It’s a number that is growing by the hundreds every day, but the trouble is, according to Loi Luu, the CEO and co-founder of decentralized exchange Kyber Network, the majority of those tokens fall short of a practical use case.
“What we observe is that most tokens are used only on exchanges for trading purposes or within their own specific platforms if the platform is live,” Luu said.
Luu wants to change that and unlock the potential of ERC-20 tokens to be used for payments. And to do that, Luu revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Kyber Network will be extending the on-chain liquidity smart contract which underlies its decentralized exchange to allow businesses to accept payments through any ERC-20 out there.
Luu told, “Our main goal is to make tokens usable anywhere.”
In practice, this means businesses can accept payments in any ethereum token, and that token can be instantly converted into any other token as well. And Luu has some experience to back up their ambition. For one, he’s known for founding ethereum security tool Oyente and building a protocol that uses a scaling solution, sharding, for the enterprise blockchain Zilliqa, before going on it found Kyber Network, that facilitates instant ethereum token swaps on its decentralized exchange (a term, while long a dream in the industry, has failed as of yet to live up to expectations).