Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to write this article about Prism on STEEM. We value our user's feedback & appreciate the detailed overview of our product. We apologized for the delayed response & wanted to reach out about some of the points made about Prism.

Please feel free to shoot any questions that come to mind when reading this to [email protected]. If anything is unclear, we’re more than happy to elaborate.

Monthly fees: While Prism did have monthly fees in early beta, these have since been removed. One of the great things about having Prism in beta is that we get tons of incredible feedback from early users. After hearing from our community that these fees were too high, we decided to remove them.

The Nature of Prism: ShapeShift is, indeed, the counter-party on all Prisms during closed beta. But, because Prisms are fully collateralized (meaning, whatever amount--up to 10 ETH--the user puts into their Prism is matched by ShapeShift), users don’t have to trust that ShapeShift will pay its part at a later time. The smart contract generated upon Prism creation locks up both the users’ ETH and ShapeShift’s matching ETH. This means that users don’t have to trust a counter-party (in this case, ShapeShift), because the entire amount is held from the beginning.

This is why a user can only double the value of their ETH. Once it has been doubled, they’ll be in control of 100% of the ETH in that smart contract. As there’s no more value to gain, the Prism will auto-settle and the smart contract will release the users funds to them. If 4 ETH is put into a Prism, the user can rest assured that their Prism is now valued at 8 ETH.

Asset Exposure vs Asset Acquisition: To be clear, at no time does ShapeShift take possession of any coins for users. Prism is completely non-custodial. When a user creates a Prism, they merely get exposure to the value of the coins they select for the Prism. The value of that Prism will go up or down based on the value of the coins selected, but those selected coins are never purchased on behalf of the user. Users fund Prisms with ETH, the Prism value fluctuates based on the price of ETH relative to the assets in the Prism, and users receive ETH when they close their Prisms. Prism is completely denominated in ETH.

Conclusion: Indeed, competing products have appeared over the course of the last year, but no other product offers users exposure to digital assets like Prism. Prism removes the hassle of handling multiple wallets and private keys, as well as eliminating the security risk of holding assets on a centralized exchange. The combination of security and convenience enabled by the power of the Ethereum network and smart contracts make Prism a truly revolutionary product.

We hope this provides some clarity on Prism. Anyone interested in joining Prism’s closed beta can send an email to [email protected].