Russian businessman Rustam Kutuev and some of his partners have reached an agreement with the authorities of one of the US states on launching a digital currency mining rig there. The existing rigs of Rustam Kutuev are part of Finom financial services platform which last February raised $41 mio at its ICO.
Servicing unwealthy
Finom is a financial platform servicing 520,000 users worldwide and intended for providing financial service to those for whom they are currently unavailable. According to the World Bank, that is about two billion people globally. A similar platform, Humaniq, is also about to be launched by another Russian businessman, Alex Fork.
Currently, Finom consists of Cryptonit cryptocurrency exchange trading since 2012, Nanopool mining pool, Cryptal mining rig, TabTrader mobile terminal for digital currencies trade, and Beetle.io mobile application for buying cryptocurrencies with a banking card. Finom parent company is registered in Switzerland since the local laws permit using blockchain technology as an accounting system. Rustam Kutuev plans to set a bank, a credit P2P platform, and a data center.
Why are these platforms capable of servicing low-income population and small businesses with no bank accounts? First of all, they have a simple interface, a single login and a single verification for each user. Besides, they offer very low charges and have an artificial intelligence helping to keep the costs down and offering best terms for a deposit, loan, Bitcoin exchange rate, or mining pool.
“When services supplement each other, there is no need to pay fees to various providers”, Kirill Suslov, Finom CEO, explains.
People will get access to banking products via their smart phones. Launching such an intellectual blockchain ecosystem requires five years and $145 mio.
Finom founders can certainly expect additional investments. Finom’s tokenized shares offering was accomplished under the US laws. That means, its tokens can be purchased by accredited US investors at SEC approved exchanges. All in all, over 7,000 investors took part in the campaign.
Alexander Nektorov of Nektorov, Saveliev & Partners law firm notes, companies running regular projects tend to arrange their ICOs under the US legislation, of which Telegram’s ICO is an example.
Finom platform evolution
Rustam Kutuev is a businessman, founder of Pride Games game studio and Cryptal mining rig in Russia’s Leningrad Region and in Finland, totaling 1,500 graphic cards. The rig is no doubt among the top miners of Nanopool, one of the world’s largest Ethereum mining pools with the global Ethereum mining share of 12%. The pool allows mining of Ethereum Classic, ZCash, Monero, Pascal and Electroneum as well. Its global mining share for Monero is 15%, for Ethereum Classic 17%.
Nanopool was founded by three Russian software specialists, Anton Trusov, Vladislav Alushkin and Alexandr Barkovskiy, in 2015 when the then one and only Ethereum mining pool terminated registration of new users.
Cryptonit exchange was respectively launched in the UK in 2012 by Bitcoin enthusiasts Konstantin Karatov and Andrey Yanukovich. It allows buying digital currencies for fiat money and trade them among all participants. Cryptonit aims to within two years hold a 2% share of the total cryptocurrencies trading market and become a top-15 cryptocurrencies exchange.
Since cryptocurrencies have been multiplying, financial expert Kirill Suslov designed TabTrader mobile application which allows trading digital currencies at various exchanges via a single convenient service. Aggregate trade at TabtTrader is $0.935 billion per annum which is approximately 0.9% of the global market. TabTrader has also designed Russia’s first digital ATM.
The authors of the said services decided to join their forces to make financial instruments available to everyone on the globe, so they founded Finom blockchain. Nevertheless, the share of active cryptocurrencies users does not exceed 0.08% of the overall global population. Most of such users live in economically developed countries of North America and Europe. According to coinmap.org, as of October 3, 2017, globally, only 10,028 entities accepted digital currencies as means of payment.
Below Irkutsk price
In early March, Rustam Kutuev reached an agreement on locating mining facilities in the north of the USA. He declines to name the exact location. The reason behind the choice was rather simple, the electricity price of $0.02 per kWh. No comparable prices may be found in Russia, even in Irkutsk Region where the prices are the lowest but still reach RUR 2 ($0.035) per kWh, while in Leningrad Region the electricity price is at RUR 3 per kWh.
The company plans to build eight mining centers in countries where natural gas and electricity are cheap, such as Canada, US, Sweden. Finom started at the US, intending to launch four mining centers in 2018 and four more in 2019.
The aggregate investments in cryptomining over the next two years, including 2019, will reach $88 mio. Gross monthly profit is anticipated at $1.5 mio and the pay-back period at slightly above seven months. Cryptal mining rig had revenue of $720K in 2017 and $255.5K in 2016. The 2018 revenue is anticipated to reach $42 mio. According to the White paper, of all the above businesses linked to Finom platform, the most profitable these days is cryptocurrencies mining.
By Natalia Kuznetsova