Topic: An Introduction to our LIME initiative. (Read 164 times)

Hello, I belong to a small village situated in the Konkan region. I am a software engineer. I first came across cryptocurrencies during 2013, when I was offered bitcoins to code a python script. I rejected the offer. Honestly back then, I didn't find cryptocurrencies to be much of a use in my day to day life, as it is an illegal tender in our country. I consider it as a commodity. On the brighter side, I am much more fascinated and interested in blockchain technology upon which cryptocurrencies are built.

During late 2016, In my village which has a mere population of 790, and the majority of them are farmers or carry out works related to farming. I noticed certain situations in which our local community of farmers could make use of cryptocurrencies. At first, I tried introducing Bitcoin to my fellow villagers, which failed miserably as none of them could understand technicalities associated with Blockchain. After many such failed discussions, I learned my lesson. What I learned was, during this discussions the majority of my audience were farmers, who dedicated their life to produce one of the essential requirement to sustain life. They don't care how Gold, silver or copper is mined and refined, they are interested in its aesthetic value. Similarly, a regular person doesn't care how blockchain works he might be interested in its currencies and their exchange rate, but more importantly he cares about its appreciation and acceptability by the masses. I changed my goal. Now my goal was to actually make someone buy bitcoin.

With my new goal in sight and a few days of constant preaching and advocating, two elite members of our community agreed to buy bitcoins. First Bitcoin was brought from a guy in Goa, which is almost 150 km (approx 100 miles) away from my village. Buying Bitcoins without an Exchange is very difficult, time-consuming and non-standardised. Most exchanges are offshore and have no liability. During May 2017 as the price skyrocketed demand for bitcoins increased dramatically. Peoples from neighbouring villages also got interested. This was still very small scale, and only elite members of our community would participate.

During late 2017 when the exchange rate was climbing and breaking its new height, everything felt ecstatic. Then came the drops which was very much expected as a market correction. During this phase, few members raised concerns over available liquidity. Finding liquidity during highly volatile market was a major problem, and needed to be addressed as soon as possible. Even assets like Gold and silver can be easily liquidated at any local jeweller. A need for reliable access to liquidity paved the way for a Local Independent Micro Exchange (LIME). A LIME provided a platform where buyer and seller can independently trade. Members are benefited with unified communal trust and security provided by the LIME, while a LIME is benefited from the bid and ask spread. To increase access to liquidity, four such LIME's from neighbouring villages came together to form an alliance. Through this alliance, LIME's provide liquidity to one another.

Currently, all transactions within alliance are done through manual coordination, which is not efficient and neither scalable. In Aug 2018 alliance members decided to set up a digital network for handling transactions efficiently and securely. This network will also provide scalability. As of 15th Jan 2019, we are at the end of alpha testing and looking forward to beta test this network.

I know there are lots of such communities around the globe, where people are unaware of cryptocurrencies. I want to bring cryptocurrencies to those people. My vision is to create abundant opportunities for reliable exchange of cryptocurrencies for the general public. Our alliance shares the same vision, while it's mission is to build a trust network of Local Independent Micro Exchanges to facilitate a systematic cryptocurrency exchange.

If anybody who might read this, I want to make an appeal to you, just look around yourself within your community, your neighbourhood or your village, there are a lot of people who can be benefited by such LIME's take this opportunity to engage those people.

I thank all the readers for their valuable time. Thank you.