Monetha have an upcoming ICO. The platform allows you to pay merchants using Eth over the eth blockchain.
Sounds a bit silly really as there is already providers for this kind of thing that have working systems. Do we really need another? Maybe.
This is for sellers or merchants and not targeted at clients or buyers as much. For example take someone who currently sells on Amazon. Currently they may pickup all the fee that involves you paying with your credit card. Paying with Monetha instead means 1.5% rather than 2-6% of traditional systems. I imagine amazon has a special deal though and they pass some of that onto merchants.
This doesn't seem like enough for me. It should be much lower than 1.5%.
I see this as a semi desperate grab to build something on blockchain by a pay pal affiliated group? There already exists technology that should bring fees down MUCH lower than that. Look at TenX or IOTA.
I dislike paypal and its fees and I dislike they have a paypal CEO on their board.
You have to rely on the ETH blockchain which has proven to get conjested during heavy ICO times. Until ETH add their sidechain to deal with this issue of congestion (or activate POS) whatever their plan is this could be an issue.
The good
Speed it is upto 10,000 times faster. It should be near instant and credit card companies can take days or weeks but you do get some kind of insurance with credit cards for both parties. As a merchant I suppose no insurance either way means you get your payment 100% of the time not matter what so this is good for merchants. No middleman it is directly between you and the merchant. So such high fees is questionable.
Cheaper transaction fees and cashback for clients and merchants with a higher trust ratings. The one thing we can see with Monetha is the ratings and reviews are left only by people that have actually conducted a monetary transaction. And you can see the rating of those merchants and people and actually would see a higher quality of review and ratings because there is a reward in doing so.
This also removes any insurance and can mean you have to solved the dispute with the seller. Should they choose to disagree with you all you can do is leave them a nasty rating.
Funds recieved by merchants can be stored as ETH or auto converted to FIAT.
They want to allow sellers to break away from Ebay and Amazon that facilitate a rating service they can't get away from.
Monetha Tokens
Token holders receive 33% of the 1.5% transaction fees (0.5%). (similar to Tenx). You can also earn Monetha for paying with monetha at a rate of 0.2% which is pretty generous.
This just seems like a reverse TenX but done worse. TenX have started at the correct end of the spectrum. Target the consumers. We are the ones that spend the money give us the power to cut down on fees and we will take it. TenX could effectively build what monetha are proposing but they are starting at the other end and producing a working product that is good for both merchants and clients. They could then build the trust platform and already they are weeks away from offering more than just ETH as the payment system. They currently offer BTC which makes the most sense and will offer ETH next.
FOREX fees? Dunno, I can't find this info. It probably exists but I didn't really look hard enough.
Roadmap
Semi functional release is for early-mid 2018. What will other similar systems that are up and running and already working be doing
The Competition
https://www.coinpayments.net/
Coinpayments allows merchants to accept up to 70 different coins already. They may not have the platform interface that monetha provides but they are just so far ahead of monetha already that they could just tack that bit on pretty easily it seems to me. They do already have pretty much everything else which is kinda of better than Monetha. I m ean you can already browse individual merchants and stores and the interface is pretty decent. What Monetha proposes really is just a tiny addon for these guys. I haven't done my research on Coinpayments but their fees at first glance look cheaper?
https://www.coinpayments.net/help-fees
There could be other competitors I didn't look that hard.
Upcoming release dates and features.
Nothing too exciting. The ICO is in 9 days.
Concerns
Again for this to take off Crypto needs to really take off. I think it absolutely will. But it will be the consumers that drive this and I think Tenx and similar services are where it starts. You will get Millions of people wanting TenX cards but likely just a few thousand merchants and then you need customers like those with TenX or similar cards to catch on. This is at least a year or 3 away before monetha becomes really useful and you can see a return on your token investment.
Conclusion
It is a no go from me for the ICO. In saying that I always buy for long term investing. People are excited about Monetha for some reason. I can't see why but because of the hype it might do well after ICO for people that don't read as much as I have. There is already existing services which are better in my opinion. I know it may seem like I am pushing TenX here but honestly they are coming at it from the better angle I think and in the long run saves both merchants and vendors money. But coinpayments seems like a better idea to me as it opens up pretty much any coin as the payment and it already exists and is being used.
This review has less detail than others as I lost interest in investing personally but I am short on funds so I have to pick one of the many available right now.