By Mark Hallum
A Middle Village financial company is aiming to change the landscape of how people use cryptocurrency by making their assets deployable in day-to-day transactions.
The Praetorian Group, made up of 10 financial and legal experts, is not only creating the software to make cryptocurrency purchases possible through a debit card at your neighborhood deli and other small businesses, but creating their own currency called the PAX token backed with its own gold standard: real estate.
“What we’re seeking to do is make it seamless to spend the cryptocurrency that you may hold in everyday life. We would handle the merchant service aspect of a debit swipe at a local corner store and the merchant wouldn’t necessarily have to accept cryptocurrency in order to get paid for the product you’re buying,” Chief Strategy Officer Louis Adimando said. “That’s all handled on the back end through the blockchain and the user might not even understand this technology, but they know they’re making gains through investing into these early stage [cryptocurrency] companies through ICOs and now they want to deploy that value.”
The “PAX universal debit application” is still in development, but a beta version is expected to be available through smartphone app stores by about March 2019, Adimando said.
The app would give users the option of choosing which cryptocurrency holding they would like to use for the purchase, which would be linked to their debit card and PAX would then convert the currency into dollars to feed into the merchant’s coffers for the purchase.
The Praetorian Group is planning to back its currency with real estate holdings along the Eastern Coastal states and into Texas. It plans to use the properties it acquires to benefit communities, Adimando said, by working with local elected officials to build libraries, community centers and even affordable housing-like plans if possible depending on the needs of the communities they are in.
“The core foundational principal needs to be helping people through the vehicle we’re creating,” Adimando said. “We want to revitalize the community we’re coming into, we’re not looking to just buy property, collect rent and return it to investors. We need to fulfill the social responsibility aspect as well.”
Praetorian Group is the first cryptocurrency company to file with Securities and Exchange Commission, something Adimando said other organizations are avoiding. But Praetorian believes this is what gives them the edge.
“We are a step ahead of the rest of the market, from a regulatory compliance perspective, which makes it easier to get us any further licensing that we’ll need to carry out this project,” Adimando said. “There are other companies in the space that are attempting to do debit services, but none of them are trying to do it in the U.S. because they’re afraid of the regulatory burdens… Whereas other companies are afraid of the regulators, we embrace them because they help bring the market to maturity and the more mature the market gets, the easier it is for retail investors to get involved.”
Adimando and many of the other founders of the company, launched in September 2017 and located at 66-85 73rd Place, come from a legal and business background. It is a stark comparison to other cryptocurrency companies led by technology experts.
(The original version of this story identified Adimando as Chief Security Officer; he is Chief Strategy Officer.)
Reach reporter Mark Hallum by e-mail at mhall
