A Letter from our CEO to you
Dear Quidaxians,
The story behind Quidax all started in 2014 when I tried to buy my first Bitcoin. Like a kid before cake, I was fascinated about how the thing worked and I still am — deeply. At the time, buying Bitcoin with Naira was a nightmare but eventually, I found someone online who was willing to accept my Naira for Bitcoin. Full of excitement, I transferred my Naira to the person expecting the Bitcoin in my wallet. Haq haq haq! Let’s just say that to this day, I am still awaiting the confirmations on the blockchain. I do count that experience as good tuition though, as it has helped shape the way we think about everything we are building at Quidax; simple, secure and transparent.
We are building for a world where people are free to move their money across borders, just like sending a text message. We are building a cryptocurrency gateway for all of Africa, a platform that helps businesses and individuals seamlessly move from cryptocurrency to their local currency and back. Africa somehow always ‘carries last’ but in this, we are taking a stand and saying, “not today!”.
Now, over the last couple of months as we clocked 45k users, $8 million monthly trading volume and counting, the demands on our people and technology have greatly increased (think 10x). Admittedly, we have had some hiccups and near-roadblocks in our delivery of the value we promise to you our users. As a customer-centric company, your feedback and our responsiveness to it is at the core of our strategy. And so to that end, I’ll be taking the rest of this letter to list and address these issues, detailing what we have done or are currently doing to solve them permanently. Here goes:
- Deposits
- Withdrawals
- Two-factor Authentication
- Quidax Mobile App
- Liquidity
Deposits
This is mostly with delayed deposits (with respect to bank deposits only) and it has been a pain for some users where they don’t get value in their wallets on time. I know, firsthand, how frustrating this must be for you and I sincerely apologize. To address this, we are deploying an automated deposit system where you transfer to a unique account number generated for that transaction. Once you make the transfer to that account, your wallet is automatically credited.
Another deposit option also in the works is a personalized bank account number tied to your Quidax wallet such that once anyone credits that account number, your Quidax wallet is instantly funded.
The first option will be out by last week in August while the second would be live in September. We believe that with these in place, cases of delayed deposits would be a thing of the past and so we will also be disabling the option for Direct Bank Transfers to our bank account once the new solutions are deployed.
Withdrawals
We have also had some issues with our payment partners which delayed withdrawals for some users. Our goal here is to ensure you can move money from your Quidax to your bank account instantly at all times of the day and week. We are currently integrating with other payment partners to ensure smoother service delivery for withdrawals and this is set to be completed in the month of September.
Two-factor Authentication
Security is a huge deal. Starting out, we prioritized preventing unauthorized access to your account and funds especially with respect to withdrawals, hence we made Two Factor Authentication (2FA) compulsory for this account action. This, however, proved to be a recurring pain-point for a lot of our users, so much so that a number of users ask for it to be deactivated on their account. We listened and have since made 2FA for withdrawals optional. Still, we will as always advise that you use 2FA for account security.
As an extra security check for those who don’t have 2FA enabled, we will be introducing email confirmations of your crypto withdrawals (going live in October). In addition, for local currency, you will only be able to withdraw to bank accounts with names that tally with the verified name on your Quidax account.
Quidax Mobile App
Every day, we get multiple requests for this and because we are users like you, we too want it as much as you do. It’s been a while coming and our team has been hard at work on this. We are excited to share that we will very soon be rolling out our mobile app for Android and iOS. A select number of users would be getting emails to join us in beta testing the first version of the app by the first week of September. We’ll be dropping more details about this in the coming weeks. It’s almost here people!
Liquidity
This is a fundamental issue and one that is very close to our hearts because it borders on transparency and is at the core of our business and value proposition. We want the whole process to be transparent because in actual fact, you are buying from and selling to another customer and so there is no time we would benefit from you getting less than you expect. It is always heartbreaking receiving customer complaints — especially with the Instant Buy/Sell feature — along the lines of “I sold, I was expecting 150k and I got 146k, what happened?!”.
In the coming weeks, we will be deploying two solutions to properly and permanently fix this.
First, we are reworking the way the Instant Buy/Sell works such that you will now get a confirmation of the exact price and the exact amount you will be spending/getting before you place the trade. Once you confirm them, you will instantly get that value — basically, we absorb any potential loss due to market slippage at the time of the transaction.
Secondly, on the order book, we are working on solutions and partnerships to ensure wayyyyyy more liquidity than what currently obtains. We see you being able to buy and sell volumes of over 100 BTC in a day. We know you guys will love that, and we will too. Shout out to 007! (If you know, you know). This should be live by September. Please watch this space.
Another update worthy mention is Tiered Account (KYC) verification. The process is now as seamless and simple as ever. We have divided it into different tiers so you can easily verify from level one and go up as you require higher transaction limits. We wrote something on this here.
Have no doubt, we are building for you. Providing you with a service that just works, simply and seamlessly delivering the value you expect from us is what we keep striving for. Today we have customers (businesses and individuals) in 71 countries of the world, we help businesses accept cryptocurrency and receive local currency in their bank account in 9 African countries and we are just getting started yet. We didn’t accomplish this alone. While good people at Quidax ‘die on the line’ every day to make the vision reality, it is because of you our customers, who have stood with us since Day 1, through the ups, and downtimes, the errors and bugs, the wins and the milestones. We say thank you. We are because you are. Upward and forward Quidaxians.
With love & respect,
Buchi Okoro
