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
YTD price data via CoinMarketCap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ternio/
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 — but the company hopes to achieve stability by regulating the supply of TERN to a flat billion tokens. As opposed to other tokens which can seem opaque to end users, there are two things to do with TERN: you can buy things with it, just like you would with the USD ($), or you can stake it to receive interest paid in TERN and, providing you meet the conditions, help to make decisions about the future of the TERN blockchain.
“Where is Ternio headed?” I asked Daniel, during our call.
“We want to be a global bank, eventually,” he said.
I was impressed. The level of execution we’re seeing from this company is… excessive. They’ve managed to be among the first companies to successfully leverage available technology to solve the hard problem of making it possible to spend bitcoin in a store on one hand, and on the other, the Blockcard is only the tip of the iceberg for these inventive souls. Any normal startup founder would be thrilled with the success of the Blockcard and all-time 30-day volume high Daniel is currently experiencing, but Daniel’s focus is pointed quite squarely forward.
Beyond this, however, there is a problem Ternio is solving here, which Tezos and perhaps one day soon Ethereum are also tackling: how to provide returns to small-time investors? I hold my savings in Tezos on Coinbase. Many say not to do this, and I know about the possible security risks, but I can’t find anywhere else to put a few grand that will enable me to earn a more consistent return than the ~5% interest I receive from my XTZ stake.
The Tezos Foundation is well-funded and provides an excellent blockchain in terms of security and speed. It seems to me that Ternio intends to improve upon this model by incorporating staking as well as providing the world’s most liquid token.
We want to be a global bank, eventually.
I asked Daniel about his hiring practices and his staff.
“We have an amazing team. We only hire the best, and it works well.” Daniel seemed to me to be very satisfied to be working with the team he has assembled, and the rapid execution of his project seems a testament to the talent which has thrown in its lot with him.
I asked about fundraising, and he brushed the question aside, merely stating something to the effect that the company had no unmet needs in terms of financing at the moment, and that they are hiring for a few positions.
Nearing the end of our call, I asked Daniel how he manages to maintain such a clear vision for his company.
“We want to innovate and build real things to solve real problems,” he said. A few seconds later: “We ask ourselves what would solve real problems.”
At the end of the day, that’s actually why I know about Ternio. Out of hundreds of ads about various crypto plays, I connected with the literature I saw from Ternio in particular because it solves a real problem that I legitimately face in my crypto dealings. This focus on bringing the blockchain down to earth and using it to do things normal people will find benefit in is perhaps what sets Ternio apart in my view.
We want to innovate and build real things to solve real problems.
I see some of this from Tezos (XTZ), in the staking concept and their mission to supplant Ethereum by providing a faster and more secure blockchain, but no other token seems to be guided by the same type of down-to-earth vision and practical mind I saw in Daniel Gouldman. I deeply appreciate the work of the team at Brave, as well, but something seems to stand out to me about the Ternio project.
I believe Nexo is working on a product which will be something like the Blockcard, and I have commented negatively on TERN in the past due to the instability of the token and the layer of complexity added by TERN being entered into the mix (why not just convert to USD, I thought!), but what I see today is a young, formidable team with a remarkable amount of traction. In fact, I doubt anyone would have believed it would be possible to accomplish what the Ternio team has if you’d told them in 2017 where it would be in just three short years.
I was impressed by Daniel and perhaps even a bit more so by his vision. As something of a serial entrepreneur myself, I know a project that works when I hear it. It sounds simple, confident, but not megalomaniacal. I’ve tried to get a handful of different projects there, without much success.
There are likely to be hurdles between Ternio and global banking, but Ternio is a company with a long-term goal which is already finding major traction: help people spend their crypto. As the project continues to pick up steam, altcoin and Bitcoin prices alike may be pulled upward as retail investors begin to see cryptocurrency as a speculative investment opportunity with substantially improved liquidity compared to the stock market, resulting in an influx of capital across the board.
I pay some attention to some of the more subtle crypto development projects as well, things like NFTs and Cryptovoxels. The space feels as if it is beginning to come alive in a way it hasn’t been before.
In a historical moment which involves some of the first major banks beginning to recognize the possibility of Bitcoin’s use as a store of value, right after the Halvening of 2020, and in the midst of the greatest financial collapse of our lifetimes, experts are beginning to reach something of a consensus regarding cryptocurrencies: they have a future.
Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash
If you would like to see more information about Blockcard or about TERN, feel free to click my affiliate link, or to visit their website at ternio.io.
Full disclosure: I am long TERN.
Contact the Author:
Thomas Dylan Daniel is an existential philosopher, professional ethicist, author, and biophysicist. He has written four books and started a Medium publication called Serious Philosophy. Connect via his website or facebook, or have a look at his books.
This article initially published at Medium: https://medium.com/crypto-spotlight/cryptocurrency-becomes-practical-99107c125911
