Hey folks, if you’ve been following my latest articles on Juno, you’ll know that Juno Finance has recently launched and airdropped their new $JCOIN. Despite their removal of earned crypto interest rates back in August, Juno continues to come out with positive features which I believe will help them continue to gain traffic into their ecosystem, and encourage people (like me) to lean more heavily on Juno than they do on regular 100% TradFi accounts.

Launched in 2020, OnJuno (or officially relaunched as Juno in 2022) is what many consider to be a Neo-bank, but in fact, it isn’t actually a bank. It’s perhaps easiest to think of Juno split into two different arms — TradFi and Crypto. The TradFi arm acts as a bank because their banking services are provided by Evolve Bank and Trust, Members FDIC. In other words, just like any other official bank, your funds are federally insured FDIC up to $250,000.

On the flipside, the crypto-arm is not FDIC insured (as no crypto I know of is or can be), but is “under the custody of trust and licensed custodians who keep the majority of the crypto in cold storage, and have taken up necessary insurances.” From what I’ve read, cold storage provided by BitGo, who if you haven’t heard before is a major industry cryptocurrency custodian who was involved (but not implicated) with the 2016 BitFinex hack.

Airdropped just last month, $JCOIN is an ERC20 (Token contract address) that serves not only as Juno’s loyalty reward point, but has multiple routes for serving as a utility token as well too. Many tradfi credit cards offer benefits like cashback, points, and/or miles, but $JCOIN has the potential to be a great deal more lucrative, because not only can $JCOIN offer the same benefits as credit card, but they just like any crypto token, have the ability to be mined in liquidity pools, staked, and traded. Just like most altcoins, there are a list of different attributes in regards to $JCOIN tokenomics including:

Minting: 1 billion token were initially minted, which will be minted again once the initial supply is exhausted. For every billion supply that is minted, the overall earning for $JCOIN will be halved, or in other words, instead of earning 1 $JCOIN per dollar spent, you will only be able to earn 0.5 $JCOIN, then 0.25, and so forth. In addition, $JCOIN is only being distributed Juno account holders, and not to VC’s or employees.

Earning: The main way that $JCOIN tokens can be earned is by spending money on your Juno debit card, but you can tack on multiple bonuses by using other account features including:

In addition to regular account features, you can also (for a limited time) claim airdrops for non-Juno related activities with Juno Quests, including:

Even if you don’t currently have a Juno account open, I’d recommend checking the Juno Quests page out to see if you’re eligible, because as I’ll break down the math a little later, with $JCOIN tokens, Juno might be the best place to hold your fiat.

Burning: All tokens that are redeemed will be sent to a burn wallet (0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000), which offsets the token’s potential inflationary minting.

Strictly Loyal: Perhaps the feature that makes it most similar to tradfi cards is because as stated, Juno:

“will not facilitate secondary trading of the Loyalty Tokens or take any other actions to list or market-make secondary trading of Loyalty Tokens.”

In other words, there is no other way to buy, sell or trade $JCOIN, and instead the only way you can obtain them is to be a verified Juno user and interact with Juno directly.

As I mentioned before, there is no current open-market price for $JCOIN because as of right now, it’s not listed anywhere. In order to discern any monetary value, we have to do a bit of math on the value(s) for what a user can redeem. I imagine that this may change in the future, but to date the current options advertised are either redeeming $JCOIN for a Ledger, gift cards, or using them for “boosts:”

Currently, the only options that can be priced are the monthly 5.5% boost (as opposed to the normal 5.0% earning rate) which can be purchased for 350 $JCOIN or for a Ledger which you can redeem for 5000 $JCOIN. Redemption details for gift cards haven’t been released yet, and it won’t really be possible to calculate the value on the other boost options (i.e., 3x earn and boosted cashback), until more information is made available.

Ledger: The standard retail on a Nano S ledger is currently $79 dollars, meaning that at a redemption rate of 5000 $JCOIN, you can redeem 1 $JCOIN for approximately $0.0158.

5.5% APR Boost: The APR (as opposed to APY because as far as I know, your interest gets paid out monthly) is limited up to $10,000 dollars in fiat for a 1-month period, which means if you were to maximize this boost, you could earn potentially $44.72 dollars per month:

At $44.72 for 350 $JCOIN, this would mean that each 1 $JCOIN equates to around $0.12 cents. Compared to the ledger, this is by far the better option but it’s also important to keep in mind that this boost isn’t scalable, meaning that you can only use the boost once per month.

Regardless of all the bells and whistles, for me Juno’s standard FDIC insured 5% interest alone is worth it, and from what I’ve found, it’s currently one of the highest rates in the nation:

However, like with most interest rates, I don’t expect the 5% to last forever and I’ll be keeping my eye on it until then. In addition, you can continue to earn 5% on select brands with their debit cards, without the ridiculous $400,000 stake you would need for other products like with Crypto.com.

Right now upon genesis, it’s really easy to earn $JCOIN as you can earn 1000 $JCOIN for simply opening up an account and setting up your first fiat and crypto direct deposits. If you’re interested in signing up, please consider using my referral link to earn an additional $10 dollars when you fund your Juno wallet with $50 dollars or more.

Thanks for reading, and as always, please be sure to follow me on twitter to read all about my latest findings and updates: https://twitter.com/CryptosWith

Disclaimer: None of this information is financial advice, and is just speculation from me, a random guy on the internet. Please consider this for purely educational and entertainment purposes. As always, please do your own research or contact a financial advisor to find what investments might be best for you.

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