Polis, the community-driven project that allows users to spend a variety of cryptocurrencies worldwide, has seen their much-vaunted crypto debit card cancelled in all but one country. This is after MasterCard said it had not given permission for the card to offered to non-Mexicans. The revelation will come as a huge embarrassment to the project, whose debit card represented a major piece of their project, as did the partnership with MasterCard, a household name that would have added a sense of legitimacy to the product. This legitimacy has been shattered however since news broke that the card provider had only gotten clearance to offer the card to residents with addresses in Mexico, dramatically limiting their use.
Polis Makes an Apology
In a Medium post issued yesterday, PolisPay explained how the card provider had let them down:
In the few past days, it has come to our knowledge through the means of our PolisPay Card Provider and our lawyers, that our provider was having a set of problems with Mastercard. As we have been told, Mastercard never gave them permission to sell cards outside of Mexico, a situation we were unaware of as we had been guaranteed our provider had the faculties and required licensing to do so.
PolisPay added that refunds would be issued where funds were unusable (i.e. 99.9% of the world), adding that the setback was “not the end of PolisPay” and that they were looking around for new card partners, which presumably will either be less reputable than MasterCard or will come with a higher price tag and therefore higher charges for customers.
The token price took a battering on the news, crashing over 66% before rebounding up again to end the day 28% down. This is in comparison to the two tokens that were added to the PolisPay platform last week, GRS and XZC, which saw a 226% pump and a 100% pump respectively when the news came out. Any lingering joy of the additions will now have been tempered however, as holders cannot spend their tokens worldwide as anticipated.
Crypto Twitter Unsympathetic
The reaction was somewhat predictable, with many pointing out the amateurishness of the rollout and the retrospectively strange action of the tokens recently added to the platform:
Wow, you guys kinda suck
And lost your shit
And really screwed up.
Great marketing
Wasted like 10 million hours of the crypto community— Troyx (@Troyxdakenf) March 18, 2019
Nice to see grs xzc and so on were pumped to 100-200% due to a Mexican fiat debit card lmao
— CryptoCJC (@CjcCrypto) March 18, 2019
The team however signed off with a positive message which will please supporters of the project:
Polis as a community has had many setbacks, but we have always found a way [t]o overcome them. We will not surrender and we plan to deliver on our vision.
What do you think? Will Polis be able to recover from this or will it go down as another failed crypto debit card endeavor? Let us know your thoughts below!
