In Depth: PAY

Disclaimer: I bought into the TenX ICO and immediately flipped it. I have not held a position in TenX since then.

Building on my first post, let's take a look at TenX, a formerly hot ICO from this summer. Do we think this is a good hold?

First, some stats:

• Raise: 200K ETH for 51% of circulating tokens
• ICO price: .0024 PAY / 1 ETH. Note that to have a better idea of the price floor, we use the original ETH price for ICOs denominated in ETH and the USD price when the ICO was in USD.
• Product: yes.
• Deadlines: so far they've delivered their cards on time, though as with every crypto CC there have been hiccups with processors.
• Crypto competitors: MCO, Tokencard, a truckload of others
• Graph:

With this in mind let's build a quick (5 minute) bull case and a bear case.

Bull:

• They're well ahead of the field and are the only ones shipping decent numbers of physical cards.
• When everyone lost their VISA processor a few months ago, they had a unique new one lined up.
• Currently at ATL, but seems to have found a floor recently.

Bear:

• Does anyone actually spend crypto? People talk a good game about wanting to, but very few of them really seem to use KYCd physical cards.
• The US and a sizable chunk of the EU tax every crypto to fiat transaction on a first in first out (FIFO) basis which makes doing taxes for crypto cards a complete nightmare. In the US, which is very prominently on the TenX roadmap, cards are basically unusable for anyone who wants to do taxes correctly.
• Still valued at $1.60 a token which translates out to a $170M circulating marketcap (and $340m total). That's an order of magnitude too high if they were ICOing today.

News: None that I know about, though I haven't kept up recently. They're already on Bittrex so we're not expecting an exchange bump anytime soon.

Looking at this,

• On a technical level, the floor seems to track USD better than BTC and is about 2x ICO in USD. Good for them, horrible for anyone looking for a quick pump
• I don't see a way for them to significantly rise against BTC without major news; none seems to be coming
• There are significant long term regulatory challenges for them as a business that will take many years to resolve
• The business itself is probably going to run at a loss for the foreseeable future

As a result I would not invest either for the short term or the long term. YMMV.