LGO Community Update March-April 2020

Hugo Renaudin
LGO Group
Published in
5 min readApr 30, 2020

A curated recap of everything that happened at LGO for the past few months !

Highlights:

  • Adapting to life in COVID times
  • B2C2 partnership
  • March: record month for LGO
  • Trading credit lines: a new funding mechanism on our spot exchange
  • New listings: Tether and LGO token
  • New token utility

Adapting to life in COVID times

As most companies in the current context, we’ve had to adapt in early March to fully distributed work. Our teams are based in both France and the US, where local governments have instituted lockdowns and pauses of non-essential business activities.

Because most of our team members are used to remote work, operations and activity have resumed to their normal course in a very short period of time, which has allowed us to withstand the volatility of the month of March. It has been our priority to protect the health and wellbeing of our employees which are all safe and well. We hope that the same goes for anyone in the LGO community.

The LGO Spot Exchange

The past few months have been incredibly busy on the exchange side, with high market volatility and new feature releases on our platform.

We’ve announced in March our partnership with B2C2, one of the leading cryptocurrency liquidity providers, which is taking an equity and LGO token stake.

Volumes in March

March has been our record month to date: $140M traded on the exchange and more than 222,000 LGO tokens burned.

Daily USD volume in March — Source: lgono.de

March 12th — also known as Black Thursday in the cryptocurrency markets — has been the perfect stress test for the resilience and robustness of our platform. When the exchanges of Bitmex or Binance experienced downtimes because of volatility, LGO stood still and our exchange was able to process millions of orders from our institutional clients. As a result, more than $12m were traded on the exchange that day.

New funding mechanism: the Daily Credit Facility

In April, we rolled out an important new feature on our platform: trading credit lines. A first in the crypto industry, trading credit lines allow eligible clients to trade with a low-cost, flexible and scalable funding option. With this feature, trading on the LGO spot exchange becomes actually very similar to trading on a regular FX or equities exchange. We see a big potential in this feature which we’ve tested for a couple of weeks now.

So why is this so important ?
LGO is becoming a better platform as it offers additional flexibility and optionality to our client base. If they choose so, clients have the ability to trade with minimum pre-funding, at scale, with security and with flexibility. Most platforms do NOT allow for something like this, this is a first in the industry.

More information available on our FAQ and our website.

New Trading pairs

With the addition of Tether and LGO token trading, there are now three trading pairs on the LGO spot exchange: BTCUSD, USDTUSD and LGOUSD.

Each have a story:

  • BTCUSD has been and remain our primary market, as it represents more than 90% of the demand we see from clients.
  • LGOUSD is a primordial market for our exchange. It allows our clients and our token holders to buy or sell LGO tokens directly from our platform. By buying LGO tokens, clients can access lower fee brackets, as described on our website.
  • USDTUSD was added to the exchange following the important amount of OTC requests we received from clients on this pair.

New Products

We’ve had the opportunity to officially launch two new products that we had been testing since January: OTC trading and Financing Services.

Both products complement our exchange nicely: our clients can now trade, execute large transactions and borrow assets on the LGO platform — with the same quality of support and service we’ve been offering to our exchange clients. These new offerings are gaining tractions and have been received very positively by our clients.

More information on our website.

LGO Token

Last but not least, some news about the LGO token!

Price evolution

Although the LGO token remains thinly traded on LGO, we’ve seen a strong buying flow on our exchange, with BUY trades almost everyday in April.

The LGO token trades at around $0.033 on LGO, up from a little less than 1cent at the beginning of April.

Buyback metrics

March was a record month in LGO token buyback: more than 220,000 LGO tokens were bought this month, following the all-times-high in trading volume. This was the first token buyback that was processed on the LGO spot exchange. As with any trade on our platform, you can check the transparency of the buyback trade on the LGO Node.

A look at the LGOUSD order book right after the March token buyback: good price action but still low liquidity

New token utility

We are proud to announce that, in addition to allowing our clients to pay in LGO tokens and get trading fee discounts by holding LGOs, we’ll be adding a new utility to the token.

All fees paid by clients of our lending business will be payable in LGO tokens. If they decide to pay in LGO tokens, clients will enjoy a 25% discount on their financing invoice.

As we grow and as our business expands, we’ll strive to add new utility to the LGO token.

In the media

  • The B2C2 partnership was covered by the Block
  • Coindesk wrote an article on our trading credit lines
  • We explained on Nasdaq what happened during Black Thursday
  • Cointelegraph asked us what we thought of MBDCs
  • We discussed blockchain and crypto-exchanges in Forbes
  • We were selected as one of the 100 companies to invest in by Challenges
  • Our partnership with Fireblocks was covered by Cointelegraph

We were lucky to be featured in three different podcasts:

That’s it for now! Thank you for being part of the LGO community and stay safe 🙏

About LGO

LGO is the leading Bitcoin spot exchange for institutions. Live since April 2019, they are trusted by over 50 institutional counterparties across 15 countries. With a boutique approach they provide a suite of fully customizable services, best in class technology, and deep liquidity. With offices in the US and in France, LGO has been selected in the FrenchTech 120 as one of the French global technology leaders of tomorrow. Please contact us at: https://lgo.group

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