A Complete TenX Review: The Cryptocurrency Debit Card

TenX has an ambitious vision to become the only platform necessary to create a bridge between the cryptocurrency ecosystems and the global payment systems already in place. Doing this will make all your blockchain assets spendable in an easy, seamless fashion at any location that already accepts credit or debit cards.

Yeah, this would be a huge game changer for both cryptocurrencies and for traditional payment systems.

TenX was providing this service by providing users with their own credit card that is linked to a cryptocurrency wallet. This card instantly converts whatever cryptocurrencies are stored there into the native fiat currency wherever you’re located.

Imagine loading the card up with Bitcoin or Ethereum or Monero or whatever and then buying an espresso at the Starbucks at JFK airport in New York. You board the plane and during your flight to London you purchase a new wallet from the in-flight store, again using your TenX card that seamlessly converts your cryptocurrency to Pounds.

After landing in London you pay for our hotel and dinner with the TenX card and following your London meeting you get back on a plan and fly to Singapore. While there you use the TenX card and your cryptocurrency is seamlessly exchanged for Singapore dollars.

While you’re traveling you still have a computer hooked up and mining back home, with the cryptocurrency being mined getting directly deposited to the TenX wallet.

Imagine how powerful that would all be.

TenX Review: The Birth of TenX

As the number of cryptocurrencies continued growing beyond several hundred to several thousand, users and merchants have found it increasingly difficult to use varied cryptocurrencies and diverse wallet systems, and tie everything together.

In order to resolve this challenge TenX has made the presumption that tying everything together behind a single credit card would be the thing to do to solve the current issues.

So they went to work to do just that, tying the credit card to a mobile cryptocurrency wallet, and creating a platform that allows users to spend any cryptocurrency supported by TenX into any fiat currency supported by TenX.

This interconnectedness is achieved through the Cryptographically-secure Off-chain Multi-asset Instant Transaction (COMIT) protocol.

Already the TenX wallet is being accepted at more than 36 million online and offline locations. Eventually TenX will connect its wallet to the COMIT network, allowing users to securely store all their own private keys.

TenX users will be able to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of different cryptocurrencies at locations all across the globe, and it will occur seamlessly and without any conversion fees.

TenX Review: The Team

The TenX team, which is based in Singapore, is loaded with experience from a number of different industries, including artificial intelligence, marketing, research & development, business, hospitality, and of course blockchain.

There is a group of four co-founders, with Toby Hoenisch acting as CEO and Julien Hosp as the current President of TenX. Before founding TenX Toby was the co-founder and CEO at One One Agency, a software development firm creating integrated payment systems for private clients.

As for Julien, prior to co-founding TenX Julien trained as a medical doctor, and held a career as a professional kitesurfer.

The third founder is Michael Sperk, who is the engineering lead at TenX and who gained experience as the technical lead at Visualyze, where he worked on the development of a scalable browser-based Visual Analysis tool capable of processing hundreds of thousands of social media messages in real-time.

The final member of the founding team is Paul Kittiwongsunthorn, who is the Chief Procurement Officer at TenX and was also a co-founder of One One Agency along with Toby.

TenX Review: Partnerships

The biggest partnership of TenX was with Visa through the card provider WaveCrest, but that partnership was terminated after Visa forced WaveCrest to close all the accounts tied to its Visa cards.

TenX has also had a partnership with DigixGlobal since June 2017. DigixGlobal holds gold in a vault in Singapore, with each gram of gold being represented by the digital currency DGX.

TenX has also partnered more recently with the Litecoin Foundation. Together they launched the Litecoin Debit card.

TenX Review: Technology

The primary technology behind TenX is its connection to the COMIT network, which gives TenX its interoperability between different blockchains. This allows TenX to ensure that users blockchain assets can be spent at anytime and in any place.

Not every blockchain is COMIT compatible. For a blockchain to be COMIT compatible it has to meet the following requirements:

  • Double-spend protection – The blockchain must have a way to ensure that if two valid transactions spend the same output, these must conflict so that only one will be confirmed by the network.
  • Multisig compatibility – In other words, a requirement of multiple signers. COMIT requires two multisig transactions for transactions to be validated by the network.
  • Time–locks – A requirement that funds are locked up until a future date. Absolute time-locks keep transactions locked up until a fixed time in the future; relative time-locks lock a transaction output relative to the time the transaction was confirmed.
  • Hash function – Standard hash functions must be available in the standard contracting language of the blockchain, such as SHA256, for example.

TenX Review: TenX Wallet and Card

The TenX wallet is a standard cryptocurrency wallet that currently has support for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. It is available only in a mobile version for both Android and iOS and once the TenX Card is re-released it will pair with the card, allowing you to spend and receive cryptocurrencies with both card and wallet.

The TenX wallet is fully secured with your own private key and is KYC compliant. For additional security you can set-up 2-factor authentication and a fingerprint lock for the wallet.

TenX Review: How TenX Works

The current advantage of using TenX is that it offers users the chance to spend their cryptocurrencies without any exchange or transaction fees. And once the card is available it will allow users to spend anywhere and at anytime, seamlessly.

How can TenX offer 0% fees? Because they charge for the physical and virtual cards. They have also put spending limits in place, which minimizes the impact of exchange/transaction fees for their network. There’s more on fees below.

To utilize the TenX network you first need to download the TenX wallet. You can then use the wallet to spend and receive any of the coins supported by TenX, which are currently Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, with many more being planned for the future.

When you use the TenX wallet you have full control over your private keys, and you can also fine tune any of the additional security settings available in the wallet. You can adjust security settings for daily limits, portfolio spending, withdrawal settings, and more, all controlled by smart contracts.

The TenX platform also relies heavily on the Comit network for providing its services.

TenX Review: What is the COMIT Network?

The Comit network allows for cross-blockchain interoperability. Comit stands for Cryptographically-secure Off-chain Multi-asset Instant Transaction network.

Since this review is about TenX I won’t delve deeply into the technical details that make Comit work, but if you’re interested you can read the whitepaper and learn more. Basically the Comit network was developed to create fast, cheap and frictionless global payments for users around the entire world. In essence, it’s a payment platform that will “provide the same final and elegant solution as the internet did for information”.

TenX has tied into the Comit network to provide the services offered by its platform. All of the elements of TenX (wallet, credit/debit cards, ATM and bank accounts) interact with the Comit network to provide payment solutions, exchange, lending services, and security.

TenX can do this because it is built on top of the Comit network.

TenX Review: Fees

If you’re familiar with fee structures from cryptocurrency exchanges, you’ll find the fee structure at TenX to be quite simple and refreshing. Below is the full fee structure outlining what you can expect to pay when using the TenX service:

  • Physical Card Issuing Fee (Covers Shipping and Tracking): $15
  • Virtual Card Issuing Fee: $1.50
  • Physical Card Annual Fee: Free (or $10 if you spend less than $1,000 a year)
  • Virtual Card Annual Fee: Free (or $10 if you spend less than $1,000 a year)
  • Foreign Exchange Fee: 0%
  • Withdrawal Fee: There is a nominal withdrawal fee when transferring assets between virtual currency wallets
  • ATM Fees: These will be determined once TenX re-releases a credit/debit card

TenX Review:The TenX PAY Token

Holding the TenX PAY token confers some membership privileges to users in connection with their TenX wallet usage. These include privileges linked to carrying out transactions using the TenX wallet, holding the PAY token, and paying fees with the PAY token.

One of the incentives for using the PAY token in a TenX wallet is a reward amounting to 0.5% of the total payment volume made through the TenX wallet.

TenX held a token sale in June 2017, raising $80 million. 29% of the tokens released were retained by TenX for market expansion, further research & development, education, business development and community initiatives.

The ICO price of PAY was $0.87. PAY rose along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market and hit an all-time high of $5.00 on December 25, 2017, but like the rest of the cryptocurrency markets PAY has been steadily declining throughout 2018 and as of October it is trading below its ICO price at $0.6636.

Those interested in buying the PAY token can do so with Korean Won at Bithumb, or with BTC, ETH and USDT at OKEx. There is also small volume trading of PAY at Bittrex, Huobi, Liqui, and a handful of other small exchanges. With the price of PAY being so depressed, the 24-hour trading volume of the token has also recently dropped below $1 million.

Once you purchase PAY tokens they can be stored in any wallet that has support for ERC-20 tokens, such as MetaMask, MyEtherWallet, Coinomi, and others. For the greatest security a hardware wallet such as the Ledger Nano S should be used to store PAY and any cryptocurrencies.

The Future of TenX

There is a basic roadmap for TenX that outlines their future plans. As you might imagine, the major priority currently is the re-issue of the TenX cards, because without those TenX is relaly little more than another cryptocurrency wallet.

The roadmap says the card design has been approved by the issuer as of August 2018. Yet TenX is still working on getting cards issued and there is no firm date.

Additionally the development team is working on porting to the Rust platform as well as including support for new cryptocurrencies.

Finally, at some time in the hopefully not so distant future, it will seek a Blockchain Banking License to connect everyone on the blockchain ecosystem from the traditional banking system.

TenX Review: Conclusion

The TenX platform is looking to make cryptocurrency usage as simple and straightforward as possible, built on the back of the Comit Network. If successful, TenX could rid us of many of the problems and expenses associated with international banking and money transfer.

By offering a physical credit/debit card linked to a cryptocurrency wallet, TenX will make it possible to pay for products and services anywhere in the world with a range of crypto and fiat currencies.

While TenX did suffer a setback when its Visa card issuer was forced to pull its cards, it has seemingly lined up another issuer, or perhaps several, and will soon be back on track to disrupt the traditional world of banking, payments and money transfers.

There was a great deal of hype surrounding the project in 2017, and it gained the backing of influential blockchain persons, such as Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, and Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin.

TenX has the potential to revolutionize an industry, and that alone makes it worthwhile to keep an eye on.