I have a couple of questions:
a) Regarding the reserve fund:
Merchant A rewards Customer B with x INCENT at PoS. The tokens are transfered to the customer's wallet from the reserve fund. A few days latter, you guys get paid y amount in fiat, which you use to buy bitcoin. you then proceed to buy INCENT in the open market to balance the books. This creates demand for the token and benefits savers and investors. Great!
But what happens when a customer wants to redeem his tokens? Customer pays in incent, you guys probably have to wire the merchant the equivalent amount in fiat(since the reason Rob started this project is that most merchants dont care about BTC). In order to balance the books, you know have to sell the INCENT you got from the customer in order to replenish your fiat reserves, causing the price to fall.
So, all things being equal the price stays the same, right? Am I missing something here?
b)Also how do merchants deal with volatility in fiat terms? e.g., a merchant might issue a token for $ 1 in INCENT, only to see it go to $2 a couple of months later. How do you deal with this issue?
c) Regarding Waves:
You guys said that an increase in the price of Waves won't result in the appreciation of the INCENT token. Could you share the rationale for making that statement?
As things stand, INCENT's fate is very much tied to Waves and Sasha. The project might be able to recover in the long term should Waves fail, but in the short term it would be disastrous for you guys. As such, I think it is only fair the price of INCENT should benefit from the appreciation of the Waves token.
Thanks in advance.
Hey De Selby,
a) You're right, we'll have BTC/fiat and Incent reserves so we can send Incent and regular cash to merchants and customers promptly. There will be overall pressure on the price of Incent for a couple of reasons at least. The spread (we will redeem Incent at a slightly lower price than it's bought) for a start. Also, the merchant ecosystem will expand rapidly in the early months and years. A lot of Incent will therefore be bought. There will necessarily be a lag between that being sent to the customer and the customer redeeming it - if in fact they do, since many will probably hold as an investment or possibly forget about it! Essentially, any adoption brings greater scarcity of available supply.
b) If a merchant issues a token when Incent is $1 and it's at $2 when the customer redeems it, that's good for both of them! Remember, Incent is just another form of money. It's not backed by that individual merchant, it's sold at market price. This is one of the things that merchants love about Incent - there's no forward liability.
Of course, Incent may be worth less when it's redeemed by the customer, due to market fluctuations. That's not great, but everyone knows what the deal is from the start at the value of Incent in fiat will be displayed to the customer in the app. Also, we've designed Incent in such a way that the value should rise sustainably over the long term, whatever short-term volatility there is.
c) Waves is a platform and Incent a Waves token. So Waves is a tool here, rather than 'backing' Incent in some way. Incent will trade against fiat (merchants buying and redeeming) and BTC (on exchanges). Confidence in Waves is important, but so long as the platform works well I don't see that the price of Waves should materially impact the price of Incent once it's in the wild and being used as intended.
Does that all make sense?