Is this something like a payment platform similar to PayPal, which is exclusively focusing on allowing crypto payments to obtain products?
We focus on enabling purchase of products and services with crypto by connecting virtual gift cards and cryptocurrencies, so that you can instantly exchange your ETH for Starbucks gift cards and buy your coffee without fiat or fees!
Ok but someone said it will be anonymous. Is that true and if yes, how are you going to deal with compliance issues as a payment provider? You can't get away from it because ultimately you want merchants to also be connected to the system right?
We absolutely want merchants connected to the system, but we don't have any compliance issues because we allow any merchant to sell to any person and vice versa, anyone can use the protocol. Because of the anonymity and decentralized nature, the only way it can possibly work is for the users to responsibly report their own activity to the authorities. Zeex simply doesn't have any information that it would need to report.
I see and if it turns out that your platform is used for illegal activities, for example selling forbidden products, could anyone be held liable? Could you guys be attacked?
Zeex utilises staking to make unscrupulous behaviour expensive and unrewarding. With regards to individuals, as a decentralised protocol, Zeex has no knowledge of or liability for individual users’ activity.
Who will be able to decide what is considered unscrupulous or not? Will there be something like a platform police who also has to have a certain amount of tokens in order to have financial interest in stability of the platform?
. The unscrupulous behaviour in question in generally double spending. If you're using Ethereum, the period in which a transaction is reversible is about 10 minutes (6 confirmations). After that it's impossible to recover funds, so the Zeex protocol holds a deposit or stake for the duration of the risk period (10 minutes with ETH, about an hour with BTC) equal to the risked amount.
For example, if you want to buy $100 of Amazon credit, you would need to deposit $100 in ZIX and then pay $100 in ZIX or ETH. After 10 minutes, your deposit is usable again for whatever you'd like. If you don't want to or can't stake a large amount but need to make a large purchase, you can do so in sequential transactions. Say you want to buy $1000 of Amazon credit but you've only got $1100. Simply tell the system to buy the credit sequentially, and in about an hour and a half you'll have your $1000 in Amazon and $100 ZIX deposit back!
The thing is, because the transaction amount is always equal to the pledged amount, it's simply not profitable to double spend anything, it would just even out really.