The first time I ever wrote about bitcoin was in May 2015. I was an intern at Bitreserve (now Uphold) and my job was to analyze the competition and publish my findings on Reddit.
My then boss, Tim Parsa (Uphold Co-Founder), would send me $20 bucks worth of bitcoin (the equivalent of 0.1 BTC at the time) to spend on every experiment. I compared OkCoin to Bitstamp, Bitreserve to Coinapult, and some others.
One of Tim’s requirements for any intern at Uphold was that they conceive and build an application using Uphold’s Open API. He wanted to demonstrate how Uphold’s digital money platform could solve money problems all over the world. That’s how AirTM was born.
Ton and I pitched AirTM to Tim and he agreed to work with us to develop the app and staked us with a $70k loan. Because of Uphold we didn’t have to worry about building complex financial infrastructure (things like account creation, AML, crypto conversions, and banking connections) and were able to launch the first version AirTM in just a few months.
Uphold was happy because AirTM gave them an inflow of revenue generating users, and we were happy because we could focus on solving our users problems.
For almost two years, AirTM and Uphold benefited alongside each other from our app/platform partnership. Over the past year it became clear that AirTM’s efficiency and ability to iterate quickly would be greatly increased by having our own registration flow, bank connections, and financial infrastructure.
For that reason, over the past 10 months, the AirTeaM tech ninjas have been busy building the pieces that make up The New Air Platform, including:
- An immutable cryptographic ledger,
- A proprietary registration flow,
- Integration with Identity Mind Global, a leading KYC and fraud-prevention platform,
- Bank connections in the U.S.,
- Banks and cryptocurrency exchange as reserve partners,
- Connections to public blockchains and support of their native tokens, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and soon Air (AirTM’s native cryptocurrency).
With Uphold as a launchpad, AirTM has been able to prove market demand for its solution by signing up more than 150k AirTM Clients in over 100 countries, and processing USD $2mm in transactions every month.
I’m grateful to Uphold for enabling AirTM to get to market quickly, and I’m grateful to Tim for encouraging us to build something on top of Uphold’s API and for believing in us and our crazy idea.
We are 6 days away from becoming independent and it’s all thanks to the our co-founder Jorge and his 100% Mexican tech team.
The Air Platform marks a new era for AirTM, one focused on perfecting the AirTM user experience, scaling our client and cashier base, launching AirUSD (our ERC223 dollar-pegged token), and AIR our native cryptocurrency.
I can’t wait to tell you more about the Air Platform and all the cool new features and services we will be launching in the coming months.
Thanks for your support,
Ruben Galindo Steckel.
AirTM Co-Founder & Co-CEO
