Matchpool: a blockchain startup to find love
Of course everybody knows that today we celebrate Valentine’s day, so I want to dedicate this article to the blockchain startup called Matchpool that aims at helping you to find love.
“When I looked at the dating industry, I saw it was expensive to reach a critical mass of users and open a niche dating site. That’s why dominant sites are one-size-fits-all, but that’s not what most of us look for.” explained Yonatan Ben Shimon to Coindesk.
He is the founder and CEO of Matchpool, a new blockchain-based startup for dating with the main goal of bringing people together thanks to a matchmaking system: successful matchmakers earn a cryptocurrency reward for their work.
The unique selling proposition of Matchpool is combining together elements from traditional matchmaking with the transparency of Ethereum smart contracts.
Those potential matchmakers start pools, groups of users linked by a common interests – similar to Facebook groups – where users can private message one another in the hope of finding the right match.
Pool owners can monetize their matchmaking work in a few ways, including setting a membership fee to join or charging an amount for each message sent.
Also, they can try to maintain group diversity by setting smart contract-based options between different user attributes: for example, a 50/50 male-female split or a balanced age range.
Rather than using the everyone-for-themselves, search-and-filter strategy of platforms such as OKCupid, you can define Matchpool as a different approach to dating.
Matchpool tokens for dating rewards
But why is Matchpool wants to create its own cryptocurrency token?
Ben Shimon explained that his company was attracted to the idea of using a blockchain-based database to store data about user interactions so they can be difficult to edit.
He thinks that cryptocurrencies can be an attractive option if the objective is rewarding users with small amounts of money (micropayments) on a regular basis, especially if compared to traditional gateway of payments.
Also, Matchpool’s token called Guppy will be used to attract users: 20% of the token supply will be used to incentivize new signups with a money prize – which for the time being will only be given to women.
“I believe that if we reward early users with real money – in a way that we couldn’t do with dollars – then we can cheaply overcome the initial barriers that come from the lack of network effect”.
With a token sale (also called “initial coin offering” or “ICO”) scheduled for March, and a launch date set in May, Matchpool won’t wait too long to see its results.
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