The mobile-first crypto platform, SwissBorg, held its annual meeting on Tuesday night where it dished out a limited number of commemorative NFTs via Enjin and explained what it’s working on. While it announced several new ways that it will be allowing users to earn interest on their crypto holdings, two things that particularly stood out were the plans to scrap fees for peer-to-peer payments between SwissBorg users and to neutralise the platform’s share of carbon emissions.
On the first point, SwissBorg’s team said that all supported crypto assets will be able to be sent to other SwissBorg users without incurring gas costs and other fees. Fees related to both Ethereum and Bitcoin have been a huge pain in recent years, as demand for the cryptos picked up, so did the cost of transferring them between wallets. Once SwissBorg introduces these free P2P transfers, people will be able to keep more of their money and the platform should be more beginner-friendly.
During the keynote, the SwissBorg team laid huge emphasis on democratisation. As things stand, you have to do a bank transfer if you want to load up your SwissBorg account with fiat to trade to cryptocurrencies. The team announced that debit and credit cards will soon be added as payment options for topping up accounts and that this integration will include 3D secure verification to protect users – 3D secure verification means you’ll have to validate all transaction attempts.
Another main feature of SwissBorg is Smart Yielding, essentially, you can start a yield subscription with any of the supported cryptos that you hold to earn interest daily. So far, cryptos that support Smart Yield include Bitcoin, Ethereum, SwissBorg, USD Coin, Binance Coin, Tether USD, Ripple, Polygon, and Tether EUR. During the announcement, the team said more would be added soon including Aave, Aavegotchi, Curve DAO Token, and Dai. Furthermore, the way users will be able to invest their crypto will be changing to give people more control over risk level and the rewards.
SwissBorg also said it wants to clean up the emissions that it’s responsible for in the crypto world, to do this it will be using Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to neutralise the 17,500 MWh consumed by its in-house SwissBorg (CHSB) token, then it wants to get into green Bitcoin mining in the European Union and later other areas. Finally, it will neutralise the emissions of other cryptos being traded on its platform through RECs and Tree Planting.
With all the new buzzwords coming out of the crypto space on an almost monthly basis, it’s a little hard to keep up with what’s going on. For cryptocurrencies and the services they provide such as Smart Yielding to break through, products need to be easy to use. It’ll be interesting to see going forward whether the changes outlined above make crypto more accessible.