Savedroid-Crypto Savings, Rich or Rekt?

Theo Goodman
hallofrankfurt
Published in
7 min readJan 31, 2018

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Everyone wants to get into crypto. The cat is out of the bag, everyone has at least heard of crypto, bitcoin and maybe even ICOs. Wow, a startup is doing an ICO in the city where I live Frankfurt am Main. That is great, the disruption of Venture Capitalists has entered the backyard of the big banks that were on the way to being bailed out when Satoshi added the message „The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks „ to the genesis block of bitcoin. We have almost come full circle.

The goal of the ICO savedroid is to make it easy for people to buy crypto and encourage them to save money each week or month with the savedriod app. The app will make it easy for people with zero technical know how. You do not need to understand bitcoin, tokens, trading, public and private keys or how schnorr signatures might help bitcoin scale. All you need to know how to do is add your credit card and press buttons. The AI that is part of the app then suggests which crypto you should buy, and BAAM, you are on the way to the moon!

This app is not for trading, it is for “saving” ,ok?

Crypto UIUX sucks

This is what every person that is part of any kind of company that has anything even remotely to do with UIUX. It should be really easy to use and understand. What is the problem with all these crypto wallets, they have all these strange addresses, and you can lose all your money if you do it wrong. If you send to the wrong person or you get hacked there is no support number to call. What a horrible user experience! Why does anyone even use this stuff?! Savedriod is right, the UIUX is not good for most crypto services, software, and hardware. If you have already been into bitcoin or crypto for over a year you most likely don´t even notice. You have learned what is going on and none of this bothers you much anymore. From the standpoint of someone trying to get new customers one full year just to learn how to use a product is not exactly optimal. Why can´t „they“ just make crypto easy, you know like PayPal or online banking? Maybe someone should just try and see what happens.

It is the hardware, not the UXUI

The devices we use now are not meant to hold digital value. When the computers, mobile devices, and laptops were designed, they did not have the concept of holding private keys in a secure way in mind. The only way to store crypto in a secure way is with cold storage. There is hardware out there that helps you do this in an easy way and companies have made leaps in bounds in the past three years. This still does not help your average person on the street buy crypto in an easy way.

All ships rise with the tide?

The goal of anyone that holds or thinks that crypto currencies are a good thing should be to get them in as many hands as possible, right? That is correct however they should know at least a little bit about what is going on. Maybe some people do not care what is going on in the background and just want an easy way to get exposure to the crypto market. That is great, and maybe such an app as savedriod can serve that purpose. With more people using crypto the price of all crypto should go up, right?

Save each month

Nothing in life is free, and neither is the use of the savedriod app. How much does it cost to use? Do I have to pay a fee to buy bitcoin, ETH or IOTA? Yes, you will have to pay a fee to buy or sell crypto in the app. I bet you would like to know how much the fee is right? Hard to say, „we do not know now“, „it can change“ „depends on the market“ are some of the answers I got when I asked this. Wait, Im sorry I forgot an answer, my favorite answer because it is an ongoing meme regarding ICOs „Did you read our whitepaper?“ as an answer to how much it will cost to use the app. Just to clear things up, the fees are not in the whitepaper, but they are in the savedriod token model xlxs file. At least there is something in the fields „base fee“, „transaction volume“,Average Transaction fee for all services“ located in the revenue model of the xlxs file (see how I did that, I said exactly where this information is located and did not tell you, „go read my whitepaper, you will like it“). What is the base fee, well that is 2€ a month? That does not sound like much. Of course, good apps are not free. This is supposed to be a savings app, and according to the document that we are talking about the projected transaction volume of an average user is 100€ and 2€ from that are 2% a month. Ok, maybe crypto goes to the moon that month and nobody care about the 2€ fee. They would have never been able to get into the crypto market without the app. Since all the software out there for crypto is so user unfriendly and the websites where you can buy them are hard to use people will be willing to pay just 2€ a month for the service. On top of that, they get to use the savedriod AI that helps them decide what to buy. They do not even have to use their brain much, they just need to know that they want crypto and that it should go to the moon.

not only a subscription fee but a fee on trades too!

Monthly fee, but that is not all

While 2€ seems like it might be a reasonable amount each month what is in the field „ Average Transaction fee for all services“? The figure located in this field is 15%. This means that an average user is projected to pay 17% a month in fees per month. As far as I understand this includes one buy and one sell action a month, so 7.5% on average per action. If this does not seem high to you, or in the ballpark of an „industry standard“ then great. By all means, connect your credit card and start saving away with the AI suggestions. You will only need to have over 17% profit per month with your crypto savings choices in order to make a plus (as an average user). Of course, these are not exact numbers since we do not know the exact fees, but we are just basing this on the documentation that we have in front of us.

Rich or Rekt

The price of the token

All the fees in the app are paid for in the savedroid token. The users can deposit savedroid token or the magic of buying the tokens for the fees on the open market happens under the hood and the user does not even notice (as far as I understand). For anyone that is a token holder, this is great. This means the more users, the more fees, the more buy pressure for the token, and a moon landing is closer than ever. The token holders can make some sick gainz on the fees that the app users will be paying. The question is, with a 17% threshold to profit each month with most users be rekt and unable to continue on the crypto „savings“ journey? Or will they just go full martingale and keep depositing? Maybe the UI is so good they just want to keep depositing since they will also earn some rewards for taking actions in the app. Maybe ..

TL;DR

I agree that we need better UIUX in the crypto world. I do not think that UIUX will solve a lot of problems with adoption in the middle to long term. I think that 7.5% for each trade even if you use a credit card is high, to say it mildly. I do not think that the incentives are inline when the token holders get sick gainz on people paying 7.5% fee for each action. I do not see how anyone can call an app a savings app when it charges per month and has high fees. I also do not think the best introduction to crypto is an app where you have a high chance of getting totally rekt on fees leaves a good impression, regardless of how good the UI is or how good the AI is or if it favors more buying and selling actions in order to generate more fees. I am not even going to unpack question 1. and 2. of the Howey Test, I will let you lawyers get into that.

Please feel free to comment below. If I got anything wrong I am more than willing to change it.

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