If you’ve tried to trade anything outside the world of crypto – stocks, commodities, forex, whatever – you’ve likely encountered some serious problems. Many trading markets are dominated by banks and financial institutions, and traders are often left at their mercy. That often means high trading fees and relatively slow transaction processing. It can also limit traders’ access to some global markets, and in the worst cases, these banks and financial institutions are actually actively manipulating the markets to their own benefit (and often to the detriment of independent traders).
What’s the solution? Stop trading through the banks; cut out the middle-man and take your business to the blockchain. ThinkCoin is a new blockchain project aimed at helping you do exactly that.
ThinkCoin Basics
ThinkCoin is the crypto utility token that powers the TradeConnect network, a blockchain-based trading platform that will support the trading of basically any financial product – assets, securities, forex, commodities, etc. – in a way that’s transparent, secure, fast, and affordable. It also allows for trades that might not be possible through other markets, like purchasing fractions of stock shares, which allows for a more equal playing field, letting smaller investors get in on trading high-priced assets without the giant buy-in fee.
The network automatically matches a buyer with the best seller and then executes the trade via a mix of on-chain and off-chain operations that’s designed to provide maximum transparency and security while still allowing for lightning-fast trading. Finances are stored in smart contracts and automatically released upon the execution of a trade, and there are no fees aside from a small “connect fee” that is split between the buyer (25%), the seller (50%), and the TradeConnect network (25%).
Here’s a hypothetical example trade: let’s say you want to buy Google stock, but you only have a few hundred dollars to invest. You can’t afford to buy a whole share, and traditional markets won’t sell fractions of shares, so you use your money to buy ThinkCoin and log onto the TradeConnect network. From there, you place an order for the fractional “Micro Shares” you want, and the network automatically matches you with the best-price seller who’s got the share fraction you need.
The trade is executed quickly and automatically, and thanks to the security and transparency of blockchain smart contracts, you can rest easy knowing that there’s no chance of being conned. You pay nothing beyond the price of the Micro Shares and a small “connect fee” that helps maintain the network and reward market participants.
Digital Personas
One of the unique features of the TradeConnect network will be Digital Personas, unique “scores” assigned to traders by machine-learning algorithms that follow user trades and gauge their success. Traders will be scored by two different algorithms, giving them each a Trade Quality Persona and a Price-matching Persona.
The primary purpose of these algorithms is to facilitate the automated matching of buyers and sellers so that users can enjoy quick, frictionless, perfect peer-to-peer matching when they’re looking to make a trade.
The Trade Quality Persona algorithm will track a particular trade over time and rank the quality of the trade based on comparisons to trades made by other traders in a pool. The Price-matching Persona will track the prices a particular trader trades with, again in comparison to other prices accepted by other traders in the pool. Both Persona scores will give market participants a better idea of who they’re dealing with, and allow them to adjust the parameters of any given trade accordingly. For example, a trader might restrict a trade to only high-quality score based sellers to reduce the spread and “connect fee”.
Over time, these Personas will become more accurate as the user base grows and the algorithms get more data to work with.
The Token
The ThinkCoin token ($TCO) is an ERC-20 utility token that’s currently in the pre-sale run-up to ICO. It’s valued at $0.30 per token, and the developers are accepting BTC, ETH , BCH and fiat during the pre-sale and ICO.
The ICO is soft-capped at $5 million and hard-capped at $30 million, and the raised funds will be spent primarily on marketing, new user acquisition, and development.
ThinkCoin is pre-mined, with a total of 500 million tokens in existence. Of those, 60 percent will be sold during the pre-sale and ICO periods. Of the remaining tokens, 24% will be held in reserve, 15% will be used to reward the ThinkCoin team, and 1% are available as bounty rewards. If there are ICO-allocated tokens that remain unsold after the ICO, they will be “burned” (permanently destroyed) to maintain these allocation percentages.
The Team
ThinkCoin and TradeConnect are more than just a whitepaper plan. In fact, the TradeConnect app is already live on both Android and iOS. But at the moment, it’s more of a financial information app than the one-stop trading superweapon that ThinkCoin ultimately wants it to be. The team has laid out an ambitious road map, with trading of crypto, forex, and CFD trading all scheduled to be online by October 2018, and physical equities, commodities, futures, and other products added into the mix in January of 2019.
Thankfully given the pedal-to-the-metal pace outlined in the ThinkCoin roadmap, the development of the TradeConnect network and ThinkCoin is being driven by the experienced team of ThinkMarkets, an established fintech player with a full-time staff of over thirty spread across a half-dozen offices around the world. Its co-founders, Nauman and Faizan Anees, collectively have more than 20 years of highly relevant fintech and bizdev experience, and the project also boasts a strong team of strategic adivisors with expertise ranging from blockchain development to entrepreneurship.
ThinkCoin and the TradeConnect network have a ways yet to travel, certainly, but with an experienced team, an MVP app already up and running, and a detailed plan for success, this is one ICO that’s definitely gotten our attention.
