Meet the CTO of the 1Konto Trading Platform: Michael Handschuh
Michael Handschuh is the CTO and lead developer of 1Konto, bringing his powerful algorithmic trading platform experience to the company. Michael is spearheading the development of the 1Konto trading platform, with the goal of making cryptocurrency investing mainstream. His focus is on giving traders better prices on buys/sells, cleaner user experience and synthetic pairs that don’t exist on any exchange. Here, Michael answers questions about his background, biggest achievement, passions, and more.
Q: What is your background and field of interest?
Michael: My educational background is in physical engineering, specifically aerospace engineering. I started out focused on modelling and simulation of compressible flow systems in college and then moved on to high fidelity simulations of satellites while working for Lockheed Martin and Analytical Graphics, Inc.
In the five years leading to 1Konto, I found myself at QuantConnect, helping to design and implement an algorithmic trading platform, drawing heavily on my modelling and simulation background. At QuantConnect I was focusing on financial markets, investment portfolios, and financial market algorithms, instead of rockets and satellites.
Q: How and why did you end up building 1Konto?
Michael: At QuantConnect I worked on modelling cryptocurrency markets and foreign exchange markets, and it always boggled my mind as to why there are a limited number of pairs. A cryptocurrency and/or foreign exchange trade is really just a currency swap — you’re selling currency A for currency B, and the price between them is whatever the market will offer. The inefficiencies in the market are exacerbated in the cryptocurrency realm as many trades require the transfer of holdings from one exchange to another just to find the currency B you’re looking for. This is what is known as fragmented liquidity, which costs traders both time and money.
With my background in automation, the solution became clear: a system to provide best price execution through routing orders to the most favorable exchange as well as a system to produce synthetic currency pairs (pairs that exchanges don’t directly offer) as multi-leg orders. That’s when the technical vision for 1Konto was born.
Q: What are your tasks and responsibilities at 1Konto?
Michael: I’m responsible for pretty much everything technical at 1Konto. This includes the technical vision as well as maintaining servers and infrastructure. In these early days, I’m hard at work building out our system which includes writing (and testing!) a lot of code. You may be seeing a short demo of the system come out in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Q: What is your biggest achievement in your career? How about at 1Konto?
Michael: It’s 2018 and the world moves fast, not only development but also our user bases. Today’s users expect software and technology companies to be moving at lightning speed. My biggest achievement so far in my career is building a cloud ecosystem that is 100% versioned (jobs specify what version they want), automatically deployable within seconds and new versions are deployed almost instantly after the code is pushed to github.
My biggest achievement at 1Konto is hands down the ideation and implementation of an algorithm for efficiently routing synthetic currency pair orders in O(1) time. This idea is the backbone of 1Konto’s value proposition through our synthetic currency pairs feature. In addition, even native (non-synthetic) currency pairs benefit from this order routing paradigm.
Q: What are you most excited about regarding the future of 1Konto?
Michael: I’m excited about so many things it’s hard to pick one that I’m most excited about. Obviously being technical, I’m really excited about all of the technical challenges and solutions, both solved and unsolved, that I get to work with on the path to the full release of the 1Konto platform. I’m equally excited about helping to make cryptocurrency investing more mainstream and achieve user experience advancements which the industry desperately needs. I think more people would be involved in the cryptocurrency markets if it was more accessible and didn’t require as much technical knowledge. For example, transferring coins between exchanges for a crypto-naive person is a terrifying endeavor where funds have suddenly vanished and hopefully they reappear on the other end. We’re aiming to remove many of these obstacles making the entire process smoother, safer, and behave in line with retail investor expectations.
Q: What are your personal interests and favorite hobbies?
Michael: My personal interests are wide and varied, ranging from computational fluid dynamics, financial markets and politics, to machine learning and chess. I like to tell people that I’m interested in anything complicated enough to make other people afraid! My wife and I love going on road trips to visit breweries across the country and even just being bums and watching some Netflix (Game of Thrones, please come back soon!). I also enjoy working outside on our house and maintaining a fresh vegetable garden during the summer months.
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About 1Konto
1Konto (German for “one account”) is in process of becoming the first to connect traditional and digital assets through one-click trading. We focus on increasing adoption of digital assets, reducing friction in ownership and bridging the new crypto world and the traditional financial markets all at the best price via our proprietary algorithm.
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