IBMR partners with Algorand to Launch Microfinance Platform
Algorand is a Boston-based open-source software company working towards building a borderless economy. Backed by a strong team that is led by Turing award winner Silvio Micali, Algorand recently attracted a lot of exciting partnerships since it leverages solid engineering and cryptographic principles. One of these latest partnerships happens to be the one with “The International Blockchain Monetary Reserve” (IBMR). The goal of this partnership is to launch a microfinance platform and a dedicated token, named Asia Reserve Currency Coin (ARCC), to promote financial inclusion in Southeast Asia.
IBMR and ARCC
According to the IBMR, the ARCC is a macroeconomic stablecoin project that aims to fight corruption by placing an incentive on public reporting of problems. The basic idea is this – as the productivity and GDP increases, the value of ARCC increases. There are two parts to ARCC’s token economics:
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A licensed hedge fund that is responsible for increasing and preserving the liquidity of ARCC.
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People can earn ARCC by reporting various things like corruption, traffic jams, barriers to commerce, power outages, utility bills, etc. This could also mean that the ARCC is going to be the first crypto that a lot of average citizens will own.
ARCC’s real-world utility
As per IBMR, a dedicated website named “AECC.one” will act as an asset management platform based on the holdings on the users. This will allow them to own ARCC and take advantage of the various services available such as credit, investment, and insurance facilities. IBMR maintains an ARCC Reserve which provides funds to different financial products. People can initiate a Kickstarter-type campaign by pooling or staking ARCC tokens. The IBMR can further convert these ARCCs to relevant fiat currencies for practical utility. The IBMR said:
Profits generated from these joint community and entrepreneurial projects can then be automatically distributed to users as ARCC tokens via the platform. All of those earned ARCC tokens, after a period of vesting, will be able to be withdrawn to a user’s own wallet then used to either invest or spend as debt-free capital.
ARCC governance
The token economy is governed by the ARCC Monetary Policy Council, which is composed of 88 members. As per the IBMR, there is a fixed maximum supply of the tokens on an annual minting schedule based on a 50-year monetary policy. Regarding the issue of the pricing of the tokens, IBMR said:
“In the case of ARCC, ours is a decentralized information network whereby the more nodes there are providing data, the more integrity and scope there is to the data aggregated and thus providing a more definitive social public mandate. ARCC is earned and distributed as an incentive for this public mandate network and then has further utility in providing liquidity and transaction to asset management platform. Finally we come full circle where this ‘decentralized network effect’ of value is then expressed through the ARCC underlying assets and reserve that ultimately acts as the buyer of last resort for the value of ARCC.”
Conclusion
The Algorand blockchain will benefit immensely from this partnership. For a token to gain mainstream acceptance, it must have some real-world utility. As we have seen with the ARCC tokens, they have been perfectly positioned to do precisely that. This will help out Algorand a lot since it will exponentially increase platform usage.
ARCC is the latest in a line of high-profile partnerships that Algorand has been making in recent months. Algorand’s first-of-its-kind permissionless and pure proof-of-stake protocol, which allows them to provide a high degree of scalability, open participation, and transaction finality has already seduced companies like IDEX and AssetBlock. Algorand has also collaborated with Reach to simplify smart contract execution and attract developers into its ecosystem. All-in-all, Algorand is taking great strides in becoming one of the premier smart contract platforms in the world.