This article addresses the rising concerns over costly banking services and the growing cartelization. The Virie Project is a decentralized, blockchain-based platform, rather marketplace, that not only offers businesses and consumers a platform to grow in a healthy ecosystem but also benefits them through interest on their assets and by simply participating in the project. Virie marketplace is an innovative step to end the era of controlled and restricted financial networks.
The Context — Why are we discussing this?
The desire to improve profits and control costs has led banks to levy charges on consumers. Once lured for ‘free’ services, consumers will now face hikes in already existing banking fees structure. From charging you for SMS alerts on transactions, hikes in annual debit/credit card fees to now charging you negatively on your deposits, banks are charging consumers for every service they can.
German banks are increasingly passing on the burden of negative interest rates to their retail clients from the very first euro deposited into their accounts. While this rise in fees was first introduced for clients with large deposits, banks are now charging deposit fee on balances of 0.01 euros or more.
For a small-scale vendor like me, all these charges combined would sum up to a significant amount at the end of the year.
The chain reaction of negative interests
While banks have forever been charging us for the services they provide, this newfound ‘negative interest’ environment is a chain reaction catalyzed by the European Central Bank (ECB) itself.
The prolonged negative rates imposed by ECB has compelled a large number of banks to pass on their burden to their clients. For instance, in Germany, approximately 58% of banks levy negative rates on corporate deposits while 23% of banks acknowledge that they charge even retail and individual consumers. Imagine having to pay money for parking your funds! Gone are the days of high-interest rate returns on deposits with banks.
Interestingly, while consumers are increasingly complaining about unreasonable bank charges, the banks are lobbying hard to justify these hikes by blaming the high cost of technology.
The question, however, is, who will control financial institutions’ greed for making more and more money?
The blockchain-based marketplace — Virie
The beauty of technology is that it is always prepared to face the prevailing inequities in society and provide a befitting response by prioritizing the needs and sentiments of the people.
One such solution to banking cartelization and growing dissatisfaction in the financial institutions is the rise of blockchain-based platforms.
Blockchain’s mere inception is the end-result of the great financial disaster that shook the very essence of the market’s objectives of creating and offering a fair and just environment that encourages healthy competition and growth.
It surfaced as a disruptive technology that took the restrictions, threats, and insecurities of the financial systems head-on. Blockchain-based projects like Bitcoin (the first to hit floors) radicalized the existing centralized systems and offered a fresh perspective to how we looked at the money and our finances. Despite harsh criticism, Bitcoin witnessed a steep growth and paved the way for blockchain’s disruption in other industrial verticals.
Today, organizations acknowledge Blockchain’s potential and are increasingly exploring their offerings as a promising technology.
The Virie Project is an emerging blockchain-based project that takes on prevailing issues like rising bank fees, restrictions, cartelization, monopolies, and frauds/threats while offering its users a platform to gain momentum and grow in their respective businesses.
The Virie revolution
In order to relate to the project’s offerings, we must first understand what it actually is.
Virie is a solution to conventional (centralized) markets and the financial ecosystem.
While centralization is at the very core of our societal and industrial infrastructure, it comes with certain setbacks and limitations. Centralized systems often resemble a dictatorial form of leadership where a central authority decides the future of organizations/users etc.
For example, the rising fees for banking services.
So, what exactly is the reason for this hike?
Poor protocol implementations in central systems often stifle innovation and initiatives, restrict efficiency, and are often plagued by the interference of intermediaries resulting in higher costs and poor services.
Virie Market is a decentralized user-friendly platform that allows users to transact whatever they want, in exchange for whatever products or services they want, from wherever they are, and without restrictions and extra costs. On the other hand, decentralization is just an underpinning feature of Virie Marketplace, and it only gets exciting from here.
Let’s get you versed with the Virie world
The first thing a user must understand before diving into this project is that it is not a payment solution or a cryptocurrency platform. Virie is intrinsically a marketplace that offers a payment platform for users to exercise their right to liberty while exchanging or trading products or services. Virie is fundamentally a project that aims at developing a ‘free’ market that offers freedom from cartelization, monopoly, frauds, etc. through its innovative and fact-based features. This article intends to acquaint you with the primary features that Virie marketplace offers and help you get onboard this futuristic project.
Feature â„–1: Virie is decentralized
Virie project is intrinsically a decentralized platform that disengages itself from the anomalies of central systems. A peer-to-peer blockchain-based platform, Virie is free from single-point control and/or failure. It is free from restrictions and/or other unnecessary taxes or fees. One simply needs to download the application and start using it irrespective of its geographies and or currencies.
Virie offers either multi-currency exchanges where users are free to use a fiat of their choice or even virtual currencies (Virie is the project’s very own token apart from other popular currencies available for exchange).
For example, a person from Japan wishes to buy a product that is available only in the U.S. The Virie Market lets you exchange your commodities without worrying about currencies, mode of transaction or even conversion. The system automatically applies conversion rates based on market demand and supply.
Another amazing aspect of the Virie Platform is that it is unbiased unlike other popular setups available today. Virie is an unbiased platform and does not segregate you based on your business infrastructure or brand value and/or the product range — rather it cannot.
Feature â„–2: Virie is a Virtual Marketplace
Virie is an instrument to use the market and vice-versa. Virie is not a payment system with a Market. It is a Distributed Exchange Network with a user-friendly payment system.
- Virie is independent of any centralized third party exchange or trading services.
- At any point, Virie Market (including its developers), cannot block any user or his money and it cannot set any discriminative set of rules for specific users. It allows users to publish offers, which include:
• Bid/Ask descriptions (buy or sell offers)
• Price
• Type and amount of buying/selling goods
• Owners names and contact information
• Desired method of payment
• The expiration date and other relevant information
All active offers are available for searching and viewing (including through various web-based services). Any user can publish their personal offer and respond to any other posted offer. This system can be updated in the future to serve as a decentralized exchange, which will automatically match bid and ask offerings.
Feature №3: Virie’s ESCROW based anonymous payment solutions
Virie features a distributed blockchain-based Virtual Marketplace (distributed exchange network) and multi-signature-based escrow, making it a unique instrument for making safe and secure contracts without the need for any third-party services. It offers anonymous payment solutions that ensure user and transaction privacy through its indigenous and unique encryption algorithms.
- Virie provides an elegant mechanism for secure escrow with no third party needed. The mechanism is built on an economic principle: in order to maximize profits, everybody has to play fair. (To know more about Virie’s ESCROW, please refer to the official website, here)
Feature â„–4: Virie protects and benefits you at the same time
Virie’s blend of PoS and PoW protocols makes it not only robust against prominent and dangerous threats but also benefits users on the network by simply participating in the development and keep it running. Virie wallets are like your bank’s savings account that offers you interest on your deposits (which no longer is the case with banks though). To know more, please refer to the Virie material.
Feature â„–5: Virie is immutable and secured
One of the primary objectives of Virie network is to ensure user and transaction privacy. In this age of internet and digitization, user privacy is becoming an increasing concern with even some of the industry giants not able to protect user data records from being hacked or traced. Surveillance is becoming a growing threat to data security with governments imposing regulatory restrictions every now and then.
Virie’s multi-sig protocol ensures you are protected at all times on the network and secures your transactions and assets. The multi-sig protocol ensures your transactions and exchanges are untraceable and un-linkable so that no malicious agent could ever trace a transaction back to your account and cause trouble.
Virie’s developers have created a simple and convenient platform that is accessible and available to anyone who wishes to use it. It is fairly detailed for even a non-technical person, who does not know the jargon of blockchain ecosystem. All you need to do is get hooked on to it and the application will lead the way for you. To Download the Virie application, please click here.
