COTI – a Beginner’s Guide on the Global Payment Network for E-Commerce.

Ambitiously positioning itself as “Currency Of The Internet”, COTI puts efforts to create a decentralized scalable payment network to give a friendly boost to the global e-commerce. An idea behind the project is to promote the widespread adoption of payments done with electronic currencies.
Current payments systems (Visa, MasterCard, and other of their kind) fail to keep pace with e-commerce and have a number of disadvantages, including high fees and an approval speed. Digital currencies are also imperfect with their ever-increasing scalability issues, too high transactional fees, slow settlement times, and omnipresent consumer/merchant frauds.
This is where COTI comes. By designing a unified currency for all online transactions, COTI solves the problems of traditional payment solutions by introducing a platform for global online payments with instant transactions, low-to-zero fees, and better seller/buyer protection.

How will COTI Work?

COTI is committed to catalyzing the widespread adoption of virtual currencies as the main payment method and leave current legacy card networks and cryptocurrency technologies behind by creating a next-generation network for payments that will be:

• Decentralized
• Fast-scalable
• Highly reliable irrespective of industry or jurisdiction
• Secure for both sellers and buyers
• Zero-to-low cost where transaction fees depend on a user's behavior
• Trust-generative
• Easy-to-use
• Fully-compliant and welcoming of regulation

To achieve their objective of creating a leading payment solution for global electronic transactions, COTI is going to develop a comprehensive ecosystem that will consist of the following components:

The Cluster. It is a native distributed ledger of COTI based on a DAG data structure (DAG stands for directed acyclic graph) and relates to transactions. Such a DAG approach ensures that COTI’s network scalability will only improve with greater network usage, positively influencing the rate of the confirmation of transactions. In the Cluster, responsibilities are distributed to different nodes which are run by operators. These nodes include Full Nodes, Double Spend Prevention (DSP) Nodes, and History Nodes.

The Trust Scoring Mechanism. This mechanism calculates the reputation of COTI network participants on the basis of their behavior inside the system, contribution to the network, payment statistics, and general data. Trust scores are necessary to validate transactions. Collectively, Trust scores form Trust chains to ensure an effective transaction consensus and validation. The higher the Trust score is – the lower fee a transacting party pays and vice versa.

The Mediation System involves mediators whose job is to protect buyers and sellers against any injustice, fraud or errors as well as to resolve disputes and handle any other problems should they arise within the network.

Native currency. COTI coins will be the fuel of the platform and used for payments, mediator stakes/payouts (mediators are required to hold COTI coins to be able to mediate), merchant rolling reserve funds, node operators incentives, and transactional fees.

Own currency exchange will enable cross-currency payments and smooth currency transfers while promoting COTI’s native currency.

Decentralized governance. COTI’s governance model on the base of the Futarchy methodology will provide voting rights for the coin holders to decide on the platform core changes and future development.

COTI will develop a range of applications and services encompassing both fiat and electronic currencies to connect merchants, consumers, and mediators on a single platform and enable P2P and merchant payments alike. The main offerings include:

• Multi-currency wallet that will support various payment use cases.
• Debit cards directly associated with users’ COTI wallets.
• Processing tools will enable e-merchants to accept payments from COTI wallets.
• Hedging services to let e-merchants be less dependent on near-term currency fluctuations.

Unfortunately, no beta-versions of COTI exist now. Important prototypes will come not earlier than the Q4 of 2018 when we can expect a beta release of the consumer wallet, as well as betas of Full Nodes, the Double Spend Prevention Node, History Nodes, Trust Score algorithm, and the Testnet.

Meet COTI’s Team

A team supporting the COTI project consists of veterans in the sphere of the payment solutions development, cryptography, blockchain, asset management, marketing, and finance. The team is quite large (34 collaborators including advisors and backers), so we will highlight only its core.
Shahaf Bar-Geffen is the chief executive officer of COTI. Holding a BSc degree in Biotech and Economics from Tel Aviv University, he also led the WEB3 Company to its astonishing success in the digital media.
Dr. Nir Haloani works as the chief technical officer at COTI because he is very competent in the questions of data compression, machine learning, and artificial intelligence with its Master Inventor title for being an author of 13 patents in these spheres, a BSc degree in computer science and mathematics from Tel Aviv University, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Bar-Ilan University.
Erol Hallufgil is responsible for research and software engineering with his extensive experience in the software development for fintech companies. He boasts a Master’s Degree in Mathematics from Israel Technion.

COTI Token Sale

COTI’s private sale is on, apply now. The minimum purchase in the private sale is $50000 or the equivalent in other currencies.
Their ICO looks like following:
TOKEN SALE: 15 JUN – 1 JUL or once the fundraising goal is achieved
Ticker: COTI
Token type: ERC-20, but after the launch of COTI’s main net, the ERC-20 tokens will be converted into coins issued on the COTI network’s transaction ledger.
ICO Token Price: USD 0.1 per COTI
Fundraising Goal: 30,000,000 USD
Total supply of COTI tokens during the formative stages: 2,000,000,000.
The maximum supply of COTI Tokens: 4,000,000,000 (at a later stage)
Available for Token Sale: 30% (550,000,000 tokens)
Whitelist: YES (PERIOD ISN'T SET, JOIN)
Know Your Customer (KYC): YES
Can’t participate: Afghanistan, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Central African Republic, China, Congo, Cuba, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Uganda, USA, Vanuatu, Yemen
Unsold Tokens: will be reserved
Accepts: still not clear, but surely, COTI will not accept USD payments during the token sale.
Company Foundation: Royal Ocean Plaza, 42 Ocean Village Avenue, Gibraltar GX11 1AA

Token Allocation

2 billion of COTI tokens will be distributed as shown below:

• Token sale (30%)
• Backers, partners and advisors (10%)
• Reserve (22%)
• Incentive program (13%)
• Team (15%)
• Liquidity (10%)

Money Distribution

The raised money will be used in a next way:

• R&D (30%)
• Cybersecurity (5%)
• Legal and compliance (9%)
• Merchant services (8%)
• Licences and capital requirements (12%)
• Marketing (15%)
• Market maker (7%)
• Operational expenses (7%)
• COTI fund (7%)

The company will mint additional 2 billion of COTI tokens at later stages of the platform development which will be locked in its reserve. So that, the max supply of COTI tokens will be 4 billion.

Conclusion

COTI’s mission is to build a global transaction network to solve the shortcomings of legacy payment systems by combining the best practices of popular payments solutions with blockchain technologies and implementing them on their platform. Such a product will make worldwide transactions faster, easier, more cost-effective, and most trusted.
This all sounds pretty interesting, but given the fact that a lot of important information is still missing on their website and whitepaper (such as the blockchain they are going to operate on, acceptable currencies, and ready-to-use alpha-beta versions), we cannot say that COTI project is the first one to be considered for investing in. However, there is enough time left to their public sale, so we hope, they will close these gaps.