Pacio is creating an economy of applications and users that find it beneficial to use the TENDER currency. The economy will serve many applications for different industries or interest groups. This could include gaming apps, business apps, accounting apps, social media apps, payment/remittance apps, or apps for non-technical enterprises like charities or individuals.
Working in the same economic community, a fair and zero-fee currency is beneficial to both the applications and their users [3]. Benefits increase with network effects. The currency works like a platform where different providers (apps) and different customers (users) can exchange goods and services for digital money and have an on-and-off gateway for fiat. The more applications there are in this economy, the more attractive it will be for users to join. The more users, the better the business will be for apps.
Although Pacio is the creator of the currency and the economy, it doesn’t directly profit from the use of both assets. There is no commission to be paid by users. This may be counterintuitive from the perspective of the network’s creator in the short run, but Pacio firmly believes that digital economies paying the creator fees will be met with user resistance, which will hinder adoption. Users accept paying for services they desire, but not for the payment protocol [4].
Current digital economies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum charge a fee for every transaction, but digital transactions are just data “packets”. They should rather be a protocol or transfer layer like TCP/IP. The internet would never have gained universal adoption had the inventor of TCP/IP charged a fee for every transferred packet of data.
A truly decentralised system
Pacio sees tangible benefits from partaking in this economy. But the economy is not Pacio’s prime business model. In Pacio’s case, income will come from accounting and other business-related applications. While Pacio will be the creator of that network, it will not be the owner [5]. For other application providers and their users to adopt the economy as their own, the currency needs to be a common good. The initial system creator must find monetisation from other sources if the economy is to flourish beyond being a single- product service. In the same spirit, the economy needs to govern itself as a truly decentralised system, without the creator acting as a middleman or orchestrator.
The time is right. Holochain provides distributed ledger technology that allows a currency to become a protocol like TCP/IP. Current blockchain technology doesn’t and can’t offer that. Only with a currency that doesn’t come with high energy costs or high capital lockups can an economy be created that serves those who use it in a fair and sustainable manner. Middlemen that maintain the network and want money for their efforts and their power are then not needed. Pacio will build on the pioneering work of Holochain.
Despite all the hype about cutting out or bypassing fiat economy banks, Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrencies come with similar structures, even if they have different names and operate differently. They still have “central banking” with all its inherent limitations, albeit defined in software. Regulating and issuing banks are replaced by miners, stakers, developers, and forkers.
While Holochain offers distributed, secure and cheap computing, it is the TENDER cryptocurrency building on Holochain technology that allows Pacio to create an economy that derives its network effects through cooperation. It allows something like Amazon, Uber or Airbnb, but in a way where all participants are partners and are equally interested in the wellbeing of the network. Today, users of platforms like Amazon or Facebook are not bound to them by loyalty, but only by the strength of the market and the lack of alternatives. The next iteration of “marketplaces” will be ones that work cooperatively via partnerships and relationships. Because they will offer a better experience. The TENDER economy will be one of them.
[3] Example of the benefits of an economic network based on a currency: if a user holds Bitcoins for trading and now wants to buy a VPN service, it is very likely that she chooses a provider that accepts Bitcoins. This is good for the user, for the VPN provider and the network as a whole.
[4] There are other disadvantages: at scale, private networks like IoT will never use a third-party currency if transactions cost money. However, the overall economy could profit from the liquidity and velocity and an IoT provider could profit from not having to invent a transaction protocol.
[5] That makes the economy a beefed up version of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) and creates interesting legal questions. Such as who is liable in an economy that has no owner?
