The folks in Australia might be pleased to know that there’s now a new bitcoin exchange in the country based out of Sydney.
Dubbed Independent Reserve, the exchange’s chief executive officer — Adam Tepper — says the exchange will add a valuable source of liquidity to the global bitcoin market.
And with a team composed of financial and IT professionals, the exchange is sure they can provide clients with unrivaled security and protection.
“Our proprietary technology includes many levels of safeguards to ensure users are well protected. We have the last mover advantage, and have spent thousands of hours on R&D and learning from other venues to make sure our platform is completely robust,” said Tepper in a statement.
Interestingly enough, it seems as if Independent Reserve is going down their own road when it comes to their policies, and they’re not following the other couple of exchanges in Australia.
For instance, they don’t plan to charge GST (goods and service tax) on transactions. According to company CTO Adrian Przelozny, Independent Reserve doesn’t think users should be penalized for using bitcoin.
“We provide an open marketplace for buyers and sellers to meet – we don’t buy or sell Bitcoin in its own right,” he said. “Therefore we are not required to collect GST on the value of Bitcoin traded. We do include GST as part of the brokerage fee charged to Australian customers, but we absorb that cost.”
Tepper says that Sydney, Australia is an ideal place from which to manage and run the exchange.
“Australia is politically stable with a strong regulatory regime,” he says. “We have spoken consistently with ASIC and the ATO as Independent Reserve has developed, as well as had the company audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. We’re very comfortable that we have the right settings here to ensure its safety and success.”
With reference to security and redundancy, Independent Reserve is operating their business out of two Tier-3 data centers in the Sydney area. All data is replicated to both centers in real time, ensuring a full backup at another location that can be accessed at any time.
Data transmitted to and from the company’s servers are encrypted multiple times using geographically-dispersed keys that are spread across four data centers. As one might come to expect, a majority of bitcoins will be stored in cold storage.
Independent Reserve will be charging clients a flat-rate fee of 0.5% on all trades — though is willing to negotiate on that rate with market makers and high-volume traders.