Why we built another Cryptocurrency Calculator & Converter app?
A short story about why we decided to build Shikari, which is not just another crypto calculator & converter app, it’s something new and different. Keep reading to know why.
It was around 5 years ago when I heard the term “Bitcoin”, there was not a lot of buzz around us at that time about cryptocurrencies. So, I assumed it to be some kind of virtual currency for overseas money transfer and went on with my life.
Fast forward 2 years, I discovered the concept of blockchain which I found to be intriguing! Hours of research into the topic and I was amazed! I then understood the reason why cryptocurrencies were such a hot topic.
After a year, I and my business partner met a team of young (22–24) cryptocurrency traders who wanted us to build a cryptocurrency exchange, which we agreed to! It was a great learning experience for our team and it was then I realized the financial scope of investing in cryptocurrencies.
We started development on the exchange but as we had no prior experience in trading crypto, we wanted to get the first-hand experience to build a beautiful and useful product. But how to get started? It was then we discovered websites that listed real-time crypto prices, but a series of questions popped in our heads:
Where was all that data coming from?
Where can I find exchanges that had the cheapest rates?
Prices listed on listing websites were different from what was on the exchanges. Why?
If I invest $100, what best can I get of my investment, and where can I get that?
I thought that just we had these questions until we discussed it with our friends who were into trading, people from online forums and the gentlemen who we were building the exchange for. We realised we were not alone!
After around 15 days of validating our questions, we realised that we should do something about it, an app sounded like a good idea. Our development team had just delivered some major projects and were searching for something to work upon until some new requirements popped up.
Since the last 2 years, we have been organising internal hackathons every now and then, realised it has been a while and the team needed something exciting.
We fixed a date and in less than 20 combined hours of the intense whiteboard, designing and coding sessions we had already published the version 1.0 of our app. It was a learning experience for the team, but it was an emotional experience for me and my partner as the team had performed well with exceptionally good quality, robustness, and efficiency. In record time we had a beautiful and simple-to-use app published in both the stores.
We would love some feedback on the app which we have built from our personal experience!
Here’s the link: http://onelink.to/8w6qpp
Our home: https://www.zivost.com
