AirWire: An Ingenious New Way to Make Online Payments

2018 has been an amazing year for cryptocurrency, a year of milestones and ever-changing trends. Starting with the crypto moon and the following retreat, 2018 saw the ICO boom, POW hash rate boom, blockchain genesis frenzy and so on. The aftermath of all these explosions is a mashup of too many different projects using too many different cryptocurrencies based on too many different blockchains and a market that is downward to stabilizing. To sum it up, it is just cumbersome. That obviously didn't stop us from getting our hands dirty, but, when it comes to mass adoption, further innovation needs to be made for better accessibility and user-friendliness. The good news is that this is far from being one man's opinion; in fact, this is the very race that drives the crypto industry at the moment. The race is for innovating solutions to make the industry accessible to a larger audience and we have many serious projects in the run. I already had the privilege to cover some of these projects in my previous articles. While those intend to refine specific tasks, today we have one with an overall solution to bring any cryptocurrency closer to people: AirWire. AirWire is a cryptocurrency payment system. Upon this sentence I can feel your eyes rolling like "Pfff! That's new." And I too might prefer that prejudgment to be just but unfortunately there is a catch, even two actually, that put me on this mission to "share the good news".

The first catch is in how they want to do the payments. But first, let me let me explain the hoops that you'll need to jump through to get there: quick registration, quick KYC, quick deposit. Yes, it is quite astonishing how fast everything was done. No five step registration procedures, no typing in every dot on your ID card, no taking a selfie while holding your passport open with your mouth on a handstand... In fact, I can't really think of anything on the AirWire.io Platform that requires an explanation. Regardless, it wouldn't feel right not using my chance to criticize something and since there is nothing else later, I'm going to do it here. At the first step of KYC verification, I had to alternate between keyboard and mouse to fill the form because I couldn't get to the drop-down menus with tab key and couldn't type in them. This is like the only thing that I really care about. And like that wasn't enough horror, I spend some precious milliseconds on the update profile picture dialog clicking on the blue button to get the file open dialog to appear until I realized it was the white area that I had to click. So basically, I got nothing... I must admit that I browsed around for a while longer, hoping to find a major flaw to publish and satisfy my writer-ego but it is just darn good. Well then, without further ado: the catch...

The innovation of AirWire comes in the shape of an application that can initiate payments via email, SMS and any social media messaging service. What this means is that the sender chooses -for example- Twitter, enters the receiver's Twitter handle; system sends a Twitter message to receiver, the payment gets deposited in receiver's AirWire account. Simple, right; but, why is this a catch? Let's remember the race for user-friendliness... All other payment services require the receiver's address shared between parties. This is the most complex in cryptocurrency since it is a long combination of letters and numbers, in other cases this is a platform specific username or an email address; an inconvenience for both parties. In case of online businesses, currently the receiver can either share his account info publicly and to make himself more accessible he must share multiple accounts of different cryptocurrencies and online payment providers, or he must do this one by one which costs time. Reducing this whole fuss into “Send to my Twitch handler” is inarguably a huge convenience. The sender, on the other hand, doesn’t have to contact the receiver to get the account info. This promotes most importantly donation by enabling “incentive acts of charity” and creates a new online ability “to surprise someone with a gift”. In addition to user friendliness, by eliminating the necessity to share additional information, the AirWire method also increases the security for both parties and promotes anonymity.

The second catch is in what they want to pay with. As a hard-core supporter of decentralization, it saddens me to watch cryptocurrency industry getting more and more centralized every day. More than half of the market volume belongs to a single blockchain which is dominated by three mining pools intentionally keeping their hash rates low to create a false sense of security. The tendency of most cryptocurrency services in utilizing only the top-tier cryptocurrencies certainly is the root of this problem. I would like to give a big applause to AirWire for siding with decentralization by partnering up with rather new blockchain projects. There is already a selection of different cryptocurrencies available on the platform and more partnerships are on the way. An easily accessible gateway like AirWire is an invaluable asset for all these projects, and even better, since social network is not the limit of accessibility for AirWire. According to the Whitepaper, they are planning to create a complete solution featuring their own debit card and internal email and messaging applications.

After surviving a rigorous journey through beta level software, programming errors, scam coins, shit coins, ICO scams, crashes and bursts; I'm not sure what could be realistically expected from cryptocurrency. So, getting an offer including decentralization, anonymity, security and user-friendliness is no less then water to a desert exile to me. The one feature that will make AirWire rise within the current trend is, as mentioned in the premise, user-friendliness. Knowing the risk of getting burned later and switching to big-words; if the 2017-2018 threshold put cryptocurrency in everyone's mind, 2018-2019 threshold is going to put it at everyone's fingertips. If you want to see the role of AirWire in this revolution, check them out on their Website and join the community on Discord.