Ivy Launches IvyPay And Improves Crypto Regulatory Compliance

In the less than one year since its ICO ended in February 2018, Ivy has continued to make progress with its technical development and marketing efforts. The project, which aims to facilitate payments securely on a global scale, recently announced a few key major updates. Here’s what you should know.

Similar to projects like Ripple, Ivy aims to partner with banks and other financial institutions to bring blockchain and crypto to the mainstream. What makes Ivy unique is its strong focus on bringing modern technologies to traditional finance. Most notably, Ivy uses extensive data points to enable banks to improve transaction verification processes. While many crypto projects have been slow to launch new features after ICOs, Ivy has so far shown that its team has the ability to deliver results.

One example is the recent release of the ivyPay mobile app. IvyPay, which commenced beta testing in the Australian market on November 1, provides users with an effective way of bridging the gap between fiat and crypto. Users can convert BTC, ETH, LTC, XRP, and BCH to Australian Dollars (AUD). Exchange rates are calculated approximately every 30 seconds by using the average price of major Australian exchanges.

Even though IvyPay is currently open only to those who have an Australian bank account, Ivy is looking to expand its services globally in a relatively short time frame.

With IvyPay Beta, you can send AUD directly to Australian bank account. Another integral feature of IvyPay is the ability to pay any Australian bill that allows you to use BPAY or a credit card. Similar to the way in which exchanges provide discounted fees to users who use native tokens, the IvyPay app reduces fees by half to anyone who uses IVY (Ivy’s native token) to pay bills.

The user adoption of the app in the first week or so was at around 60 users. Even though this is a rather modest result, it’s important to note that the Ivy project team is just beginning its marketing campaign for IvyPay. With almost any beta test, there are typically unexpected challenges that come along. As noted in a recent project update blog post, Ivy had to work out the process of parsing the payments that had been exchanged to the finance team. The team was able to resolve this issue in a timely manner.

On November 9, Ivy President Ash Shilkin presented the company’s monthly update on the progress of its technical development and business development work.

Regarding Ivy Network Lite, some key highlights include the fact that the project is considering a re-scope of its technology. Basically, Ivy is aiming to simplify the integration of its technology in order to increase the possibilities of user adoption of banks and other financial institutions.

As we have seen with many other projects in this space, the goal is to not only create a technology that works but also one that is easy for people to use. According to the update, Ivy aims to “add more value to banks from a KYC / KYT point of view, get the token more in use than with IvyPay, but avoid the need to stake reserves within the financial institutions”.

For Ivy testnet, Ivy already has a functioning environment for internal use and for its external technology partners to access and test out. There are four environments within Ivy’s testnet: developer, test, staging, and demo. What’s even more promising is the next iteration of the testnet (expected sometime in the first half of 2019) will be public-facing. This means that banks, financial institutions, and other potential business partners will all have the chance to use the demo.

The IvyPay Beta launch is a major milestone for Ivy. It appears that the move towards easier integration of Ivy Network Lite could be the key to gaining user adoption of financial institutions. Finally, when looking at the Ivy roadmap featured on the project’s website homepage, the highly-anticipated testnet currently appears to be on time.

Based on the updates we have seen from Ivy thus far, this project is actively working on moving its product innovation forward. Even though many of the main features are still yet to come, the Ivy team keeps its community updated on its progress and challenges on a frequent basis.

If you’d like to know more about Ivy and keep up with the latest developments from the project team, you can do so by going to the project website.