Altcoin.io Interview: A Truly Decentralized & Secure Cryptocurrency Exchange Powered By Plasma
I am on a quest to learn more about new exchanges and trading platforms. I decided to learn more about Altcoin.io. The answers in this interview were provided by Andrew Gazdecki, Altcoin.io CEO.
Could you briefly describe what Altcoin.io is?
Altcoin.io is a platform for trading cryptocurrency peer-to-peer, without ever losing control of your tokens. If our service were to go down or be hacked, users’ tokens are never in harm’s way. All we do is connect one individual to another. We never assume the custodial risk of holding users’ tokens, nor do we have any control over them.
How did you come up with the idea to start Altcoin.io?
I started trading earlier last year and got burnt a few times, made some bad trades, made some good trades, but really loved how much energy was in this community. I loved how people were willing to share and discuss ideas and how fast altcoin technology was emerging. I was hooked.
But I soon discovered a flaw: the exchanges we trust with our altcoins are centralized, which makes them vulnerable to theft. In fact, since June of 2011, ~40 exchanges have been compromised, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars worth of coins.
Many of these exchanges hide in shadow, lacking fundamental business practices like customer service, and do little other than help people exchange altcoins. So when things go wrong, there’s nothing you can do.
If decentralized digital currencies are the future, why do we trust our altcoins to centralized exchanges that are a clear target for hackers all around the world? We trust our funds in places that are literally a digital gold mine for digital thieves.
Could you tell us a little bit about the Altcoin.io team?
I’m Andrew Gazdecki, the CEO, and founder of Altcoin.io I was also the founder of Bizness Apps, which was number #91 on Inc. Magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in 2015. I’m based out of San Diego.
Sule, or Sulejman Sarajlija, is our CTO and lead developer. He specializes in back-end development and blockchain technologies. Day to day, he leads Djenad, Anto, and Azra, who are our engineering team based in Bosnia.
Fabian Vogelsteller is a technical advisor to Altcoin.io. Fabian’s worked on many open-source projects, including Ethereum’s Mist browser and the Ethereum Wallet. He also proposed the ERC20 standard, ushering in a new era of token trading, and brings a wealth of technical expertise and insight to the team.
Fabian joins five other advisors, four of whom are active cryptocurrency traders. That helps support our goal of creating an exchange built by traders, for traders.
Could you describe the vision for Altcoin.io?
Our mission is to bring the entire cryptocurrency community together to create a transparent, trustworthy, and honest market. We believe that will help take the cryptocurrency industry from where it is today, which is around a $250-$300 billion market cap, up to a multi-trillion dollar market cap.
We look at CoinBase, an exchange that made $1 billion in revenue in 2017 by making it really easy to buy Bitcoin and a few other digital assets, including Ethereum and Litecoin. What CoinBase did for Bitcoin, we want to do for altcoins. We want to help people trade securely, easily, and peer-to-peer, without ever giving your tokens to a third party.
What value will Altcoin.io bring to its users?
Also, many other exchanges lack a user experience that builds trust and understanding at every step. For more experienced traders, using exchanges like Bittrex, Poloniex, or Binance can seem relatively easy, but for those just entering the market, they’re pretty daunting. We see a huge opportunity to introduce an exchange that, one, is trustworthy; two, is secure and never takes custody of your tokens; and three, gives an easy and enjoyable user experience with a support team available to help you along the way.
We believe we can attract not only experienced traders, but also traders who are just entering the market and want to diversify their cryptocurrency portfolio beyond Bitcoin.
With what strenghts and features will it bring this value?
We’ve seen countless new decentralized exchanges popping up over the last few months, and this is a great thing. Finally the market is waking up to the failure of centralized exchanges.
But despite losing their users billions of dollars in hacked funds, centralized exchanges still dominate the market. To compete and really change this market for the better, DEXs must have the following characteristics:
- Instant trustless trading
- A great user experience
- Blockchain interoperability
- Liquidity
We originally pursued atomic swaps and smart contracts to address both trustless trading and blockchain interoperability. While we’ve had some success, atomic swaps fail to provide a great user experience for two reasons:
- Transactions can take minutes to be confirmed on their blockchains.
- Users have to pay high blockchain transaction fees.
This constrains trading volume, liquidity, and creates a frustrating trading experience. The community wants security, but not at the expense of transaction speed. So now we’re focusing on building an instant and trustless trading model with an amazing user experience using a Plasma-like sidechain approach.
How will Altcoin.io distinguish itself from other exchanges?
What makes Altcoin.io different than other decentralized exchanges? Scalability. All decentralized exchanges currently suffer from unintuitive, slow, multi-step user experiences which leads to low user adoption and low daily trading volume. Our goal at Altcoin.io is to address these user experience issues and build the first DEX that can truly compete with a centralized exchange. Read more here.
Can you tell us about important developments yet to come and why they are important?
Our first mainnet launch coming later this year. :)
