Entering the second crypto decade #10AB
Different cultures celebrate New Year on different dates. For most of the world, the new year happened two days ago. For us, it’s today. As we enter the second crypto decade, we’ve chosen a new date as our time to reflect back and think about the future.
Bitcoin was launched on 3 January 2009, exactly 10 years ago. For us in crypto, this is the most significant date there is. To mark our commitment both to the industry and the unique culture that emerged in this community, we propose a new New Year. 2019 AD with its beginning on 1 January doesn’t really have much significance for us. Rather than that, we’re celebrating the year 10 AB starting on 3 January. Anno Domini becomes Anno Bitcoin.
After the massive bull run of 2017, people have been talking about 2018 as a down-period for crypto. For those of us in the industry, it has actually been the more exciting year. The bull run was a crazy period that saw the entire industry scrambling just to keep up with demand. After the rally, we were able to examine our processes and improve our foundation for the future.
But the thing is, 2018 hasn’t really been a down-period. Now that the year is over, we can look back and put it in perspective. In comparison with 2017, both the trading volume and total number of trades increased significantly.
On the industry side, these numbers show a very successful year, with definite growth. The reality for investors, however, is a bit different. Prices have gone down across the board, but the situation is better for some cryptocurrencies than others. There’s a belief that prices move more or less in unison — the market follows the movements of BTC. But if we take a look at the average prices over the entire year and compare that with the current price, the picture looks a bit different, with some of the 5 cryptocurrencies Bitstamp supports currently sitting much further from their average than others.
For us at Bitstamp, the last year of the first crypto decade was all about growth. We continued scaling our team in all departments and reached a few important partnerships to improve our tech arsenal. In November, we partnered with Cinnober, a global independent provider of technology solutions for the finance industry, to create a new matching engine for our exchange.
“Our platform’s order matching speed is expected to become 1250x faster, while throughput will increase by 400x.” — David Osojnik, Bitstamp CTO
The traditional financial infrastructure has, historically, pushed crypto away. When Bitstamp was founded, there was no way we could get a partnership with a clearing house, or a custodian, or a kyc provider. It was up to us to establish the processes we needed to function, meanwhile a traditional exchange could just outsource each part of their operations to a company that focuses on that specific field.
Our vision is to provide the bridge between these two worlds.
However, as the crypto market matures, it is growing closer to traditional finance. Our vision is to provide the bridge between these two worlds. Creating a new matching engine in close cooperation with Cinnober is another step on that journey.
Besides catching up with traditional finance performance-wise, our goal for the second decade is to maintain our position as a pioneer of best-practices in security and consumer protection in crypto. The main topic emerging in the industry right now is ensuring market integrity and establishing more consumer protection. In order to stay at the forefront on these matters, we recently partnered with Irisium, a state of the art market monitoring platform. We already placed an emphasis on market integrity and are entering the new decade with a technology upgrade on that front.
Our goal for the second decade is to maintain our position as a pioneer of best-practices in security and consumer protection in crypto.
Bitstamp has been supporting the crypto industry longer than any other active exchange. A few years ago, we assessed the direction crypto was going and decided to focus on building a strong foundation based in security, reliability and compliance. For the past few years, that’s been our focus and we’ve made significant progress. But the work we’re doing isn’t always obvious to the public — you don’t see the underlying infrastructure, just the front end on our webpage or app. We’re aware it’s been a while since our user interface was updated. However, we intend on changing that very soon.
Bitstamp has been supporting the crypto industry longer than any other active exchange.
Everyone on our team is excited about the second crypto decade, because for us, it represents a turning point. The foundation has been built, now we get to work on projects that will be directly visible to our users, starting with the launch of our new mobile app! A brand new iOS and Android app is currently in closed beta testing and will be publicly released by the end of January.
That’s how we’re starting 10 AB. Expect to see more announcements, partnerships and product updates over the course of the year. The second crypto decade is here and we’re confident this is the era when we finally bridge the gap between crypto and traditional finance.
Wishing you a happy New Year and successful 10 AB,
The Bitstamp Team
