several other companies out there, which are offering debit cards and crypto accounts that can be used to make purchases in the real world. Pundi X is one of these companies. It has a POS terminal and a “credit card” that will allow users to transact instantly. The token is ERC20 and also connected to NEM, due to the high use of NEM in Asia, where the company is based in Malaysia.
Financials
On Jan. 21, 2018, Pundi X had its ICO, which lasted 90 min and raised $35 mln. Its token entered the market at $0.0001023 on March 22. The price climbed up to $0.01532 on May 14 and then dropped before climbing up again to $0.015259 on June 17 before, suffering at the hands of the bear market and crashing down to $0.001921 at the time of writing. Despite the fall in token price, the market cap has skyrocketed to $182 mln.
Team
Zac Cheah- CEO & Co-founder
Cheah is the former W3C Chair of HTML5 Interest Group. He was a scholarship recipient at Sweden KTH for an M.Sc in computer science and Norway NTNU for an M.Sc in Security. Cheah spent 12 years in tech in the browser and mobile gaming market. Despite working in the game industry, he has assembled a strong team to meet the needs of the company in terms of tech development, payments, finance, and banking.
Pitt Huang- CTO/COO
Huang is an entrepreneur who sold his first Groupon-like company at the age of 25. He has started and sold several businesses, including a 200 person company. Huang studied a B.Sc Engineering at Xi’An Polytechnic University.
Constantin Papadimitriou- President
Papadimitriou has 17 years’ experience as founding CEO of two Indonesian fintech companies- Infinetworks and E2Pay. He has an M.Sc in Computer Science from Purdue University and B.Sc Computer Science from the University of Tulsa.
Tech
Besides developing a Blockchain, the Pundi X is also building the POS hardware and “credit cards” to go along with the system. There are several payment terminals available from the company to buy, sell, and take payments for crypto in exchange for goods.
The technology seems appropriate for what Pundi X is attempting to do, and the delivery of thousands of POS devices shows that there is substance behind their efforts. Recently, the Pundi X blog just announced the following:
- The Pundi X POS is set to make its debut in Colombia and South America following the signing of a distribution partnership with Colombian investment fund Manticora Capital.
- One thousand Pundi X POS devices will be progressively rolled out across Colombia over six months to a specialist, general retailers, and hospitality businesses by Manticora Capital, which has its headquarters in Medellin.
The entire team has substantial experience in both technology and finance, which has been helpful to the start-up. With partnerships in place, and the hope for larger partnerships to be forged. Pundi X has been very successful so far and are delivering on their promises. It appears that they are on track to hit the Q4 goal of delivering 20,000 POS units, with the expansion into South America and the Q1 2019 goal of having 50,000 units in service. It is finally nice to see a company achieve success in the hard-hit cryptosphere.