Benzinga - Greg Magarshak is playing the long game. For the last five years, his company Intercoin has been hard at work building software to “restore confidence” in the crypto industry, which has been rocked by one scandal after another. If you have not heard of Intercoin, that is because they’ve been quietly building – preparing to launch globally next year.
The company has developed a unified suite of smart contracts for communities around the world, including religious organizations, conferences, educators, schools, and online forums. All the software is completely decentralized and open-source. Unlike most crypto, it is being designed to achieve mainstream adoption inside communities, by being user-friendly and letting each community customize the contracts to its own needs. Intercoin’s endgame is to network all the communities together, into one “Intercloud”, with the Intercoin token playing a central role as a fuel for the ecosystem.
“Web3 has gotten a bad reputation”, says Magarshak, “but ironically, most of the worst implosions have come from exactly the type of middlemen that blockchain was designed to cut out. Centralized exchanges, centralized lending companies…” he trails off. “The only thing ‘blockchain’ about them was telling you to send your tokens to them. After that – you had no control.” Like Jack Dorsey, the team at Intercoin has begun to associate themselves with “Web5” – they believe that by combining the strengths of Web2 (social) and Web3 (transactional), their products will appeal to a mass market. Or, as they put it, “making crypto mainstream.”
Intercoin was spun out from Magarshak’s first company, Qbix, which he started over twelve years ago, in 2011. The company developed an open-source social networking platform, a kind of WordPress for Web 2.0. “I was into decentralization before it was cool”, he shrugs. “WordPress now powers 40% of all websites in the world, and our goal is to become that for social platforms – to be an alternative to the Big Tech oligopoly.” Back in 2019, he laid out his vision for a future where communities increasingly manage their own affairs, with control being shifted from the elites to rest in the hands of the members. A sort of democratization of the Internet.
The approach seems to have been prescient: In recent years, people have increasingly started to look for an alternative to Facebook, Twitter, and other large platforms. Other open-source platforms that started later – such as Mastodon and Matrix – have enjoyed an influx of users. Meanwhile, Qbix’s apps on the app stores have attracted 10 million users in over 100 countries. Named “Groups” and “Calendars”, they help people manage their communities and events.
Intercoin’s blockchain software seems to feature a distinctly community-oriented flavor. While many crypto protocols focus on peer-to-peer interactions, Intercoin designs smart contracts to power community contests, payroll, auctions, memberships, elections, governance, DAOs, and even community currencies. “You can democratically vote on how much UBI to give out in your own token”, says Magarshak, giving an example of combining these contracts, like LEGOs. “You can also auction off memberships for your next course, and receive recurring payments from people around the world. None of this would be easy to do with current technology.”
Following the design of UniSwap, Curve, and other protocols, Intercoin’s software uses the Factory pattern: all smart contracts are guaranteed to have completely identical code, enabling trust in the ecosystem, something that has been badly needed amid the proliferation of custom meme tokens in the last few years. The team has been working with CertiK and other auditing companies to ensure the security of their smart contract factories. Ultimately, the vision is to have webmasters deploy secure, decentralized community software on their own website. Qbix would power the Web2 and Intercoin the Web3.
The company is now gradually rolling out its software worldwide. “We treat our early customers as investors,” says Magarshak. They buy the ITR token from our ecosystem, and the money is used to help build solutions for their communities. We don’t need to pay influencers to shill our product – instead, community leaders pay us to release and promote their solutions to their audience.”
Intercoin is markedly different in one other ways from most crypto projects: from the beginning, they treated their token offerings as one would a security, including filing a Form D, and paying a law firm to draw up an offering memorandum with extensive risk disclosures. “After the JOBS act, there is plenty you can do within the securities laws”, says Magarshak. Their YouTube channel features an hour-long discussion with one of their advisors Sara Hanks, who used to work for the SEC, and now heads up CrowdCheck. Intercoin is now testing the waters for a crowdfunding campaign at Republic, inviting anyone to come and sign up and signal their interest in receiving ITR tokens later this year.
About Intercoin and Qbix
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