The ICO era in 2017 had created a lot of expectations for the crypto industry. Many projects from all over the world received millions of dollars or even more. From all of these projects, only some of them actually tried to make crypto payments “easy” and “adaptable.” Crypto.com is one of them.
Before we dive deep into whether an investment in Crypto.com’s MCO and CRO worth your money in the long run or not, we need to understand the fundamentals behind both tokens. We also need to learn more about some external factors that can affect the token prices and the core team behind the project itself. Let’s begin right away!
MCO and CRO - Summary
At first, having two different tokens in one ecosystem might sound a bit complicated. There are, basically, two tokens that are associated with Crypto.com. MCO and CRO. Let’s take a look at Crypto.com's history, so we know the details of both tokens and the differences between the two.
At first, the project was only known as Monaco, hence why the first token was just called MCO (which is short for Monaco). The idea of Monaco was to bring cryptocurrencies to the average consumers and retailers.
The Monaco team believed that attracting merchants and retailers to the crypto space was extremely important for the sake of the industry itself. While Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others focus on getting their technology improved, Monaco’s primary focus was more on retail adoption.
One of the main selling points of Monaco was a promise to bring cryptocurrency visa cards where you can easily spend your crypto in normal stores and public places. The idea here is that a marriage between the traditional financial system and cryptocurrencies must happen if we want crypto to go mainstream truly.
MCO Visa Prepaid cards enable exactly that. MCO cards enable both fiat and crypto payments. The core team believes you cannot just release a card that only accepts crypto, as most merchants will brush it off right away. But, by having a card that accepts both worlds (crypto & fiat), people will slowly accept crypto.
The purpose of MCO token is to provide staking rewards, access to different card tiers, and for airdrops of different crypto tokens. You might want to check this article that provides much more details on how staking MCO tokens will give you significantly more discounts and provide access to higher tiers of prepaid cards.
For example, if you want to get an Obsidian Black MCO prepaid card, you will have to stake 50,000 MCO tokens. When you get one, however, you will get a 2% cashback rate, and you can make transactions without fees up to $1000 in ATM machines.
Compare it to the standard Midnight Blue card where you don’t need to stake any MCO token, but you will only get a $200 transaction limit on ATM machines without fees. And, you don’t even receive any cashback with this card.
That’s why MCO token has a significant role for rewards, cashback rate, discounts, and accessing higher tiers of the MCO prepaid cards. And this was the main selling point of the Monaco project.
The team then made a significant move in 2018. Specifically in June 2018 when the Monaco team decided to buy Crypto.com domain, and they had to spend $10 million for it. As soon as the purchase was completed, the project was instantly rebranded from Monaco to Crypto.com.
While the domain purchase looks a bit too expensive but the Crypto.com team at the time believed it was the right move. They admitted they had almost $200 million in the company’s balance sheet due to the altcoin prices surge in January 2018.
Keep in mind that Monaco team itself received their ICO funding with $26,700,000 worth of ETH in June 2017. So, ETH price surge in December 2017 and January 2018 had certainly helped them.
After the successful rebranding, the Crypto.com team decided to create a Crypto.com chain with CRO coin as the native cryptocurrency. In short, CRO is used for cross-asset settlement token as well as to pay for transaction fees. The nodes that support the Crypto.com chain are also paid with CRO coins.
According to the team’s plan, Crypto.com Chain has four different phases. The first phase is about letting merchants to integrate Crypto.com Pay API seamlessly. The second phase is about having different cryptocurrency projects to adopt the Crypto.com ecosystem.
The third phase will be important as it will launch the mainnet and bring on-chain transaction settlement. The fourth phase will introduce independent entities that can replace Crypto.com settlement agents. By doing this, Crypto.com team believes the ecosystem will be even more decentralized than ever.
Currently, the Crypto.com project has several different products, which include wallet application, crypto exchange, crypto credit, prepaid card, crypto investment, and crypto payment application.
Of course, by having the newer CRO coin and multiple products, it doesn’t mean the team ignores the existence of MCO token. They actually have made great progress with the MCO VISA prepaid cards and the always-expanding use cases of MCO token itself.
By early 2019, they finally shipped the MCO cards to Singapore. Currently, the same cards are also available for US citizens. The team also plans to launch the cards in select European countries.
Analyzing Crypto.com Team
When it comes to investment, sometimes it’s also about the promises of the core team. After all, cryptocurrencies are always about what we expect from their future. Crypto.com promises a lot of different things in the future, and it’s important to try to find out whether we can actually put our faith in them or not.
So, how about the Crypto.com team? In 2016, the Monaco team was created by Kris Marszalek, Gary Or, Bobby Bao, and Rafael Melo. After the rebranding in 2018 to Crypto.com, these co-founders remain in the team.
Kris Marszalek is the Chief Executive Officer, Gary Or is the Chief Technology Officer, Rafael Melo is the Chief Financial Officer, and Bobby Bao acts as the Head of Corporate Development.
Before his time at Crypto.com, Kris Marszalek had an impressive track record. He was the CEO at Ensogo, COO at iBuy Group Limited, the CEO at BEECRAZY, and the CEO at YiYi HongKong Limited. His particular time at Ensogo was exciting. Ensogo is one of the most famous online discount retailers in Southeast Asia.
Bobby Bao, the Head of Corporate Development, also has a superb track record. He was the Head of Corporate Development at Ensogo prior to joining Kris at Crypto.com.
From all the tech backgrounds that the core team has, it looks like Crypto.com has more than enough recipe to achieve a great future. And judging by the development of the project and the market cap of both tokens, it looks like they are on the right path.
Crypto.com Future And Potential Roadblocks
The future of Crypto.com looks bright, with multiple different products targeting different use cases. And they cleverly “mix” all of these different products into the MCO and CRO ecosystem. There are not many serious crypto startups that try to solve the problems with crypto adoption, but Crypto.com is definitely one of them.
Talking about potential roadblocks, unfortunately, there are a lot of them. In 2017, the idea of having a fiat/crypto mixed prepaid card was interesting. 2 years later, in 2019, it doesn’t look very unique anymore. It’s actually not very hard for the existing prepaid cards to adopt crypto payment.
When non-crypto companies try to incorporate crypto payment into their PoS (point of sale) and/or prepaid cards, it won’t be easy for Crypto.com to compete with them. While it’s too early to tell who will eventually become the winner, but it’s definitely one of the potential roadblocks.
And Crypto.com's other products also need to compete with more established applications in the crypto space. For example, recently, Crypto.com introduced its own CRO-powered exchange. The thing is, there are already thousands of crypto exchanges out there.
Their credit application will also need to compete with the likes of Nexo or Celsius Network. How about their wallet application? Again, there are other established wallet crypto applications out there like Exodus, Atomic, Trust Wallet, and many others.
Basically, almost all of Crypto.com products has a huge competition in the crypto space. While it’s possible for Crypto.com to gain some market shares but it has difficult battles here and there, let’s see whether they can overcome all these different challenges or not.
External Factor That You Need To Consider
Unfortunately, investing in one crypto token is not only about the project fundamentals. You also need to look at one big external factor. That external factor is called Bitcoin price. It’s not a secret anymore that Bitcoin price affects all altcoins. When Bitcoin goes up, altcoins go up as well. When Bitcoin goes down, altcoins go down as well.
Early to mid-2019 was a very good year for Bitcoin, and most altcoins also go up following Bitcoin price action. Recently, Bitcoin has been going down, and altcoins have been going down as well.
So, despite Crypto.com strong fundamentals, CRO and MCO token prices will be hugely affected by Bitcoin future price. Before you choose to invest in any of these tokens, you need to analyze Bitcoin price and see if it’s the right time to get into crypto.
Conclusion
Crypto.com has strong fundamentals despite its potential roadblocks, as I have described above. Compared to other altcoins, Crypto.com’s MCO and CRO actually have more than enough resources. Whether they can finally pull it off or not, that’s a different story. Only time will tell.
