We believe there should be a commercial global digital currency that can be easily purchased and used for instant payments between buyers and sellers anywhere in the world. This global currency must also be able to be stored or exchanged with confidence of low volatility and near zero fees.

To drive widespread adoption, Qoin is designed as a smart digital cryptocurrency that will be backed by participating Merchants supply of goods & services and complemented by a global sales initiative. The objective is to expand the merchant base to a desired ecosystem of ten million merchants, businesses or sellers, within 20 years. Each merchant agrees to accept Qoin as a currency of payment for goods & services. Based on 10 million merchants this should create an ecosystem of available goods & services to buyers of approximately US$1.0 Trillion per annum based on:

• Average capacity available in each business / merchant of 25%, and
• Average annual revenues of US$500,000 per business / merchant*

The Qoin Reserve will administer the expansion of the ecosystem through a global sales initiative, onboarding, and incentivisation of new merchants. This means that anyone who has purchased Qoins has a degree of assurance they can utilise or spend their digital currency in the participating merchant ecosystem.

As per Metcalfe’s law, the value of Qoins will be effectively linked to the size of the merchant ecosystem. This may cause fluctuations in the value of Qoins.

Access to the existing Bartercard Ecosystem of approximately 21,000 merchants and 40,000 cardholders across the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand will form the nucleus as the kickstart of this project.

The blockchain only has one way to mint new Qoins for the Reserve:

• For the expansion of the merchant ecosystem and validation of all transactions, a fixed amount of Qoins equivalent to US$7,500 per merchant will be minted to fund the sales initiative, attract, sign up, incentivise and onboard new merchants and their customers, as well as maintain the technology and node network. This fixed amount will be reviewed annually by the Reserve to consider inflationary and global economic changes.

The maximum Qoins that can ever be minted by the Reserve is capped at 10 Billion in order to create the +US$1.0 Trillion merchant ecosystem.

An algorithm will value and adjust the Qoin price regularly based on:

• Number of merchants
• Average annual revenues of each merchant
• Average available capacity of each merchant
• Number of Qoins minted and in circulation.

*Based on the average turnover of targeted businesses