Got crypto coins to spend? Starting today, Peddler.com , an Amsterdam based online marketplace, will be the first crowd-buying platform to start accepting the digital currency. They now accept payment in the most popular forms: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and many other cryptocurrencies. And within the next month this startup will be the first to offer crowd-buys on cars for crypto throughout the EU.
Products range from the hottest new Nikes, to Samsung phones, or even Dyson vacuums, but what distinguishes them from other retailers is their ability to harness the collective purchasing power of groups to offer discounts of 20% to 50%. This often enables them to offer brand-name products cheaper than anyone else in the UK (their primary test market), even including giants like Amazon.
The founder, James Klymowsky, explains why they started accepting this form of payment:
‘We realised that we have a lot of consumers who hold digital currencies but have no place to spend them. So we expanded our crowd buying for this community. The crypto markets can drop if there”s a lack of general purpose application. With our platform, we see a real opportunity to provide real utility.’
In order to explain the growth of crypto currencies, we must first understand the value of currency. By itself, cash has no intrinsic value. It only has value because society as a whole accepts cash as a medium of exchange for actual goods.
The biggest issue right now is that there are not enough places to spend these digital currencies. Peddler.com will now be a major platform where consumers can purchase nearly any product they want with cryptocurrencies.
The promise of blockchain is a world without middlemen — something that also lies at the heart of this startup”s crowd-buying model. The blockchain is a digital ledger of crypto transactions that cannot be controlled by any single entity. Instead, it has a self-auditing ecosystem of computing nodes. Every node is an ‘administrator’ of the blockchain, and joins the network voluntarily. In this sense, the network is decentralized.
This startup”s new model is creating a more decentralized shopping alternative. Klymowsky explains, ‘AI enables us to cut out the middle men – big advertisers who are getting our data for nothing – and even start paying users for sharing the things that they want. It”s your data and you own it, so you should get paid for it.’
Everytime we use Facebook, we”re creating data that they sell to advertisers. In return we”ve developed addictions, watched national elections fall, and helped Facebook grow into a trillion dollar company with our data.
But what if no central company controlled our data? Klymowsky is leading this fast growing startup in that direction:
‘Our ambition is to scale and become decentralised in order provide our AI and crowd buying capability to everyone everywhere — even one day cutting out Peddler.com itself.’
Soon customers will get paid for their data on Peddler. But starting today, they can pay for products with cryptocurrency on a platform that is cutting out the middlemen and passing these savings back to where they belong: customers” pockets.
AMSTERDAM, April 17, 2018 /PRNewswire/ —