StormX is an exciting new blockchain project that aims to let users earn cashback when they shop online. Its one of a growing number of different use cases in the emerging world of cryptocurrency, here is the interview…
How would you describe the main pillars of the product?
Overall StormX is creating a single place where users can earn online.
Our first product play utilizes micro-tasks and allows users to earn by checking out new products, services, and answering short surveys. These are quick tasks users can complete for
Our latest product StormShop allows users to earn crypto cash back when they shop online.
Users can earn up to 87.5% and shop from over 750+ stores like eBay, Samsung, Alibaba, Nike, and more. Instead of having to spend on marketing fees on billboards, or ads elsewhere, companies can pass on those expenses as discounts which we pass off the savings to users. This is to help users earn passive income when they’re shopping like they normally would.
Our third product which hasn’t been developed yet StormGigs will allow users to create their own tasks to allow users to hire and work off a peer to peer marketplace similar to Taskrabbit or Fiverr.
What is your team Strength?
StormX has been around for over 6 years and as a result we’ve survive multiple bear markets, and have seen it all. Each day there’s new innovation in the blockchain industry and we’re quick to adapt to changing dynamics and also setting up for success in the long term.
Do you have any partners backing you up?
Yes partners include Litecoin, MakerDao, Trust Wallet, and others.
The Co-Founder & CEO of Bittrex, Bill Shihara also recently invested in us again and joined our team as a board member.
What has changed in the past 3 years and why did you do these changes?
Like most companies we experienced a pretty big bear market over the last three years. Regardless of what happened in the space we kept building new features and a new product making it more useful each day. One of the major change we’ve made is further integrating our token economics into our core shopping product.
In 2017, we launched the Storm token with the vision of creating the token for “x” or in our case a earning marketplace but were a bit ambitious in our goals. For businesses to interact with Storm tokens required too much friction and only consumers benefited from this side which became very one sided. With our new model we allow users to earn up to 250% higher crypto cash back when they shop online from any of our 750 stores like Nike, Samsung, GameStop, and others. It fits well into our current product as we allow token holders to receive the best benefit of our product.
About the future; Do you have any development plans you’d like to share?
Yes we’re launching more stores globally and growing the “Shop” product aggressively. Outside of that with the rise in DeFi, we’re introducing staking as well as other components of DeFi that would allow our users to earn even higher rewards and we’re excited to add these features soon.
What’s the added value of StormX in comparison with other competitors?
There’s plenty of great companies like Rakuten, Honey or Lolli in this space. But with those companies it just ultimately becomes a price war like Lyft and Uber where whoever offers the highest rate is going to attract the customers. You can do that with endless VC dollars but what we’ve seen with many food delivery apps that tried doing this, companies will run out of funding. Especially in a recession like we’re about to face now, funding will dry up making this impossible for the short term.
For us because we allow users who earn or purchase StormX tokens to earn higher cash back rewards, we are able to reward higher rates to our more loyal customers giving us a significant benefit in terms of cash back rewards and also faster withdrawals.
You just did a rebrand, what were the main reasons for this rebrand?
We recently launched a new product with better token economics so we’re excited to show people the new StormX.
We also recently upgraded our smart contract where we added staking capabilities as well as removing a feature in the contract where we had the ability to create or destroy tokens. We set this up in case of emergencies or a hack but did not want this feature on there no longer.
How are you aiming to provide scalability to your service?
In 2017, we pivoted from Bitcoin to Ethereum because transaction fees jumped from 0 to 50 cents over night and when Ethereum jumped from $10 to $430 in a few weeks we ran into the same issue. This was when we decided to create our token using offchain/onchain technology for which we were granted a patent in 2018. Ethereum gas fees continue rising due to the DeFi hype right now so eventually we could also migrate to another chain as well.
What makes StormX different from other crypto projects?
I think most crypto projects right now are targeting the small group of existing crypto users there already exist. Our number one focus is UX and creating an easy way for users who don’t understand crypto to use our product. We’re now close to 3 million downloads to date and want to get to 100 million downloads in the next few years. We have a great product and are one of the few companies that actually has a need for a token associated with it.