Beaxy Exchange | AMA — Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Steve Sofocleous
Beaxy Exchange
Published in
7 min readMar 18, 2021

The questions for this AMA were gathered from traders from both Twitter and Telegram and will feature:

  • Naeem Master, Head of Operations
  • Nick Murphy, Co-President
  • Cooper Craighead, Head of Support
  • Bay Abbot, Co-President

Let’s dive into the first question from a member of beaxy black.

Are there any plans to support staking? And to go along with that, what are the major obstacles if there are any?

[Naeem Master, Head of Operations]

So the short answer there is yes, I would say that there’s a lot of work that we need to do on our backend in order to facilitate staking. That’s probably why it isn’t a short-term priority. But to summarize it, yes, we do have plans to offer staking.

Now, what are the biggest obstacles with staking? You need to be able to have the overall staking power in order to make it beneficial for users. One of our biggest obstacles is would we be able to provide users with that power?

Currently, not right now. But that’s something that we would obviously have to launch campaigns around. In summary, the long-term priority is yes, it’s something that we do want to do. We’ll obviously work towards it. It’s a big part of crypto. I think that long-term, it makes a lot of sense. And it fits well into our overall vision of how beaxy will look one day.

What has been the most surprising regulatory issue that you’ve had to deal with?

[Nick Murphy, Co-President]

I think all of us at beaxy and pretty much everybody in the crypto space are still surprised that in 2021 we still don’t have any real regulatory guidelines.

The lawmakers around the world have been very short-winded with what they have to say in terms of what folks can and cannot do. In a conversation yesterday with the team, we talked about how legal guidelines tend to follow the trends not go before the trends. With crypto being so new, it’s something that we’re gonna have to win. To answer the question in simple terms, the most surprising issue that we’ve got to deal with is the lack of guidelines.

We’ve seen a lot of work done by beaxy these past few months to help make the API compatible with Hummingbot and Gunbot. Do you see additional work needing to be done to strengthen the API’s functionality?

[Cooper Craighead, Head of Support]

What we have now is substantially improved. In terms of ease of use and stability. It’s difficult to say that development will ever be 100% complete on it. However, the core functionality that’s necessary for almost any integration is, including some integrations that we’re researching for the future.

I think when you pull the curtain back and you look at the API, the work that was done was done around the authentication, it was done around a new server so that we’re not querying the same server and overloading it and opening that new server so that can be queried for trading history on Gunbot.

A lot of things were done to optimize those trading bots.

As we add further integrations, and as we add more bots, and more people using them, we’ll have to scale up from there.

In the last part of this question, will the API improvements need to be made to allow for MetaTrader 5 to function:

MT5 operates on an entirely different API, the FIX API, which connects to the platform on a different level. It’d be easiest to think of it in terms of your internet connection, the REST and WebSocket APIs that bots and users connect to is like your cable internet connection. Whereas the fixed API is like the trunk line that your internet provider uses to connect to a much larger system.

What is your game plan for marketing in the near future to get new traders?

[Bay Abbott, Co-President]

To give some insight into what marketing has been doing and what it’s focused on, a couple of metrics I thought were noteworthy; there’s been a 3x increase inactive users in the last 30 days. We’re currently sitting at 14,000.

Over the last month, there have been 61,388 sessions, and those include returning users. There’s been a 728% increase in signups from Q1 of last year to Q1 of this year. As far as our email metrics, we’re seeing a 13.22% over the average open rate for financial services businesses. If you look on Google and you type in BTC, to USD, we’re sitting in the 8 to 15 range for rankings.

The reason I say all of this is because we have to act with surgical precision on the marketing side. What we’re doing right now is doubling down on the things that are working. We are seeing results in SEO, we’re seeing results in beaxy black, we’re seeing results with bots, and upwards of 70% of the trading done in crypto is done by bots.

We have this proven hypothesis that when we get Gunbot and Hummingbot, those are two important pieces of the puzzle along with any other bots.

Everything is directionally correct. I think how this kind of ties into your question, LOTH, is the lifetime value of the customer. That’s a major focus for us because we’re getting these people in the door. We’re seeing record numbers in signups. But then how do we get those people to trade through our sales process? That has to do with things like a nurturing funnel, push notifications, things like that are the internal marketing.

I understand you can’t list every project and there’s got to be some overall volume on other tokens before you take the next step. What is the reason we don’t see more listings to take volume away from other exchanges? What is the strategy? I know you guys follow the US rules closely, is that the main reason?

[Naeem Master, Head of Operations]

Fundamentally, yes, being that we are a US-based exchange and are generally under a lot more scrutiny than exchanges worldwide. We need to do our due diligence on every aspect of the project before listing it.

I wouldn’t say that is an obstacle to listings, I would say that it puts us in a better position, because that means we are listing projects that we are very comfortable with that meet our criteria and our requirements from a compliance perspective.

We do have other requirements as well. Liquidity is obviously a fundamental requirement that we work with projects on. If a trading pair has poor liquidity on the exchange, that’s a bad reflection on us, and it’s a bad reflection on the project as well.

That said, do we have any listings planned? Yes, we do have listings planned. And it’s just a case of working through the process and obviously we’ll list those when the time is right.

Is there any additional utility plan for BXY?

[Naeem Master, Head of Operations]

The core function of BXY is to serve as a mechanism for discounted fees. That’s where its utility inherently lies. We are always looking to add more utility into the token, we have drafted out several models for various different functions. Those models aren’t finalized yet. They’re still going through the paces.

Are there any plans to add Fiat to Fiat pairs?

[Naeem Master, Head of Operations]

What the question is effectively asking us is, do we have any plans to be an FX brokerage? The short answer to that is no. The reason for that is because retail FX brokerages are highly regulated in the US. With all the regulatory obstacles that we would have to overcome, it’s not a route that we will go down right now.

Will beaxy integrate any additional credit or debit card providers?

[Nick Murphy, Co-President]

The answer to that is certainly, we have several that are already in progress or complete in development, and soon to be released. Obviously, we want to make it as easy and cheap as possible for users globally, to onboard and off-board.

I’ve been in constant communication with eight or so different providers right now, two to three of which are already either integrated or being integrated. We will continue to build that out. But again, my goal is to have it be where you can be anywhere in the world and still have fees that are not gouging you.

Are there any plans to add a USD to USDC pair?

[Naeem Master, Head of Operations]

We do have the infrastructure for it, we can list that if there is significant demand for a USD to USDC pair to be listed. That is something we are open to doing.

Is there a 100% implementation roadmap for the Dragonchain integration?

[Cooper Craighead, Head of Support]

From the back end, the integration is complete. All of the trading information has been provided to the dragon chain provably fair system, it’s viewable there. Beaxy order ID’s can be plugged into their system, and it will return all the information that you need.

The final point of integration is really kind of a matter of convenience. It’s allowing a user to link directly from the trading platform to the provably fair system. Over the next few months, we will rework several aspects of the UI to improve the user experience.

When will you allow Georgia residents to use the exchange?

[Nick Murphy, Co-President]

That’s a great question. Georgia, like several of the other states that we don’t currently support, are not supported because of certain guidelines in the laws around those states.

We are always working to build out support in more states. That is something our legal team is currently working on. I don’t have an exact answer to when but as soon as we can.

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