UMA is an Ethereum token that describes itself as “an open-source protocol that allows developers to design and create their own financial contracts and synthetic assets.” The protocol’s name comes from the team’s goal of creating universal market access (UMA).

Pundi X is the project that wants to make spending crypto as easy as a credit card. Creators of the NPXS token hope that it will one day be used on their Ethereum-based Point-of-Sale devices. This approach could give basic banking services to underdeveloped regions like Latin America and Indonesia. One of the most notorious pain points in crypto is the ability to actually make purchases. Pundi X cryptocurrency plans to change all that by distributing hundreds to thousands of point-of-sale smart devices to retailers so they can accept payment in the form of NPXS, the network’s proprietary crypto token. If it can distribute the devices for free and with lower transaction fees than current card and mobile payment solutions provide, it’s a grand-slam idea. Pundi X raised $35 million during its ICO from September 2017 through January 21, 2018. 35,000,000,000 NPXS (at the time known as PXS) were sold during the ICO presale and crowd sale. The team retained 15,750,000 and another 1,750,000,000 was distributed to early investors and the rest was held by Pundi X for further development and marketing. It also set aside 2 percent of sold tokens to fund bounty programs across social media and online platforms. The Pundi X team are a talented group of technologists and entrepreneurs, which seems to be exactly what this project will need for success. In general the management team is comprised of computer engineers turned serial entrepreneur. The glaring exception to this is CEO and founder Zac Cheah, who was formerly an HTML games developer, but perhaps this is why he surrounded himself with such a strong team. The President of Pundi X, Constantin Papadimitrou, has a long history of founding successful fintech companies, and scaling them, which makes him an ideal fit for a project that will need rapid growth and adoption. The CTO/COO Pitt Huang created and sold his first business by the age of 25 and went on to create and sell several more business, including one that had over 200 employees. The company is working on developing a card, which they are naming the XPASS card, which will work together with the mobile app and wallet, enabling payments and deposits by card (a familiar medium for most) that are pulled from the mobile wallet. In addition, users should be able to see the current market price of each cryptocurrency before paying for goods and services, allowing them to pay with the cryptocurrency that brings the best value at the time. This ability to pay for things easily with cryptocurrencies is what will finally give them real value in a widespread sense. Pundi X has taken on an impressive and ambitious task in tackling what could amount to everyday adoption of cryptocurrencies by the masses, if their vision is realized. The technology seems appropriate for what they’re attempting, and the delivery of the first 500 POS devices shows that there is substance behind their efforts."