MT

TheAfterPipe

I cannot recall, but I think the sequence of events was: - hear about it while browsing some tech website (slashdot or digg?) back in 2009 or 2010 - hear about it going up in 2011 - this is when MT.GOX was super popular. I believe this may be when I started listening to Andreas Antonopoulos? Any way, I was absolutely fascinated by it and ate up any documents or articles I could find about it. About a week after I submitted my details to MT.GOX, the platform froze. I count myself very fortunate to have narrowly avoided that site. The payouts from mining (Slush's Pool) were how I first "encountered" a denomination of BTC. at the time it was mere cents I was getting. at the time I stopped mining, I had about $35 worth of Bitcoin. Mining was super fun. Wish I could still do it. I felt like a rockstar.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Somsanite7

Hm 2013 i was working the first year with my diploma my guess is always if i bought some BTC/ ETH and it goes up to a couple hunnys / make a 3x whatever i believe i didnt hold it and cash out Sad thing is also the Security in the early stages i used to read a lot about it and as MT.Gox got hacked i doubt it was not clever to Invest...Error🤣

hendrikss68

Does anyone here need help? A Russian guy is helping me with his bot and my MT5 is crazy.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

hudsoncider

Nice . I ended up with running 10 jalapeños at one time and then lost all my BTC at MT Gox :-(

arflorenca

Good point. Like you said there are many unknown unknowns. I first heard about bitcoin in 2015 and immediately 'knew' it had great potential. I bought 15 btc at about $600 each and used them all to buy a mining contract. The price of bitcoin started going up, more and more miners started increasing the difficulty. The mining rewards in terms of btc were very low, but because of the higher price per btc, it was very profitable in dollar terms. My mining contract couldn't complete with the bigger players that were entering the market. Today, I have 2 bitcoins from the mining activities , which I am still very grateful for, but I sometimes wonder what could have been if I had just bought and kept the 15btc. But then I think that I might have decided to keep them on MT Gox and could have lost everything. Hindsight is always 20/20 vision. In my opinion there is still lots to gain with regular DCA what you can afford.

erilaz123

Hi, is a Tesla M40 card profitable in 2024? I'm considering replacing the K10 in my server,[Tesla K10, similar to 2x GTX 780) 2X Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz 12X HMT31GR7BFR4A-H9 8GB DIMM DDR3 1333MT/s MemTotal:       98894328 kB ( 98 GB) MemFree:        77341924 kB MemAvailable:   81958844 kB A  kWh is 0.106 euro. M40 card specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/tesla-m40.c2771

WoTpro

MT.Gox did the first number

No-Setting9690

I was an early miner on many coins. I lost some on BTC-E right before that, but that was a domain taken by the FBI. I thought Cryptsy was diff. MT Gox I saw the signs and left 30 minutes prior to all withdrawals bein stopped. Seeing how the lawsuit went, I should have left it all, lol Real wild west back then for exchanges. Hell, I made some money of an exchange a kid ran out of his bedroom.

erilaz123

It's a old server that has: 2x GK104GL [Tesla K10, similar to 2x GTX 780) 2X Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz 12X HMT31GR7BFR4A-H9 8GB DIMM DDR3 1333MT/s MemTotal: 98894328 kB ( 98 GB) MemFree: 77341924 kB MemAvailable: 81958844 kB A kWh is 0.106 euro. Maximum wattage for the two cards is 234 W combined according to nvidia-smi.

addi1973

Is this about Amir? Cool group of Brit's setup the first exchange alternative to MT gox. It was hard work. I helped a little [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Intersango](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Intersango)

m0v3s1z3

Get from your bank the MT103 SWIFT transaction documentation and send it to coinbase. Also ask for their compliance department. I can recommend a top german lawyer, check your DM.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

deviantgoober

Maybe you should go learn how the stock market in general works before you start confusing yourself with how BTC fits into that picture. Of course you are going to lose money if the ETF value goes down alongside BTC just like you would with individual shares of any stock. ​ >So people who don’t have a lot of liquidity are forced to take a loss? You only take a loss if you choose to sell at a loss instead of holding. Liquidity in ETFs I would argue are worse than anywhere else in the crypto landscape because there are many many crypto exchanges with liquidity (although any individual one can run out of liquidity like FTX, MT Gox etc) and also P2P transactions outside of exchanges but with ETFs theres much less liquidity and your only option is to sell through the ETF itself which is not the case in the rest of the crypto ecosystem. Although the ETF handles going to those same exchanges on your behalf behind the scenes to get liquidity so you could also argue that its the same, but you are time bound to them doing it on week days only and the crypto economy is 24/7 so theres time risk if the crypto market goes up or down sharply over the weekend. The number of shares and price of the ETF may change but you will still always own the same adjusted percentage as the overall amount of funds held in the ETF fluctuates, so i dont know if you mean ETF liquidity or individual ownership percentage and you are confusing the two.

Specific-Vanilla

Remember FTX ? They built stadium, paid elected officials, had a superbowl commercial, had the support of actors, etc. Yet they still went down in a shitshow and crypto didn't end. Now think even further than that, MT.Gox which traded the majority of Bitcoins worldwide at one point in history. It didn't end well and dragged the markets down, but still, it wasn't the end like some people thought it would be. Take it from my experience, I used QuadrigaCX for years, as well as my family and friends. I own cold storage but would be lazy and only transferred out when I had 4 figures at a time... and even if I did, I didn't see the point because I didn't think it would ever go down after years of usage. I lost close to 2K when it did. Ultimately, you could be keylogged, simswapped, etc. even if nothing happens... why take the risk ?

GelattoPotato

Two words: MT GOX

matwurst

God what is that even. Who’s your MT? 😂

BitcoinAcc

The famous MT Gox exchange (famous for losing their clients Bitcoin) was initially a website to trade card games. That's where it name came from: Magic The Gathering Online eXchange They simply pivoted into trading Bitcoin and thus were able to get into the game quickly, with their trading infrastructure already set up. With the (in hindsight) quite unsurprising result, that their security was maybe good enough for trading cards, but not good enough for trading a new monetary asset. So, they had their assets stolen...

deviantgoober

The ETFs dont have protocols... the custodians have protocols as they are the ones holding it. ​ >imagine what powerful custodians can do You mean like MT Gox, FTX, Binance getting their APIs hacked. Powerful custodians are not infallible.

Own_Sky9933

Let me out myself. I am now old. I voted for Ron Paul that is how I learned about Bitcoin. Probably around 2011. The BTC noobies have no idea. Coinbase you can dislike them all you want. Good luck actually buying Bitcoin in the US before Coinbase came around. Wire money to Japan you got MT. Gox. Wire money to Bit Instant you have Charlie Shrem that went to jail. Coinbase has been the Rock of Gibraltar for BTC and the crypto space since like 2013-2014. I am now so old I remember when they only had BTC and they added ETH and it was a huge deal. Again you can be mad at Coinbase all you want but given the countless fraud and bad actors in Crypto, I am still shocked at the absolute hate here. Let me rattle off a few: Bitcoinnect, Countless Defi Scams, Blockfi, Celsius, Genesis Mining, Hash flare, Voyager, FTX, and oh year Mt. Gox. If I am missing any please feel free to chime in below there are countless.

Scumpson44

This is nothing like the guy who paid 10k btc for 2 pizzas but... 3 btc for a 1 lb bag of coffee.. Here is your order as we received it. At the moment, I'm manually sending a unique payment address for each purchase via email, which you should receive soon. After your bitcoin payment has been confirmed, your order will be processed and shipped. Once you've had a chance to enjoy a cup of our fine coffee, we'd appreciate a review at http://www.thebitcoinlist.com/listing/bitbrew/#respond . \> >> \> >> Thanks again for supporting the Bitcoin economy! \> >> ---------------------------------- \> >> \> >> ORDER NUMBER: MT-QRWWHT4VN4Y6Q9 \> >> \> >> Item: Karmic Sumatra - Decaf, Ground (Fine) \> >> Item Price: BTC2.99 \> >> Item Total: BTC2.99

FreedomGoUp_Maxi

Many of us have been there. MT GOX.... may those dudes burn for all eternity

harvested

Also this https://youtu.be/45YiWmK70WU?si=9XtJIPUHR6MT6kd6

Warmaster0010

Once MT Gox payment comes in then yes I know someone who will have 60

guestn47

Of course, but if you print your seed phrase on paper and somebody finds it, you are screwed. But if you print encrypted wallet on paper, which looks like this for example (this is new empty wallet I just created): 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 it is useless unless someone has password for it.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

ShAd0wS

Counterpoint: There are plenty of people who lost money on MT.gox still around

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

No-Setting9690

Oh I know. Wild West days were freaking awesome. Hell I watched teh MT Gox implosion live cause I saw it coming and withdrew about 30 minutes before they stopped them.

Fickle-Impression365

Genuine Receivers Needed for sure BTC, USDT, MT103,SWIFT CASH TRANSFER Contact the direct sender. Dm on WhatsApp ‪‪‪+5547997664255

Gr8WallofChinatown

It’s just clickbait. MT GoX fud has been spread since 2015

hellprism

Just did the math,at time MT gox got hacked the price was 600$ ish. So if you assume the avg holdings per holder was $15k at the time, that's 25 btc per person. So 142k btc ÷ 25 btc per person= 5680 people who will be paid out. Which means every one of those people are basically millionaires now I'm automatically if they took payment in BTC.

chrnk1130

They are two entirely different investment vehicles. Bitcoin is a currency and a store of value. You can use it. You can move it. You can store it on your own. It's up to you. If you lose it, you're accountible for that, there are not really any legal avenues for recovery. If a significantly large entity that is regulated, like MT Gox, loses your bitcoin you may eventually be restored. The ETF is an IOU. Instead of taking custody and control you allow Blackrock, or Fidelity, or Grayscale, or whoever to secure it. You can trade the ETF using your retirement account/s (if they allow it) without worrying about immediate tax implications. The trustee takes legal accountability if they lose it.

JustCryptastic

Crypto isn’t kept on the Ledger, it’s on the blockchain. You own your keys when you use a Ledger, and the Ledger gives you a layer of security via a passkey that is required for that wallet when you execute a transaction on the blockchain. If you’re not waiting for your funds to clear so that you can move your crypto into a wallet that you own your keys, I don’t know why you’d trust an exchange to hold them. Exchanges are fiat onramps at best. Ever hear of Celsius? FTX? MT Gox?

Chathin

\- Spent 9 BTC on the Colombian weed back in 2010 / 2011. \- Lost about 50++ BTC in the MT.GOX hack. \- Spent another 9/10 BTC over the years on weed from various markets. \-- I just don't bother even looking at it any more. I used it as it was supposed to be used as currency and not as some weird fucking asset investment.

Ok-Ant-2143

I'm definitely nervous....there is no doubt in my mind that when this next bull run occurs I will have serious personal questions to consider. I've been "in" since 2013, and bought most of my stack starting at $37-195...first buying at MT Gox and then next in the very early days of Quadriga. (I got out of both without losing anything.) Next bull run I predict the remaining balance of my stack will be enough for me to retire, and that's a scary proposition to be honest....that's why I'm nervous that it's about to skyrocket upwards. It's going to imbalance the future for me.

4ss0

In 2009 bought bitcoins ? Probably peer to peer or you mined them, don't think even MT Gox was there at that time. You should search in your laptop of that time wallet.dat file (never ever disclosure it to anybody, DYOR and find out how to open it, use electrum).

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

thecoat9

When I first considered buying bitcoin the price at the time in USD was $8-12 per coin. Sure my financial state could have been quite different had I not gotten distracted and had started DCA back then.. but I didn't and ask not for sympathy, I don't dwell on it and assume that had I done so I'd have left it on MT. Gox, or thrown out a hard drive with the wallet on it etc. Over the years before I started buying and doing DCA, if at any moment I'd have had the option to direct a small portion of my 401k distribution into a bitcoin or crypto fund I'd have done it, maybe 1%. U.S. citizens have around 7 trillion dollars in 401k plans. If we only see 1-2% flow into ETFs that's still going to be one hell of a shot in the arm. Now that won't happen Jan 11th, but you can bet your ass that next December it's highly likely that when people are doing their yearly revisit of their 401k plan and financial advisors are touting the new crypto distribution category that many will decide to drop at least a small percentage in. Now how much have these institutions already bought in anticipation of offering their ETF? They aren't stupid right? Chances are they've enough to not need to buy up more to meet the initial demand, however they also won't be dumping it on a whim. Even if they don't have to buy large amounts after an approval, they will be locking up supply for a longer term and we simply may not see as much volatility as the floor becomes higher and higher, and the bottom more solid.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Ecansson

https://cloudminer.net/?reference=5MT1P8

Ecansson

https://cloudminer.net/?reference=5MT1P8

Ecansson

Please check out this cloudmining! Earn some cash and eat for ”free” 😊 https://cloudminer.net/?reference=5MT1P8

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Objective_Digit

Foolish. The exchange could go under. MT Gox had 2FA. You're also contributing to the centralisation and volatility of your coin(s).

ElectronicOcelot3251

Thats not why Bitcoin crashed. Bitcoin had a bull and bear cycle before other crypto existed. MT Gox was BTC only and before other crypto existed.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CannonGibsonator

To trade forex using a bot on the MT4 platform. They were recommended by a trusted source. The forex trading experience with OspreyFX was drama free for the last 8 months. Until Wednesday when they suddenly stopped supporting the MT4 platform. My bot works only on MT4. So I withdrew all my money that night.

CannonGibsonator

And it was their fault I left. They suddenly, with 5 hour notice, forced migrated all live MT4 accounts to TradeLocker and discontinued MT4 support. I use EA’s to trade. TradeLocker doesn’t support EA’s, only manual trading.

Redac07

Quite sure those didn't exist back then. Infact it most likely was MT Gox and the bitcoins got hacked. They should research to see if they could get a percentage back.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

bobbyv137

I have listened to approximately 50 hours of Michael Saylor talk about Bitcoin and finance in general. He says himself the most ethical donation anyone can ever make, is losing their Bitcoin. I’m going to assume MSTR have enough security measures in place never to lose their holding. But if it came to light the keys were lost, I think the price would dump 10% or so then inevitably recover. Bitcoin is proving time and time again its stern resolution against external macro events, whether that be the MT gox hack, covid, China mining ban, Musk’s antics, rampant inflation and the hugest interest rates in decades. The network itself remains resolute and stronger than ever. Bitcoin’s transparent and utterly predictable, ‘boring’ monetary policy is one of its greatest strengths. I have no doubt in my mind if the ETFs were to be again rejected, the price would massively dump but then only recover again. To coin the man himself: *it’s going up forever, Laura*

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

GranPino

Why do you say they don’t have a solid model at core? They solved the reliability issues and it’s the most powerful blockchain by a fair margin. Also the new client, Firedancer, is improving the capabilities with 1.2M tx per tile with only 4 processors. Btw, most of the Solana coins in hands of FTX and Alameda are locked, as they tried to sell everything unlocked on the open market to stay afloat. The rest will unlock slowly during the next 5 years. Also, MT Goax didn’t liquidate yet after 9 years. These bankruptcies usually take very long to sort themselves. I would be surprised if they finish in less of a decade. And finally, it’s opposite. VC put most the early money to develop the technology, and they have been selling since then. VCs are all about exiting their invesment s in the medium/long term. Yes, institutional money will arrive because any solid due diligence about current projects will identify Solana as one pf the only projects able to actually become the hub for international DeFi.

prkr88

FTX and MT GOX had amazing low fees. Like Any business they need to make a profit somehow. I'm just glad they are actively going for licensing and following regulations. I'd rather pay a little more but have a better warm and fuzzy they aren't gambling to keep afloat.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Review_Exchange

I've been using BingX for a few years. What I like the most is that, besides Crypto, BingX also offers Forex, Indices, and Commodities. Copy trading is easy to use, and the platform is available on MT5, mobile, and the web. High security and a user-friendly interface. What's important is that BingX responds to your requests. It's normal to use the platform without KYC. Leverage trading up to 150x. The fees are very low. Currently, there are 584 coins and 599 trading pairs available on the exchange. I highly recommend it to you! By the way, you will get a lifelong 10% discount on trading fees and welcome bonuses of up to $5,000 by entering referral Code 8DLSAUGZ when registering on BingX. Good luck to you!

genobeam

>During fiscal year 2021, Marathon successfully deployed 30,391 top-tier bitcoin miners and completed the construction of its mining facility in Hardin, MT. As a result, the Company increased its hash rate by 1,790% from 0.2 EH/s in January 2021 to 3.5 EH/s in December 2021. You are bragging about consuming as much power as this? 1. you're definitely full of shit 2. bragging about this type of power consumption proves my point. This level of mining doesn't just operate during energy surplus periods.

Creme-Waste

Sorry but that is a bad take. Live reserves tracking with flows has been mostly implemented after FTX. Ofc knowing what the liabilities are is great, and it is possible to know since CDC is registered in Malta as Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, and has to publish annual financial declarations. I was talking about the run on CDC, which saw 30 percent of their 1:1 customers withdrawn without much hustle. FTX crumbled during a similar run. CDC did pause USDC and USDT withdrawals but during the FTX collapse, but only on SOL and that was a contingent response to uncertain situation and rumours of a hack. All other networks could withdraw USDT and USDC, including on Poly and ETH. You are making assertions and allegations that are completely baseless. With regards to the arena naming rights, the name [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) arena drives traffic to their website and trends online. It is also a gateway for retail, and helps them with brand recognition. Good deal IMO.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

TarkovRedditor

today is my birthday and I wish for aussen BTC ETF news. So you should probably counter it expecting MT GOX selling and short

BrianS911

In the last 3 cycles I've been apart of Id say yes but not completely, price action hasnt dropped as low as it has in the past.But the length duration so far is the longest.Weve had multiple b swans, a flash crash.And if Binance goes belly up there is your MT. GOX equivalent

arthur_fissure

Thanks to your link i checked his other comment and his posted in this post [https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1kpsi5/i\_put\_all\_my\_life\_savings\_into\_bitcoins/](https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1kpsi5/i_put_all_my_life_savings_into_bitcoins/) where one guy said he put $50k (in 2010 so around 500 BTC), hope he hodl, he said he put them on an offline wallet so no MT Gox hack maybe

wealth4good

Interesting article. I hope those investors who lost their crypto can get a portion back. If they do, they might be better off due to the crypto market, especially BTC, much higher than when MT Gox got hacked.T Gox got hacked. Interesting article. I hope those investors who lost their crypto can at least get a portion back. If they do, they might be better off due to the crypto market, especially BTC, much higher than when MT Gox got hacked.

R4ID

I see people selling their rights to their BTC from MT.GOX at 75Cents on the dollar. the case just got delayed another year. I was tempted to buy some "rights" as it would be essentially a cheaper bitcoin but the problem is you dont know when you'll be getting that pay out.

Dubznation300

Let’s not forget, MT. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles was only sentenced to 30 months in prison. What a travesty

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Delgra

Isn’t this what [TRM](https://www.trmlabs.com/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=AMER-US%5BEN%5D_GGL-Brand%5BGEN%5D-Generic_MT-Exact&utm_content=Brand&term=trm%20labs_(e)&utm_term=trm%20labs&utm_campaign=AMER-US%5BEN%5D_GGL-Brand%5BGEN%5D-TRM-Generic_MT-Exact&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=9192575298&hsa_cam=15867235090&hsa_grp=134936326049&hsa_ad=575090628705&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-891760215539&hsa_kw=trm%20labs&hsa_mt=e&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gad=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7q_L19bXgQMVtAetBh0cHhbREAAYASAAEgIUcvD_BwE) is working to build solutions for?

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

DerEwige

Well, I'm a creditor in the MT.Gox bankruptcy. Any year now, I might get back part of my 1m Sats.

loksfox

Yay 30%, well, it's better than nothing, i hope it really gets payed in a reasonable time frame, i'm tired of seeing MT gox delays, i rather not see the same thing happen with BlockFi.

theoreoman

The network size, finacial portability, bitcoin holders, and bitcoin miners give it value. And as long as there is a use for the bitcoin there will be value in the network. Since bitcoin has the largest network it's most likely to to stay around the longest. Since it's not backed by any government the risk is that they can be partially banned by a government. As a counter point if you ask what the American currency is backed by I'd say the network size, finacial portability, the entire American economy, and the US army. Also Bitcoin is not for everyone and it never will be. its never going to replace any currency and its foolish to think that it will. It's basically a global currency that's independent of any government or organization. Like I fully understand what it is and how it functions but it's not an asset class I want to be invested in due to its volatility, shit I was trying to to buy bitcoin in the MT Gox days, but was too complicated back then. Do I regret it no, because I would have either lost all my money in the mt go crash or would have sold it way before it ever hit its highs. Lots of other people are okay with the volatility and They are happy with their bitcoin investments. Trying to force something down someone's throat is never the approach. Your dad may not be comfortable with the assest class and that's ok

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

timbulance

I feel for those MT GOX and FTX users though

Miserable_Fennel_446

USDT, BTC & MT103 Receiver Needed . Message me inbox

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

paulharris05

Haven’t we been worried about the same thing with MT GOX for as long as I remember and look where we are currently at! It’s all Fud

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

Affectionate-Hunt217

A millions things could have happened tbh, you could’ve lost those bitcoins which happened a lot back then, it could’ve been hacked, stolen like MT Gox, and I’m pretty sure I would have hated myself even more because I lost that much hypothetical money haha, but tbh I would have loved to have been in the community back then, part of it for the money of course, but I also really loved tech and stocks back then haha, but my dumbass didn’t realize Bitcoin and crypto fit into that exact paradigm Lol

Jub-n-Jub

Well, if ol' MT said it, it's gospel!

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Con-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) con-argument written by IAmGiff. > Let’s dive into CRO's negatives (here’s my [related take on the pros](https://np.reddit.com/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sife3c/coin_inquiries_cryptocom_proarguments_february/hvb6h1j/?context=3)). > > **Centralization** > > I began my post on the pros by noting the fate of CRO is obviously inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited, founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives would drive adoption of the coin. The flipside of this is failures and missteps of the company would drag down CRO. > > The company has taken steps to decentralize the actual validators of their chain, but there’s really no question the company’s actions could hurt the coin. With that in mind: > > **Security Concerns** > > Obviously the biggest risk to *any exchange* is getting Mt. Goxed. > > Crypto.com seems to work hard on its security but, still, the company very recently had a hack that [stole 4,600 ETH](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/19/cryptocom-ceo-acknowledges-400-customer-accounts-were-hacked/) and some BTC. Although customers were kept whole, it was a pretty bad breach as hackers somehow circumvented a 2FA system. They've since taken steps to improve security, added whitelisting, and are rolling out a new account protection program (with apologies to Cardi B, the unfortunately named [WAPP](https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-com-security-report-next-steps)). > > Look, security-by-obscurity can be a valid idea, but the company hasn’t been completely transparent about how the hack occurred. This type of thing can still be a risk. > > **Poor Customer Service** > > If you spend any time on the crypto.com sub you will see two main things. 1) People excitedly posting photos when their card arrives (bullish!) but 2) people angrily posting customer service complaints including loooong delays getting their cards (bearish). Even the biggest fans have to admit many people find the customer service experience to be very frustrating and inconsistent right now. While there’s a viewpoint that it’s just growing pains, it’s really not a good excuse. If you’re going nuts on marketing, and asking people to invest $4K or $40K for a card (!) you need to invest in customer support that can keep up or you risking driving away customers for good. > > **Opaque Fees** > > The fees are a common/fair complaint. The app takes a spread that's 1) non-transparent 2) variable 3) difficult to calculate on your own and 4) in some reported instances, apparently quite high. Someone using the app to regularly trade crypto could lose lots of profits to these fees. I don’t use Robinhood but understand it has a similar invisible spread and while people initially loved it, and some mistakenly believed they were buying with no fees, over time people wised up and become more aware of this losing proposition with Robinhood. I feel like everyone hates Robinhood now. There’s certainly a possibility that ultimately customers would rather just see exactly what they’re taking as spread, and that hiding it from your customer is a bad practice that will catch up with you. > > **Product Limitations** > > New customers frequently don’t realize limitations of the products. Sometimes they didn't read the materials, yes. But sometimes it's complicated or unexpected. > > For example, you cannot load money on the pre-paid debit card and turnaround and use it to buy crypto on crypto.com. It’s a silly idea to load money onto CDC, offload money from CDC to the card, and then try to buy back onto CDC. (Just load the money onto CDC and buy crypto, without the extra steps, obviously) But there’s no denying it makes people incredibly mad when they learn they can’t do this. Relatedly, once you’ve loaded the card, there’s no easy way to unload. Sometimes this is just bad planning, but sometimes people loaded the card for a large purchase, found they were unable to make the purchase, and then had no way to get funds back. > > A standard feature of pre-paid cards is you can’t earn rewards on every category of purchase. Also, though true of all pre-paid debit cards, you have to load then spend, rather than spend then payoff later like a credit card. A lot of people would prefer a credit card. > > Due to regulatory constraints, not all of this can be fixed. But the company could fix some and certainly do more to warn people. In the meantime, some people get driven away. > > **Switcheroo Risk** > > If you’ve been following CRO for long you’ll know the company was once known as Monaco, and its currency was MCO. Then it bought the crypto.com domain, launched CRO and eventually retired MCO in favor of CRO. There’s a fair [discussion of what went down here](https://zeroverge.com/crypto-com-has-changed-the-rules-of-the-game-mco-to-cro-swap-83c33f66633d). MCO holders had a window to exchange their MCO for CRO (in hindsight it was a sound move to do so) but there were a lot of questions at the time about fairness. Many people felt like the whole thing was a switcheroo. > > Despite this transition ending up fairly successful by many measures, a lot of people have speculated that the company could someday dump CRO in favor of something new, and there’s no guarantee it would work out as well next time. > > **Too-Good-To-Be-True APYs** > > There’s good reason to believe 10%+ interest rates won't be sustainable indefinitely. But who really knows because there’s limited information available about how the company is paying such high rates. Is the company recycling trading fees to prop up APYs? Is it spending its treasury to do it? I’ve never seen clear answers. > > The company has disclosed it has a CRO supply for the purpose of subsidizing validator rewards, with the goal of decentralizing their chain. Is it also using these funds to prop up Crypto Earn rates? What happens when that war chest runs out? Is it a temporary promo rate? What happens if the system turns out not to work the way people thought? > > A lot of people believe they’re just giving users a higher cut of borrowing than banks do. But I don’t think the company has actually claimed this. And the math for this claim doesn’t really add up because lending rates aren't that high. You can’t pay 12% interest to depositors (under this explanation) if you’re not lending to someone else at 12+%. > > If anyone has seen a detailed accounting of any of this, I'd love to review it. > > **Leadership** > > For the sake of completeness, I’ll note some people have concerns about the past activities of senior leadership. You can [read this](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cryptocom-ceo-kris-marszalek-had-messy-past-before-staples-center-renaming) and make your own decision. I personally think the story is overblown. > > **Limited US Functionality** > > The lack of a US exchange is a big limitation. Everyone knows this. Also, if you’re just on the app the research tools are incredibly limited. You can only see 6-months of charts, there’s virtually no information about what you’re buying, you’re vulnerable to the fees above etc. A lot of people (Rich Boomers, elder millennials, etc.) just aren't ready to trust meaningful funds to something that's a limited app. > > **Chintzy Missions** > > This might seem minor, but some people hate “Mystery Boxes” in the app. It’s a little gamification, but the rewards are so low (most boxes earn the equivalent of finding a dime or two in your couch) that many people would rather have nothing than get small amounts of free CRO. You can be the judge of the logic there, but there’s no question people get mad about it. The Mystery Boxes do seem to incentivize some people to make purchases they would not otherwise make in order to collect boxes. > > *Ultimately, the bottom line to all this: CRO will suffer if crypto.com alienates its customers.* > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. Despite the cons, I’m personally bullish on CRO but I never want to be blind to the risks of an investment, so I thought hard about this. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Crypto.com(CRO) Pro-Arguments Below is a Crypto.com(CRO) pro-argument written by IAmGiff. > CRO or Crypto.com coin is the native currency of the Crypto.com app, exchange and blockchain. At time of writing, it’s [\#17 by market cap](https://coinmarketcap.com/). > > To begin, the coin is inextricably linked to the fate of the parent company (which is officially named Foris DAX MT (Malta) Limited and was founded in 2016). The coin’s primary purpose is to support the company’s various initiatives, and the success of those initiatives is what would drive adoption of the coin. For the purposes of pros and cons, I don’t think it’s necessary to make sharp distinctions between the coin and the company. > > **Pros** > > I’ll start with three priority areas outlined in their whitepaper: payments, trading and financial services. In [their own words](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf): *“Our strategy is to leverage* ***payment solutions as the primary tool for driving adoption and user acquisition****, while building* ***trading and financial services solutions as the major sources of revenue****.”* > > **Real-world payments** > > The company has two major crypto-related payment initiatives. One is a Venmo-like **Crypto.Com Pay** feature. For merchants, the payment system offers lower transaction costs than typical interchange fees and instant settlement. For consumers, there’s a strong “cashback” program. (Despite the potential, it’s unclear how much uptake there is at this point.) > > The **Visa pre-paid debit cards** are becoming fairly ubiquitous. In the U.S., these are issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank (a New York State chartered bank & member FDIC). They offer some of the best rewards of any card on the market. There’s a tier system, progressively requiring higher investments in CRO to get to higher tiers, that people seem to find motivating. Many people love the design. There’s lots of information about how they work so I won’t repeat it here. Key point is they're indeed popular. > > The most important point (that’s often oddly missed in this discussion) is the cards give you a fast and efficient crypto offramp. Some cryptos can be loaded directly onto the card. Others you have to take the 3-second step of converting to USD or a stablecoin and then loading the card. Either way, you can start with crypto and buy almost anything IRL in a few seconds. > > **Trading** > > In many countries, crypto.com is a full-service **exchange**. In the US (where I’m based) it’s only an app for now although there are plans to open a full exchange eventually. The exchange is ranked #9 by [Coinmarketcap](https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/) although it’s ranked as high as #4 by [Coingecko’s methodology](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges). Recently their spot market volumes are about 20-25% those of Binance but about 80-90% those of Coinbase. (They are a smaller player for now in derivatives, although that could change if they were able to tap the US market.) They support slightly more cryptos than Coinbase, although nowhere near as many as Binance. The fees are apparently cheaper if paid in CRO, which is a driver of utilization. I can't try it out yet myself. > > The **app** is a limited experience but easy to use. If you set-up an ACH push to fund your account there’s no fee to load money onto the app, and card fees are also waived for your first month. Long enough to get many new users hooked. (Although it appears there’s no fees to buying the crypto, there’s in fact an opaque and variable spread fee; more on this in my cons post). If you’re just trying to buy and hodl crypto on an exchange, spread won’t kill you. If you want a gentle introduction to buying your first $100 of Bitcoin, this will work well enough. At the moment I just checked, you’d get $99.6 of Bitcoin for your $100, so that's 0.4% in spread. > > **Financial Services** > > Their **Crypto Earn** and **DeFi wallet** programs are attractive for new crypto users, and allow users to progressively pursue more complicated investing strategies. Crypto Earn is the custodial option on the app, which offers a simple way to earn fairly high interest rates on many coins. > > Their DeFi wallet is a more advanced non-custodial option, with the ability to contribute to CRO validator’s staking, or to participate in liquidity pools. (There’s also a lending program but I’m not familiar with it.) > > ***In sum***, the crypto.com financial ecosystem is not 100% there yet (especially with no US exchange), but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a full-service crypto-based financial services provider, and you can imagine a not-too-distant future where, for some people, the company’s offerings would be complete enough that you could ditch your bank entirely without jumping through enormous hoops. In this world, of course, there’s lots of reasons people will be buying CRO. > > **Marketing** > > Many people are very hyped that Crypto.com does a lot of marketing which should benefit CRO and perhaps cryptocurrency in general. You may have heard there's a Matt Damon commercial and a basketball arena in LA. I'm aware Cointest rules say not to focus on marketing, so I'll just make a quick observation. I’ve seen some people say, “oh this is just hype etc.” but if you look at the traditional asset management space, Charles Schwab has a market capitalization of like $170 billion and the primary differentiator between it and other asset managers is really just that Charles Schwab carpetbombs the airwaves with marketing. Marketing does matter in consumer financial services. > > Cointest rules say not to base arguments on price either (Charles Schwab's market cap is NOT a price prediction btw, sorry y'all!) but it’s also relevant to briefly note here that CRO’s marketcap is about 1/6th of BNB’s, so many people believe there’s still upside to this set of observations. > > **Regulation & Security** > > Crypto.com advertises that it works hard to comply with regulation. As a publicly-traded company, so does Coinbase, of course, but the regulatory-compliant approach is quite a contrast to Binance, for example. [Crypto.com](https://Crypto.com) claims to be the first crypto company to have various levels of ISO compliance, [https://crypto.com/images/crypto\_com\_whitepaper.pdf](https://crypto.com/images/crypto_com_whitepaper.pdf), etc. Philosophical arguments about regulation aside, the relevance to CRO is I think it’s fair to say these efforts at compliance probably reduce (but don’t eliminate) the risk of countries swooping in and hammering the exchange or the coin. > > **CRO technical details & tokenomics** > > There were originally 100 billion CRO, but [70 billion were burned](https://blog.crypto.com/70-billion-cro-to-be-burned/). Most people expect the 30 billion supply to continue in the future. There’s currently about 25 billion circulating with the remainder primarily being distributed overtime as validator rewards. These rewards encourage decentralization of the network by giving people an incentive to act as validators. Some people see that as a philosophical plus, but this is still a coin that's very dependent on the company. > > Although the supply is fixed at 30 billion, it’s worth noting that even in the absence of future burns, the supply on the market could fluctuate considerably if the company built up or ran down its holdings. > > Another factor that some consider favorable is that the Visa cards require people to make progressively larger 6-month stakes for higher tier cards (and keep the stakes to retain the card benefits). Therefore, if the number of cardholders increases, an increasing amount of CRO is tied up and unavailable to be dumped. > > CRO successfully migrated from ERC20 to the Crypto.org Chain Mainnet earlier this year. The company has also very recently launched the [Cronos Chain](https://cronos.crypto.org/docs/chain-details/introduction.html) which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is thus an option for developers to connect Crypto.com users to Ethereum projects and apps and so on. This is interesting to follow, though I think the main reason to invest in CRO for now is if you believe in the company’s vision for executing its financial services offerings. > > **Betting on the sector** > > Finally, there’s a philosophy behind betting on CRO that’s worth mentioning. With apologies to everyone with WAGMI tattoos, there’s over 16,000 cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap. It’s very difficult to imagine that the majority of these will thrive in the long-term. Some will fade away, new (and often better) ones might arise, etc. > > When you bet on an exchange coin you’re partially placing a bet that demand for buying and trading crypto will continue (at that exchange), but you can be otherwise agnostic on which individual technologies and coins are the best. What’s the best chain for dApps? I have no clue. But I think we’re likely to have dApps in the future and people will want to trade the related currencies and use their crypto. So a nice way to bet on this agnostic view is to invest in exchanges, rather than trying to guess which projects are best. > > **Disclosures:** I’m an Indigo card holder, but don’t hold CRO other than for the stake. I’m personally bullish on cro but I have a lot of cons about it too. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_crypto.com.28cro.29) to find submissions for other topics.