In the world of cryptocurrency, one of the most important elements is trust. While Bitcoin itself is a decentralized, trustless system, there are still some untrustworthy people within the Bitcoin world.
Nowhere is trust more important than for trading platforms and online wallet services. After all, these organizations hold your hard-earned coins.
And there has been a laundry list of collapsed Bitcoin platforms this year so far. Mt. Gox, MintPal, Moolah, BitXoin, Flexcoin, Bitcoin Trader, Dogevault, the list goes on and on.
As these platforms fall apart, they create new opportunities for entrepreneurs to come in, learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, and build what will hopefully provide a better, stronger trading platform.
One of those entrepreneurs is Virgile Rostand, developer of the newest cryptocurrency trading platform CoinSquare. Virgile sat down with The CoinFront to talk about his project.
So what’s your background Virgile? What did you do before you entered the cryptocurrency world?
After earning my PhD in Mathematics and a Masters degree in Mathematical Finance, I began working as a financial engineer and consultant within the financial sector. I developed some pricing and risk management software which banks and hedge funds use. But after I discovered Bitcoin, and started wandering further down the rabbit hole, I realized the potential cryptocurrency has.
And what was it that made you finally take the plunge? When was it?
Bitcoin has been on my radar for almost three years, but it’s only in January of last year that I really decided to go with it full-time. The main reason would be that I now believe that Bitcoin (and blockchain technology) has the potential to significantly change the way modern finance is working. I see the market for crypto finance gaining momentum and I wanted to be part of that revolution.
Agreed! We can all contribute in our own way. But while some of us create their own coins, others build merchant adoption programs, and still others start Bitcoin news websites, you decided to start a trading platform. Why?
I had different business ideas back then and a crypto exchange wasn’t my first choice. However, as a lot of people, I was disappointed with the current state of affairs of existing exchanges. Scandals, hacks, and secrecy was everywhere! I realized I couldn’t run a proper crypto business if there wasn’t an exchange I could trust in the first place. So here we are, CoinSquare is born.
What sets CoinSquare apart from other cryptocurrency trading platforms?
The first thing you are going to notice is our user interface which is like nothing else in the market. We especially designed everything from the ground up for our users to enjoy a unique trading experience that is more intuitive and customizable than anything else, and without the need to install or download software on your machine other than a standard web browser. It also aims at being very responsive with live updating data, and without the need to reload pages over and over. I wanted to make the design usable on touch screen devices which are becoming more ubiquitous on the market.
All prices are quoted in bits by default (1,000,000 bits= 1BTC). This make values more readable and easier to type.
The trading happens in real-time with live updating data, public exchange data distributed using high availability cloud servers. The trades are executed as soon as they are confirmed and accepted by the exchange instead of being queued and checked after by another process like some other platforms.
We also have low trading fees: starting at 0.1% per trade, we are priced among the lowest.
All that sounds great, but Bitcoiners are more wary than ever of surrendering their coins to a centralized organization. How do you plan on securing the trust of the Bitcoin community?
In two words, transparency and security.
Security is paramount! We offer email verification and confirmation for account sensitive operations, 2-factor authentication, and active IP monitoring per account in order to prevent unauthorized access. Your passwords are stored using the very strong bcrypt algorithm and the user information is held on privately owned servers only accessible by CoinSquare (not on a virtual private server).
CoinSquare also runs a completely independent “backoffice” application whose role is to reconcile our books and make sure everything adds up in real time. If a problem is detected there, the exchange withdrawal process shuts down immediately and a service request is sent out to our administrator.
As for transparency, it comes in different forms. First, from the management side, I want to emphasize that CoinSquare will be run with the culture of a proper financial corporation with the fiduciary duty put above everything else.
CoinSquare is incorporated in Canada and registered as a money service business. We are commited to respecting existing legislation and staying ahead of the curve with a strong know-your-customer policy and identity verification process for applicable financial transactions.From the technical side, we have plans to implement proof of reserve in order to show our individual users that their deposits are backed and allocated to actual coins on their respective blockchains. That won’t be ready for launch, but will be implemented later. We believe in making the business as transparent as possible by leveraging the blockchain technology. We actually believe that blockchain technology can make a financial business much more transparent than our currently existing financial institutions, and we are certainly moving in that direction.
Where would you like to see CoinSquare by this time next year?
We’ll be opening coin-to-coin markets immediatly and coin-to-fiat very soon as well, with both USD and CAD. As things develop, CoinSquare will continue adding features and markets that will help you manage your cryptocurrency portfolio. In short, we want to give you the best platform possible, to make it a turning point in the development of the cryptocurrency economy.
What do you think is the biggest issue facing the Bitcoin community today?
Merchant adoption rate is still very low, although we have seen impressive progress during the last year with Dell, Overstock, Expedia, and others. The more people are willing to accept BTC as a mean of payment, the more useful it will be. This should drive down volatility and help establish BTC as a store of value in the long run.
Your platform specializes in crypto-to-crypto trades. Which coins do you think are the most interesting currently?
As the owner of a trading platform I don’t think it’s my place to comment on individual projects directly. But I would say that the main factors that makes a coin interesting (and valuable) are community endorsement, innovation, and merchant adoption. We selected a set of 11 crypto coins to start with based on these factors, in particular we have Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Darkcoin, and Blackcoin, XCurrency, Peercoin, VeriCoin, Vertcoin, Primecoin, and Auroracoin. We’re also keeping a close eye on so called crypto 2.0 coins as well and will be adding more coins based on demand and new oportunities as they show up.
What’s the hardest part of building a crypto exchange?
Security, hands down. Everything needs to be secured so tightly. You need multiple layers of security in case one layer fails so you can detect it and take effective counter measures. Some people are working very hard to get into exchanges and steal other people’s coins. You have to be ahead of them all the time and never let your defenses down. It’s like playing chess and you have to plan 2-3 moves ahead all the time.
Great, thanks Virgile! Where can people go to find more information about CoinSquare?
The best way is to visit the platform itself. Stop by and say hi in the site’s integrated chat box! We’re also on Twitter.
New Trading Platform CoinSquare Aims To Be More Secure And Transparent
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