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Yesterday, a partnership was announced through which it will be possible to purchase gift cards directly on the Polkadot app.
These are gift cards in fiat currency, spendable in over a million stores, chains, or e-commerce sites.
Summary
The partnership to bring gift cards to the Polkadot app
The partnership that made this possible is the one between Raise and Parity Technologies.
The objective of this initiative is to make it easier and more rewarding for people to use their cryptocurrencies for daily transactions. In fact, it will be possible to purchase gift cards on the Polkadot app with just a few clicks.
Technically, it is the integration of the white label payment APIs of Raise’s gift card infrastructure within the Polkadot app. This will allow the purchase of gift cards directly in the app, paying with Polkadot’s native cryptocurrency, DOT.
Furthermore, it will be possible to earn cashback up to 20% in DOT.
The role of Raise
In this way Raise becomes a payment provider for the Polkadot mobile app.
Raise in fact is an important payment provider in the gift card sector.
In fact, it is the largest gift card market in the USA, and provides users with on-demand gift cards from over a thousand brands.
Furthermore, its infrastructure is directly integrated into the PoS (Point of Sale) of many leading brands, offering a seamless payment experience, while also providing cashback on all purchases.
The company was founded in 2012, and over the years it has facilitated transactions for over 10 billion dollars.
Thanks to the partnership with Parity Technologies, it aims to bridge the gap between the crypto sector and retail. Raise has ambitious plans to expand its presence in the cryptocurrency sector, with more blockchain integrations coming in the next few months.
In fact, the company is also working to make its payment API available for all non-custodial Polkadot wallets in the future.
On the other hand, Raise’s mission is precisely to innovate and improve the transfer of value between consumers and companies.
Parity Technologies
Parity Technologies is an important blockchain infrastructure company.
He is working on the creation of a common creative open source heritage that will allow people to create better institutions through technology.
Everything started on Ethereum, but later Parity focused on Substrate, an industry-standard blockchain framework. It is precisely thanks to Substrate that it created Polkadot, a decentralized blockchain meta-protocol that aims to connect and secure the various crypto ecosystems.
Parity in fact was founded in 2015 under the name of EthCore by Gavin Wood and four other people, and it led the creation of the Polkadot project a few years later.
Currently, he is the main contributor to the Polkadot blockchain. Its CEO is Björn Wagner, while Gavin Wood is the Chief Architect. Wood was also one of the co-founders of the Ethereum project.
The Polkadot ecosystem
Polkadot is a crypto project born in 2020 with the goal of creating a meta-blockchain capable of enabling interaction between different blockchains.
This is a very ambitious project, and very difficult to complete from a technical point of view.
For this reason, its development seems to be proceeding slowly, as there is still much to be done and development in a decentralized environment cannot be particularly fast.
In fact, the release of the Polkadot app has not yet occurred, even though it is expected in this same third quarter of 2024.
The app, thanks to Raise, will allow users to make purchases at USA retailers using the native cryptocurrency DOT without ever having to leave the app. Additionally, by the end of the year, Raise and Parity intend to expand these capabilities internationally.
DOT to pay for Gift Cards on the Polkadot app
The price of DOT, however, has been suffering for a while now.
It has even slipped to the 14th place among the cryptocurrencies with the highest market capitalization, after previously being in the top 10. Now it capitalizes less than Shiba Inu.
Having landed on the markets in 2020, it was able to take advantage of the great bullrun of 2021 to record a historic high of $55 thanks to a speculative bubble that then, of course, burst.
It is not to be excluded, however, that sooner or later another one may inflate, or that over time the price may slowly rise back to those levels.
Currently it is down 88% from the highs, with a price just above $6 which is not much higher than the bottom of the bear-market of 2022. Moreover, in 2023 it fell further, so much so that it has only been above $4 since the end of October last year.
This year it managed to climb up to $11.5, but later it ended up stabilizing below $6.5.
The comments on the initiative
Regarding the partnership with Parity Technologies, the founder and CEO of Raise, George Bousis, stated:
“For too long, cryptocurrencies and traditional trading have remained in silos. Raise published its first white paper on blockchain in 2015 detailing a better way to enable customers to transact with businesses, but technological constraints prevented this evolution from happening. Polkadot’s blockchain provides the necessary technical support to finally bring our vision to life. Together, we are making it easier and more rewarding for people to use their cryptocurrencies for everyday transactions. We couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with the Parity team and we look forward to showing how cryptocurrencies can be seamlessly integrated with retail and e-commerce in the future.”
The co-founder and CEO of Parity Technologies, Björn Wagner, added:
“When I first met George and the Raise team in 2021, I was immediately impressed by their vision of unlocking the use of cryptocurrencies in retail sales through their gift card platform. Since then, we have been working tirelessly together and I am proud of everything we have achieved through this integration, allowing all DOT holders in our ecosystem to use their assets in traditional commercial systems. This partnership with Raise opens a completely new audience to traditional e-commerce and this is just the beginning of what we have planned for the future.”