Humint Hopes to Custom-Build Altcoins for Brands

We’ve had peercoin, feathercoin, worldcoin, and a host of others. How about WholeFoodscoin, CocaColacoin, or McDonaldscoin? A group of social entrepreneurs is hoping to bring branded coins into existence, and is chasing unidentified potential partners as we speak.

People might be forgiven for thinking that the whole altcoin scene is getting a little silly. In a world where dogecoin – a six week-old coin launched from a dog joke – has a larger hash rate than Litecoin, things are clearly moving in a strange direction. And we’re already starting to see coins trying to capitalize on existing brands. For example, Kanye West recently squashed a coin that tried to cash in on his name.

Wendell Davis, CEO of recently-formed crypto currency marketing and consulting company Humint, thinks that the time is right for custom coins developed for specific brands.

The case for branded coins

Why would a company want its own coin? Davis gives a grocery story as a hypothetical example:

“There’s a 40% pre-mine of this coin. 20% of that goes to you, and you’re going to give this away to your customers for free with every purchase that they make,” he suggests.

Humint takes some of the coin as its fee, because it doesn’t charge the brand to create the coin. Another fraction is distributed to people in the grocer’s supply chain, including the food producers, in emerging countries. “Maybe you give the rest away to some causes that you want to support.”

The rest of the coin is then mined, in the traditional way, and is then traded by the miners.