QASH (pronounced “cash”) is the native currency for the Quoine (pronounced “coin”) which is now rebranded to Liquid. Liquid is a global cryptocurrency firm looking to solve the liquidity problems that have surfaced with crypto investments. Liquid brings liquidity to the cryptocurrency space by providing a means for you to easily buy cryptocurrency with and cash-out to fiat. Currently, each crypto exchange has its own level of liquidity that differs between the trading pairs it offers. This creates individual silos that may have great liquidity on one exchange but not on another. The Liquid platform connects these silos into one combined pool to give you the greatest liquidity possible. The Liquid World Book compiles the orders and prices from exchanges around the world into one order book for you to use. This gives any trader, no matter their location, the ability to use the fiat currency of their choice when purchasing or selling crypto. It removes the liquidity silos of separate exchanges and gives more trading power to previously underserved markets. The Prime Brokerage half of the Quoine Liquid platform basically gives you access to the features outlined in the previous World Book section. With Prime Brokerage, you have direct market access to all exchanges in the World Book without having to create an account on each individual exchange. Furthermore, Quoine has been building partnerships with a network of banks over the last several years to ensure the quick transfer of your fiat funds. QASH is an ERC20 token you use to pay for services on the Liquid platform. Beyond that, QASH holders may also receive discounts, promotional products, and ICO investment opportunities with coins that Quoine helps to launch. The team also emphasizes in their whitepaper that other organizations may use it for their own purposes similar to how some financial institutions use the Ripple XRP token. Because Quoine enters a few different financial sectors, the company has quite a few competitors. As a credit facility, the company competes with SALT. On the exchange side, there are numerous other businesses like Binance specializing in alternative coins or Gemini and Coinbase focusing on fiat to crypto conversions. Mike Kayamori (CEO) and Mario Gomez Lozada (President and CTO) founded Quoine in 2014. Kayamori was previously a Senior Vice President at SoftBank Group and was the Chief Investment Officer of Gungho Asia. Lozada was the CTO of Merrill Lynch in Japan for 11 years before taking the Chief Information Officer role at Credit Suisse Japan. Quoine is the first cryptocurrency firm in the world to be officially licensed by the Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA). The Liquid platform is actually the result of combining two previous platforms, Quoinex and Qryptos. At one time, those two trading platforms were performing over $12 billion of transactions each year.
Solarcoin is a Scrypt based alternative digital currency and its innovation comes from the secondary proof of work reward: the Solar Proof of Work. Green solar energy producers are entitled to receive one SLR for every MWh electricity generated. In order to claim a Solar Proof of Work reward, solar plant owners must submit 3rd party verified energy generation certificates such as a Solar Renewable Energy Certificate (SREC) or equivalent country specific documentation. All Solar Proof Of Work rewards will be stored as transactions in the blockchain. The supply of SLR comprises of the following: - The Mining Pool: 105 million Solarcoins (0.1%) to be publicly mined over the next 40 years. All publicly mined Solarcoins represent historically generated and unclaimed solar electricity. - The Generator Pool: 97.5 billion SolarCoins (99.4%) are currently stored in the OCA non-circulating generation pool account. These will be exchanged for Solar Proof of Work claims of solar electricity generation submitted over the next 40 years at the rate of 1 SLR per MWh of solar energy. - The Genesis Pool: 500 million Solarcoins (0.5%) are stored in the genesis pool account for environmental charities, early volunteers, advisers, builders and maintainers of SolarCoin infrastructure. Genesis pool circulation is capped so that it will never represent more than 5% of total Solarcoin in circulation.