Craider breaks down its service into three pillars which form a holistic approach to trading: Manage, Grow, and Convert. We are thrilled to announce that starting this week we have shifted to a freemium model, which means all users will have free access to all features that fall under the Manage pillar for an unlimited amount of time.
These features include alerts like a daily news summary, and notifications that signal price changes on selected Digital Assets. Also available to users are aggregated portfolio balances, which enable users to easily view and manage multiple accounts (currently integrated with Binance, Kraken, Poloniex and Coinbase), direct buy and trade executions and access to the Craider web platform.
In this post we will focus our thinking on the “Manage” pillar and why we decided to go Freemium, taking a historical look at other industries and markets, and what that might mean for Digital Assets.
Freemium Models and Growing Users
Financial trading, in both the traditional and crypto sense, has often been only accessible to the elite, whether they be the moguls of Wall Street or the deep-tech savvy crypto investors. At Craider, we believe in the democratization of digital asset investing and trading, and our mission is to make digital asset trading accessible and reliable for everyone, no matter your nationality, income group, experience level, or age bracket.
With this mission in mind, our pricing structure has evolved and we are now offering previously unavailable trading products and features to the wider masses whilst employing a freemium and pay-as-you-go model in order to maximize the total number of participants — in this case in the Digital Assets Market. Our decision was largely based on two previous case studies: Vanguard’s revolutionary approach in traditional trading and the rapid growth of Gaming in-app purchases.
Real life examples: Vanguard and Freemium
The first ETF was launched in the US in 1993, and were used by institutional investors, using complex trading strategies to garner an immense amount of wealth. Financial advisors and individual investors soon followed suit. Vanguard launched its first exchange-traded fund (ETF) in 2001, and was made accessible to laymen, opening the market to new players for the first time. Though scoffed at initially, this process of democratizing, or making this particular investment vehicle accessible to the masses “on the cheap”, has been generating tremendous growth and proving it’s value year after year.
We’ve seen a similar phenomenon (lowering of barriers to entry and personalization of charges) in the gaming world with games widely moving to freemiums models, where instead of purchasing games, users purchase in game items via microtransactions. Once thought to be unsustainable, revenue from in game purchases outgrew subscription based revenue in the US back in 2010. The online games freemium market is on track to bring in close to 140 billion in revenue this year, which is a whopping growth of 13.5%, when compared to 2017. This tremendous growth was made possible by removing the cost barrier that existed for people interested in games as opposed to targeting the hardcore gamers, as well as opening up new markets by using current technological advances (Facebook, smartphones).
By offering automated trading strategies at a fraction of the costs of current investment tools, being offered on messaging platforms like Telegram, which already had mainstream adoption, Craider aims to ease the entry into the crypto market for the layman investor with the goal of seeing similar effects that were had on the traditional asset markets carried over to the Digital Asset space.
Countering whale volatility with schools of fish
Today, just like in the pre-Vanguard days of the financial world, there is a great consolidation of ownership of Digital Assets . Large players are stretching the market to extremes — whether it be so called “whales”, who own large crypto blocks, or the large mining pools, with more than 80% of the bitcoin mining pools are located in China. These movements usually correct themselves in due time, however it is the size of the market correction that scares novice investors as they fear their funds could halve overnight. Yet big market moves can be countered with a lot of little nibbles in the other direction.
Our goal with bringing arbitrage, for example, which is nothing other than taking advantage of a market inefficiency across exchanges or currency pairs, to the masses, is that it will temper the volatility of the crypto market enough to make it more attractive not only for institutional investors with less risk tolerance, but also for the mainstream everyday investor. In this way we hope to pull the crypto market forward and increase adoption and favorability of the use of crypto as an investment vehicle, by creating a more mature and reliable market place.
This post was written by Boyko Draganov (CEO) and Seetha Val (Head of Community) at Craider and is part 1 of 3 Medium articles. Part 2 will be posted next week, so follow us on Twitter or Linkedin to stay up to date on our progress!
For a full view of Craider’s product offering, please visit our website or join our Telegram chat.
Craider is a digital assets platform consisting of a mobile messenger bot, a web based portal and a multi-functional exchange, all powered by data driven analytics. Craider’s aim is to streamline the flow of funds between platform users, traditional financial markets and the emerging digital asset economy.
