Image via Amp token.īecause of how the whole ecosystem around Flexa payments works you might understand that the success of Amp is tightly tied to the success of Flexa. Here’s a simple picture of how Amp works. You might now be wondering where that AMP comes from, and the answer is from those who Stake AMP in any of the payment providers leveraging Flexa payment protocol, which are SPEDN and Gemini Pay. Then, if for some reason your payment didn’t go through that locked AMP will automatically be converted to fiat and issued to the merchant. To give an example, if you were to buy the coffee we talked about for $5 there would be an amount greater than $5, say $6.50, of AMP being locked up in a smart contract as collateral.

To solve this issue AMP Token is used to collateralize each transaction. Therefore, without any collateral the merchant would take a risk of not getting anything at all if the transaction doesn’t go through. On top of that you might understand that converting one crypto to a fiat via an exchange isn’t instant although you as a user of Flexa will experience instant finality. Image via Flexa.Īs you might recall card fraud is a big issue and it can cost the merchant a lot. Here’s just a few, you can find the rest from the image link. But what I am certain of is that Amp is completely open-source. Reading at Flexa’s website they give the implication that everything is open- source although I’m quite certain that that’s not the case. Since Flexa is centralized some aspects of its operations are proprietary, however, I found some mixed information on what exactly is open-source and what isn’t. You might have guessed that Flexa acts as the centralized entity and AMP is the decentralized part. How do Flexa and Amp Work?Īs mentioned in the previous section the idea is to have a centralized payments operator combined with a decentralized network that makes it trustworthy and secure. Flexacoin holders were then able to swap their coins to Amp in a 1:1 ratio. The reason for this was that apparently that the technology behind Flexacoin couldn’t support staking it without sending it to a smart contract. In July of 2020 Coinbase announced their plans to list Flexacoin which hours later was followed by a Flexa announcement of a new token, AMP. Following the launch Flexa expanded to Canada to an additional 10,000 merchants and started accepting Litecoin and Zcash. residents to pay with cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Gemini’s GUSD stablecoin at over 30 000 locations. Less than a month after the last funding round, which was in April of 2019, Flexa released the SPEDN app which made it possible for U.S. In the last funding round Flexa was backed by some big names including Pantera Capital and Access Ventures.

In early 2018 Flexa had its first funding round in the form of an ICO of the Flexacoin. The front figure for Flexa is without a doubt Tyler Spalding who you’ll probably find in most, if not all, of the interviews. Image via Flexa.įlexa was founded in 2018 by Trevor Filter, Zachary Kilgore, and Tyler Spalding. But the question is “Can it do that?” and what does it mean for Amp as an investment? So where does Amp come in? Well Amp is a token issued by Flexa and Flexa is a payments platform aimed at solving all these problems. Another possibility would then be to directly pay with cryptocurrencies by transferring it from one wallet to another, but that too has some issues – namely finality, speed, and security. For example ’s card is issued by Visa, and they charge the basic Visa fee. But that won’t solve the chargeback problem. We know this since the most common way to pay with cryptocurrencies is using a crypto credit card. However, the payment ecosystem surrounding cryptocurrencies isn’t there yet. Another problem merchants typically face is fraudulent card charges which reached over $25 billion in 2019.Īll of this is without a doubt a problem and as you might know there are hopes that cryptocurrency will at least partly solve this problem. Naturally, they also charge a fee for all of this which is important earnings taken away from the merchants. This includes your data being transferred through banks and payment companies like Visa and Mastercard. When you pay using your card there are multiple steps that take place behind the scenes. Then our part is done, and we might think that the merchant will now immediately receive the $5 dollars we paid them. The only think we have to do is go there, grab our card and hover it near the card reader. For a consumer like you and me it feels fairly simple to go grab a coffee from your local coffee shop.

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