After some time of silence, I thought it was high time to give my acquaintances, friends and others that might be interested an update on what I have been up to and what led me to where I am now. No, I have not been gardening nor have I been sitting idle. Read on.

Some background

In early 2014 I moved to Saigon, Vietnam, to build an engineering and operations team to work on one of the earliest crypto currency companies in the world, Quoine.

Having spent most of my career in banking, I decided it was time to expand my horizons in an industry that I believed and still believe will change how we do finance in the future. Conceived in late 2013, Liquid.com started as Quoine, and it was one of the earliest crypto spot exchanges in the world. At the time, it was two young Vietnamese engineers and myself doing development, operations, customer support and all that is needed to run a crypto exchange. We worked from my small apartment in Phu Nhuan district, a busy area in the middle of Saigon. The vision was clear. Our team was extremely focused and highly motivated. Soon the team grew to about 10 people by the end of 2014. Our transaction volumes were growing steadily. We were one of the first exchanges to introduce margin trading and lending back in late 2014. By end of 2015, we were the biggest exchange by volume in in Japan, a market we chose to focus on early on. It was a time I will always cherish.

To the Power Traders

Fast forward to 2020, the original vision was lost and disjointed, fragmented by management with no shared vision. I will not comment on what happened or on what led to this, but the time had come for me to move on and so I did. I left Liquid.com. My vision of early years at Quoine still very much alive inside me, I partnered with a group of very capable individuals, a group of builders like myself, to move the vision forward. I learned a huge deal while building and operating Liquid.com, initially as CEO, then CTO and eventually as CPO & President. While at Liquid I learned many hard lessons on what to do and, more importantly, on what not to do.

We are now building a new crypto company. I’ve gone back to 2014 (kind of), but now with a wealth of knowledge and know-how, a non-trivial amount of invaluable experience that we will apply to this new venture. My associates and myself identified what we see as untapped opportunities in the industry and are moving steadily and aggressively towards launching the new platform. We started this new venture two months ago, soon after my exit from Liquid.com.

After having spent the first month or so planning and designing, we are now building from scratch what we call PowerTrade (http://power.trade), a mobile-first crypto options & structured products trading platform unlike anything crypto has seen before. I have been very lucky to have found very capable partners, builders themselves, that were willing to come along for the ride. Our team is small but together we bring in significant experience across key fields such as options trading, pricing & risk management, UX & UI design, marketing & business development, trading systems & low latency technology, mobile app development, operations & management.

PowerTrade will be launching this year around Q3 to a limited number of users. The specific date will be announced at a later time. I look forward to writing more about the platform and product roadmap.

For now, we will keep on building. If you’d like to get early access, visit us here and sign up: http://power.trade