Cryptocurrency Enters The Real World
I got the chance to chat with Daniel Gouldman, CEO of a game-changing fintech startup that lets people spend crypto via debit card.
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I had the great fortune of being able to speak on the phone for a few minutes with Daniel Gouldman, CEO of Ternio, and it sounds like some amazing progress is being made. Riding a high of all-time best 30-day volume, Daniel was happy to clue me in a bit about the company’s vision and plans for the future. In this article, I’ll share what I learned about what Ternio aims to accomplish and where that fits into the exploding cryptocurrency universe.
A bit of background
Ternio was founded officially on January 1, 2018, making them a true startup (< 3 years of age as of 2020). The founding team had been working on the project since 2017 and developed enough traction to make it official as 2018 got started. In May, 2019, the Blockcard virtual card was launched and quickly followed up with a physical plastic card. The vision is simple enough: if you have crypto in a wallet somewhere, you can forward it to your Ternio account and it is automatically converted into TERN, the company’s crypto token. The card links to an account that holds your TERN, and Ternio’s unique software uses Visa to process payments in real time, anywhere Visa is accepted (pretty much everywhere, these days).
The tech
TERN is based on the Stellar Lumens payment blockchain, and the rapid progress Ternio has achieved stands as a monument to the power and reliability of XLM. Unfortunately, overuse of airdrops adversely impacted the price of XLM and by association TERN, but the Ternio team pivoted and disassociated the TERN crypto token from the XLM token. Despite unlinking the prices of the two tokens, TERN is still able to benefit from the speed and security of the XLM blockchain.
Price stability
Price instability of TERN is to be expected during the early phase the token is still in — think of where Bitcoin was one year after launch —…
