Cryptocurrency, SPEDN, Gamestop, Barnes & Noble and more

Flexa co-founder Trevor Filter is rumoured to have leaked that their SPEDN wallet app allows cryptocurrency holders to make purchases at Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble, Express, Lowe’s, GameStop, Office Depot, Regal Cinemas and Jamba Juice, just to name a few.

You Can Now ‘Spedn’ Bitcoin at GameStop, Barnes & Noble and More

On Monday, the payment processing startup Flexa announced the release of its new custodial crypto wallet SPEDN, which allows users to spend bitcoin, ethereum, bitcoin cash or GUSD at a variety of brick-and-mortar retailers.

Although the merchants receive fiat in the end, the partnership enables new possibilities for people looking to spend crypto as easily as they might use Apple Pay.

Flexa co-founder Trevor Filter told CoinDesk the wallet app works at Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble, Express, Lowe’s, GameStop, Office Depot, Regal Cinemas and Jamba Juice, just to name a few. None of the merchants responded to requests for comment, but CoinDesk was able to confirm the deals.

Sarah Olsen, head of business development at Gemini, told CoinDesk the exchange company is partnering to provide security for the custodial wallet. In return, the app now provides a new way for stablecoin users to use GUSD beyond trading.

“Whether that’s a foreigner who’s coming to the U.S. and more easily able to participate in our economy or vice versa,” Olsen said, adding:

“The Flexa network is going to be open source so if you’re a merchant anywhere you can integrate to use their network, even without necessarily interacting with the Flexa team directly. This is going to be the first step toward the future of how we transact value.”

Indeed, Flexa co-founder Tyler Spalding told CoinDesk the ability to spend cryptocurrency can actually boost its function as a store of value.

“You need the other ecosystem to exist,” Spalding said of bitcoin’s value being tied to utility that includes, but isn’t limited to, trading.

Plus, users don’t need to have a credit card or bank account to use this mobile app. A 2017 study by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation found that 8.4 million American households were unbanked. Filter said that the eventual goal is to bring buyers and sellers closer together with a digitally native payments system. For now, Flexa’s crypto exchange partnerships manage conversion on the backend.

“We’re actually building payment rails on top of cryptocurrency instead of just trying to integrate cryptocurrency into the payment rails that already exist,” Filter said.

Introducing Flexacoin: The digital collateral token that makes Flexa possible

At Flexa, we’re building a global network that enables developers to add instant cryptocurrency payments to their apps — using any coin, across any border, and by any individual.

After announcing our private token sale two weeks ago, we felt it would be helpful to share a little bit more about the purpose of Flexacoin (FXC), as well as how the current Flexacoin supply has been distributed and how it will be deployed in the future.

What’s Flexacoin?

As we set out to build Flexa, we quickly realized that a neutral collateral token was going to be necessary in order to support instant payments at retail points-of-sale, and to make cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin acceptable to large, multinational retailers. We also discovered that although there were thousands of cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem already, none of them offered the ideal combination of neutrality, simplicity, security, and utility that we believed could collateralize a global retail payments network. Therefore, in February 2018, we developed the collateral-specific Flexacoin token smart contract.

Now, when we talk about Flexacoin being used for collateral, what we mean is that the Flexacoin token’s utility in the Flexa network is to temporarily secure cryptocurrency transactions while they are awaiting confirmation on the blockchain. To put it another way, Flexacoin represents the assurance that any given Flexa network transaction will settle, which enables Flexa to advance fiat to a merchant in real time in order to complete a retail transaction. In the unlikely event that a cryptocurrency transaction is never confirmed — e.g., due to malicious activity or blockchain vulnerabilities — Flexacoin collateral can be liquidated to cover this fiat advance.

But who would “stake” Flexacoin as collateral for app payments in the first place, and why?

The short answer is that anyone can stake Flexacoin and support an app on the open Flexa network. In return for using their collateral to secure Flexa payments, stakers are paid a small percentage of each transaction that’s processed through the app they choose to collateralize. What’s more, stakers will soon be able to select projects from a transparent network index representing how much stake is allocated across the network at any given point in time (look out for details of this process in a forthcoming update).

In this way, Flexa really represents the first-ever participatory payments network — wherein the total value of Flexacoin staked is exactly equivalent to the total amount of payment volume that can flow through the system, unconfirmed, at any given point in time.

How has Flexacoin been distributed?

From the beginning, Flexacoin was developed to be easy to obtain and simple to use. Since our goal is to make Flexa a useful payments platform for developers and consumers alike, we needed to get Flexacoin tokens into the hands of as many developers and community members as possible. Therefore, we opted not to develop a new blockchain, and instead decided to deploy an ERC20 token on top of the popular and well-tested Ethereum network.

In 2018, we completed a private sale of Flexacoin tokens to a group of accredited investors and established token funds. The proceeds from this token sale have helped us continue to build out the Flexa network through additional merchant integrations and relationships with critical infrastructure partners.

How will the Flexacoin token supply be distributed in the future?

Note: for the purpose of clarity, we’ve adopted the Messari token supply definitions for the supply tranches outlined in this post.

The maximum and diluted supply of Flexacoin will always be 100 billion tokens, as there are no mechanisms within the ERC20 smart contract that enable Flexa or any other party to issue additional tokens now or in the future. The Flexa team has allocated these 100 billion tokens to be used for the following purposes through 2045:

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