A new year of togetherness and opportunities
For the love of blockchain, let’s take 2019 to the moon!
The new year is here, holding within its 365 days and 8,760 hours a ton of opportunities to change the world — our world. With this thought, I, along with every member at Team Koinex, extend the warmest wishes for 2019. I would also personally like to take a moment to thank all our users, backers and believers who stood by us throughout 2018 and because of whose blessings we are where we stand today.
The year that went by
Since the beginning of 2018, the digital assets and cryptocurrency market has witnessed a bumpy ride. Falling prices, fewer ICOs, unfavourable regulations and many more factors have kept the true potential of blockchain technology, decentralisation and a tokenised global economy from blossoming.
For India in particular, things became worse with the introduction of the Reserve Bank of India’s directive to isolate formal banking services from the entire blockchain-based digital assets industry. This was harsh, to say the least, as a few significant exchanges shut shop in India. A bearish market, unavailability of formal banking services, lack of initiatives and finally the complete absence of regulatory clarity dealt a crippling blow to an otherwise booming technology sphere.
Nevertheless, at Koinex, we choose to always look at the positive side. Everyone here is focused on solutions, not the problems. We kept our innovation going and we did our best to keep the industry alive and kicking. We created India’s most loved peer-to-peer trustful token transaction network — Loop. We also introduced a peer-to-peer INR deposit/withdrawal mechanism. We added 32 coins, 72 trading pairs across 4 markets. In addition to this, we introduced India’s first crypto gifting service and conducted numerous trading contests and competitions, giving away prizes over INR 1 crore. Along with these user-focused developments, our Engineering team worked hard on a lot of behind-the-scenes components to enhance the performance of the exchange: we built a world-class trade engine which could handle a million transactions per second. We also developed a real-time messaging service, Pushman, which filled the ticker and orderbooks with data, broadcasting millions of messages every hour. On top of the development, we continuously kept improving the security on the platform, which has always been our priority.
The year that just started
On top of all the things that we did in 2018, we laid out the foundation for our mission — making India a hotbed of blockchain technology development. We hosted our first #KoffeeWithKoinex meetup in Mumbai in December 2018 which received a tremendous response; that was enough for us to gear up and plan to hold regular meetups in every part of the country in 2019. We partnered with another blockchain company in Bengaluru and co-hosted a developer-centric hands-on workshop on EOS blockchain in November 2018. We plan to organise many more hackathons and developer conferences throughout 2019. All of these only serve as a small step and contribution in building the entire blockchain ecosystem in India!
More concretely, we instated a blockchain research and development team within the organisation to study the core technology in depth and build vital pieces of infrastructure which can power the next phase of adoption of Web 3.0 applications. We inaugurated a new Development Centre in Bengaluru — the startup hub of India, and we plan to triple our workforce within the early months of 2019. This year we will work on two major impact areas: cutting-edge research and development of sophisticated technological products/solutions, and building an active community of enthusiasts and participants. This is aligned for all our activities in accordance with our mission.
We are looking forward to 2019, recovering from the unpredictability of 2018. We are energised, focused and dedicated to keep delivering on our promises and executing our vision. We believe this will put India on the global map of excellence in the field of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. In this pursuit, we invite everyone — developers, entrepreneurs, thinkers, policy makers, community spokespeople and the end-consumers — to join hands in forging a path to the future. We also encourage blockchain enthusiasts who would want to join our team to check out all open positions at Koinex. We are actively recruiting across all major roles in all major functions (Engineering, Product, Business, Strategy, Marketing, Operations and others), including senior leadership positions.
Once again, wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year! Let’s make 2019 a big success, together!
