COTI is the currency of the internet, solving the problems in the payments industry by bringing together the best of traditional payments and digital currencies. COTI ICO has been rated as one of the top ICOs of 2018 by Invest in Blockchain, and the project is supported by Silicon Valley VC Luna Capital, Advanced Blockchain AG and nakamo.to GmbH. The CEO, Shahaf Bar-Geffen will be telling us more about the COTI project in this interview.
1) Please tell us your name and about yourself?
Hi, I’m Shahaf Bar-Geffen and I’m currently the CEO at COTI, Currency of the Internet. I guess you can say I’ve been a self-professed serial entrepreneur for the past 15 years. I co-founded WEB3 in 2006 as an international digital marketing agency which is now operational in 15 countries around the globe.
2) What is COTI and what are the major services you provide?
COTI is building a platform that creates payment networks over DAG, powering up merchants, payment service providers, developers and financial organizations with a full solution that can help them replace cash, credit cards and banks.
Some of our main offerings include COTI PAY, COTI-X, a decentralized arbitration system, wallet, debit card, merchant integration tools, a loyalty program and more.
3) What is wrong with traditional payment systems and why have digital currencies failed as a payment means; how will COTI solve these problems?
Traditional payment systems are complex and cost consumers billions of dollars every year due to high fees paid by merchants driving up product costs for consumers. When coupled with falsely declined transactions and long settlement periods, merchant profits and cash flow are further reduced. Complicated multi-currency support, high spreads and exchange rates also negatively impact both parties. Over two billion people around the world remain unbanked as a result of these inefficiencies common to traditional payment systems.
Cryptocurrencies were the first revolutionary technology to disrupt this industry, but have largely failed to address these issues due to scalability challenges, volatile prices, lack of buyer-seller protections, a complicated user experience and the absence of regulation. What’s more, the public at large doesn’t trust cryptocurrencies.
COTI solves these issues by bringing together the best of traditional payments and digital currencies. We offer scalability, instantaneity, near zero fees, buyer-seller protections, ease of use, regulation, price stability and so much more.
4) Tell us more about the architecture and technical side of things at COTI, what is the technology behind COTI?
We’ve developed a practical solution known as the Trustchain, a unique base-protocol with FinTech application layers. The COTI Trustchain is based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which creates a scalable and blockless protocol that can be utilized by any industry that requires immense scalability and an arbitration mechanism to resolve disputes, fraud (e.g. double spending) and errors.
5) How will COTI’s partnership with two major German technology firms; Advanced Blockchain AG and nakamo.to GmbH bring more value to the project?
The partnerships with nakamo.to and Advanced Blockchain AG will further the creation of COTI’s Trustchain, which is based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. Whilst nakamo.to will employ their marketing and community building techniques to spread the influence of COTI, Advanced Blockchain AG will be developing on top of the COTI protocol and leading other businesses to also build their systems on the COTI protocol.
6) Invest in Blockchain recently chose COTI as one of the top 10 ICOs to watch in Q3 2018! Tell us more about your token and how we can still invest.
We are currently oversubscribed on our private sale and had a successful limited community pre-sale at the beginning of June. We are finalizing our decision on whether to conduct a public sale and will be providing updates very soon. You can find out more in our Token Economy document.
7) Silicon Valley VC Luna Capital has invested in COTI with CEO Lindsey Maule joining COTI’s board of advisors, what does this mean for COTI and do you have other major investors like this?
Luna Capital’s mission is to identify winning projects and assets that are going to grow and improve the cryptocurrency ecosystem, solve problems, rise in market cap and provide long-term value. They are especially interested in DAG-based projects that strive to improve the limitations in blockchain technology today, which is a perfect fit for COTI.
We’re also working with a handful of other investors, such as Hexa Group, TLDR, Rhodium and more.
8) What is next on your roadmap and where do we see the project and the value of the token within the next 2 years?
Our alpha net launch, COTI exchange (COTI-X) beta launch and wallet release will all be happening in September. In the next two years, we see COTI PAY being adopted as a B2B solution and utilized by merchants, users and financial institutions all around the world as the leading alternative to credit cards and P2P systems like PayPal.
9) Please tell us about your team, your security and customer support?
COTI’s team consists of over 40 individuals from a range of reputable companies, such as IBM (former head of research), Ripple (former CRO), Coinbase, Blackrock (former CIO), HSBC, Investec Bank UK (former CEO) and Processing.com (CEO). Our amazing customer support team has been with us from the start and growing the COTI community from the early stages.
As far as security, we implement a multi-tiered security architecture which limits attack vectors and attack ingresses, while exchange liquidity is secured and integrated with Bitfinex. All traffic in COTI’s exchange is encrypted end-to-end using Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 (utilizing SHA256 keys) and all data-at-rest is secured with AES-256 encryption.
10) Do you have more information for our readers?
We encourage everyone to join our Telegram group for all the latest updates coming from COTI. You can also find more details in our overview document, technical whitepaper and token economy document.
