8 years of Bitstamp
A look back over the past year at the world’s longest-standing bitcoin exchange
With the lightning-fast pace of the crypto industry, every year seems to come around in a flash. So as we celebrate eight years of Bitstamp, we wanted to take a moment to look back over the past year and give a brief recap of what we’ve been up to.
Building inside and out
This year’s got us feeling extra fresh as our platform got a front-end upgrade both on desktop and mobile.
In January 2019, we launched a new mobile app, bringing a powerful and intuitive trading interface straight into your pocket.
In May, we tackled the other part of our front-end presence and gave Bitstamp.net a facelift, improving usability and providing a slick look to our page.
That’s what we’ve built on the outside, but we’ve been just as busy on the inside of our platform. On that end, we launched a new in-house WebSocket streaming solution, which reduced latency by 250–270 milliseconds and significantly increased the speed of pushing order_book messages on our WebSocket API.
Our API users already had the option of using a withdrawal address whitelist. This year, we also made withdrawal address whitelisting available through our webpage for all Bitstamp customers.
As the world’s longest-standing exchange, we take pride in the fact that we’ve been supporting the development of Bitcoin since its early days. We believe that the next big step for Bitcoin may be the Lightning Network, which is why we launched our own Lightning Network node in order to help the network grow and encourage other companies to start working with Lightning as well. Check out this page to learn more about Lightning or connect to our node if you’ve got one of your own.
On the business side
Before we dive into the key partnerships we established, let’s address the biggest business-related news of the year: our change of ownership. Bitstamp was acquired by NXMH in October last year. However, the new ownership did not come with many changes. The acquisition gives us a stronger base from which we will continue our global expansion, but our team, leadership, vision and strategy all remain the same, which is one of the reasons we decided this was the logical next step for our company. This was, of course, a big milestone, but it’s actually been business as usual around here. And business is looking great, as we were able to close a number of new partnerships this year.
On the tech side, we got a major boost from partnerships with Cinnober, who we’re working with to implement a new matching engine, and Irisium, whose holistic monitoring platform will help us maintain market integrity at Bitstamp.
A lot of our efforts this year were focused on creating a robust banking infrastructure. We’ve strengthened our banking infrastructure by creating a branched-out network of banking rails to create the most reliable and efficient fiat on- and off-ramp in the crypto industry.
We also worked on establishing different types of relationships with banks — like our partnership with Dukascopy Bank, who is using our infrastructure to enable their clients to deposit and withdraw funds in the form of bitcoin.
Expanding in the States
We’ve had a strong presence in the US from the beginning, but this year marks a new chapter for Bitstamp on the western side of the pond as we decided to move forward with opening a New York office.
On that end, we’ve already obtained a BitLicense, providing further proof that trading at Bitstamp is subject to the same high standards followed by traditional financial institutions, and started filling strategic roles.
So far, we were joined by two senior executives with experience from both crypto and traditional finance. Hunter Merghart joined as Head of US Operations and Caitlin Barnett came on board as US Chief Compliance Officer. However, this is just the start of our stateside expansion and we’re still looking to fill a number of roles before opening our New York office.
Thank you for another year of support!
All in all, year #8 has been great and, as always, we’re grateful to all of you for your continued support. Thank you for giving us the trust needed to make Bitstamp the world’s longest-standing crypto exchange. On our end, we’re looking forward to another year of progress alongside a growing number of awesome companies in the crypto industry.
