Hello everyone. Here we have Coinsbit CEO and COO who will tell us about their platform and the latest plan for development.
Q: By the way, congratulations on reaching the top 15 of the Coinmarketcap rating. After changing the algorithm, you have become rated higher than before! How long have you been working for it, what do you think about it?
Vincent: Thank you for your congratulations. That’s true that the other day we moved to the 14th place in the ranking, although in fact we always stayed in the top. As soon as the algorithms of rating systems change, we always provide additional information in order to return to previous positions.
Nataly: We are always in favor of any updates, and changes in rating system algorithms allow us to develop the industry, track exchanges by more indicators, thus weeding out unscrupulous exchanges.
Q: And even after changing the algorithm, you still returned to the top 15. This confirms once again that you are the largest and strongest European exchange. But let’s start with a small introduction. Tell us briefly about who you are and how you found yourself in crypto.
Vincent: Hello guys, my name is Vincent Veisman, I am the CEO of Coinsbit exchange. I have always been interested in technological innovations in the financial sector. Managing the software development company I became curious about cryptocurrencies and technologies behind. Continuing the search for a solution that could combine cryptocurrency and fiat, I began to study this technology and gave priority to the projects that used it. Of course, these were mainly exchanges and exchangers.
As a result, I learned about different crypto exchanges, and in 2019, became a part of the COINSBIT team.
After the restructuring and changes in the management team, by the time the past CEO and co-owner Nikolai Udianskyi had left his position, I took the position of CEO.
Nataly: My name is Nataly Simson, I am the COO of Coinsbit. I am a certified specialist in Asia. I have always been interested in innovations and world trends, and so in 2017, I got into the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency, helping various projects to develop in the Asian market.
Actively working in the field of business development, I constantly found new ways and opportunities for development and interaction both for projects and for myself. At one of the business meetings, I learnt about Coinsbit. In 2019, I was invited to the team, and today I participate in all development processes of the exchange as a COO.
Q: Coinsbit operates for 2 years already. This is a good term for the exchange. How does the exchange look in numbers and user base coverage?
Vincent: Coinsbit is the largest crypto exchange in Europe and one of the largest in the world. Over the past two years, the number of users has increased significantly, as well as the trading volume and added trading pairs.
More than 170 trading pairs are presented on the exchange, and IEOs are conducted every two weeks. The total user base reached 2.3 million people from all over the world. About half a million traders are using the exchange daily. Coingecko and CoinMarketCap rating systems assigned the top positions in their ratings of exchanges to Coinsbit. The total audience coverage in our social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram) is about 350 thousand people, and our community is growing every day. We are happy to attract a new audience and delight people with our achievements.
Q: Recently you launched OTC-platform and several internal products before that. What was the reason to set it up?
Vincent: As a customer-oriented exchange, we are paying special attention to simplifying access to fiat-crypto gateways for our users.
You can deposit in 6 fiat currencies: the US dollar, euro, Turkish lira as well as Kazakh, Russian and Ukrainian national currencies.
Due to banking bureaucracy and regulation, we decided to use simpler and faster integration methods, giving our users the opportunity to exchange cryptocurrencies for fiat in different regions.
Nataly: The OTC platform operates on the basis of B2P, wherein each region we have an accredited partner-supplier of fiat. In order to conduct OTC transactions, Coinsbit users use their exchange balances, and our partners directly exchange crypto to fiat and vice versa. In this model, Coinsbit operates as an Escrow to avoid fraud.
Q: There is no news – most of the exchanges nowadays have their own token. How CNB works?
Vincent: CNB is a very simple thing. It is a service token issued for user experience optimization and providing access to various advantages of the exchange.
Aside from trading commissions discount using CNB it can be used to earn additional profit with our Staking pool.
CNB is also traded on Bithumb, BiKi, HotBit, BKEX and other exchanges. A characteristic feature and difference of our CNB token are that we distributed it to users absolutely free of charge – through a referral program. Moreover, we are the only ones who burned 10% of the supply at the end of the first quarter. A total of 1.5 billion tokens were issued.
Q: Back to the internal services. If the idea to have OTC, Staking Pool and so on is clear for any exchange. What was the reason to run Marketplace which is frankly far from the core exchange business?
Nataly: The key product idea was to launch a global marketplace where you can purchase goods from Amazon, Alibaba, Aliexpress and eBay using cryptocurrency. Finally, after a long time development, we launched the Marketplace in March 2020. At the moment, people are able to buy goods with us using CNB token, USDT, USDN, and PLC.
Everything works quite simply and conveniently – you just order products in our marketplace, and payments are made directly from your Coinsbit account. All this happens in just a few clicks, thus the service is truly convenient.
Vincent: Yeah, the reason was mostly to concentrate user activities through our platform. Same thing with P2P lending for example.
As for the last two years, P2P lending became a usual thing in crypto, and we also decided to implement this feature for users.
You can lend or borrow funds on terms you agree within a few simple steps and Coinsbit provides infrastructure and Escrow services to make the process safe and fast.
The main goal here was to build simple service for non-professional traders and non-crypto people who can use the exchange as an investment platform or even absolutely new in the digital currencies ecosystem. Indeed, many people use exchanges as a platform for investing in innovative projects and at the same time as a wallet. It is important to take into account when developing new products.
Q: Okay, so you decided to move your platform to the infrastructure development which is quite logical and can be noted in other players activities as well. I guess the worst or better say: the most dangerous thing here is to be defocused with many parallel processes and the likelihood of the team being out of focus and as a result, the blurring of the core product with microservices. How do you choose the products for development?
Nataly: We feel that trading platforms should give users what they need: easy exchange service with all the popular pairs, familiar financial instruments in order to reach the mass adoption of cryptocurrency as a payment instrument. Coinsbit is taking large-scale steps towards mass use of cryptocurrencies.
Since the exchange is actively developing and the number of new users is growing rapidly, we create new products in order to provide the most comfortable conditions and develop a full-stack ecosystem for our users. OTC platforms, marketplace and other products give users access to the traditional services and it’s also a way to implement cryptocurrencies to the mass market.
Regarding, as you say, “team focus,” it’s worth noting that all the products we launch in our infrastructure have separate command units and organizational structures. Therefore, such an active and rapid development of infrastructure and ecosystem in no way affects the quality of work, since we have a clear division of the areas of responsibility of each of the units.
Vincent: As you can see we are very active in creating a platform not only for professionals but also for all those who are interested in the latest digital innovations.
We want to see Coinsbit as a unique place with users from all over the world. Anyway we also have plans to improve our core product – that is, exchange. In the near future, we plan to launch margin trading and derivatives. For example, futures will allow us to attract more traders and investors.
Q: There are several mentions of the Bitcoin fork Coinsbit plan to support the fork of BTC that is called Bitcoin Ultimatum. Can you confirm these plans?
Vincent: Yes, we are preparing to support launching a fork of Bitcoin Core named Bitcoin Ultimatum or just BTCU. The project is being developed by Prof-it Blockchain development team with the support of Coinsbit.
Project setup is also supported by a number of major market players interested in its further development. The concept of BTCU is quite similar to Ethereum. One of the priority goals is to develop smart contracts and atomic swaps on the protocol layer. It allows users to interact with other protocols, which will expand the capabilities of this technology globally.
Like Ethereum, the BTCU team is opposed to Proof Of Work consensus through the use of cryptocurrency mining capacities.
Ethereum developers use a more flexible approach switching to Proof Of Stake consensus, while the BTCU team decided to completely switch to the LPoS consensus combined with Proof Of Authority.
Q: That’s an ambitious goal to achieve, moreover the launch can be perceived in a very different way by the rest of the community. Why can a new fork of bitcoin be in demand for today in 2020, given the existence of at least several forks, including Bitcoin Cash, Gold, and SV? What’s the point?
Nataly: BTCU is a technical and social experiment that has resulted in the creation of the distributed financial system historically and technically linked to Bitcoin Core. We plan to be accurate and do not want to divide the community with disputes about the most orthodox Bitcoin. Better to think about BTCU as a community attempt to create a semi-private network that is distributed not only with technological methods but also with social capital of the validators.
The main features of BTCU are cross-blockchain Smart Contracts; LPoS consensus algorithm combined with Proof Of Authority; highly confidential transactions and limitation of validation nodes. There will be only 20 validators in the network – large blockchain organizations and other influential companies that determine the vector of the industry’s development. Involving such validators will give the fork the right direction for development.
By the way, this month representatives of the project will visit the Family Office Investment Summit, where they will present the project to the general public of investors and specialists from the traditional world. The BTCU project will be the only representative of the blockchain industry at the Summit.
Q: You already have enough big infrastructure and your future plans also sound like a lot of work. How many people do you have in your team at the moment?
Vincent: At the moment, the total number of employees we have is about 100 people. We do not use outsourcing services and support the platform only with internal resources.
We have a technical team, legal department, support department, marketing team, financial department, headed by top managers of the company. All members of our team are located in several countries in Europe and Asia, working in offices.
Q: By the way, are there any plans to expand your exchange geographically?
Nataly: Of course, being one of the largest exchanges in the world, we always strive to have branches in different regions. We are currently working on opening a branch in India, as well as in Montenegro, where we also plan to cooperate with the government in terms of legislation development in the field of blockchain and crypto.
Q: We all are aware that exchanges are increasingly becoming the subject of attacks from both competitors and regulators. For example, some received a lawsuit from the SEC, among the charges there are some serious matters such as money laundering. There are also scandals about collective lawsuits being prepared for blocking accounts on several exchanges. How do you feel about this?
Nataly: Coinsbit over the years of its work has established itself as one of the most reliable exchanges. For us, the security and legitimacy of transactions carried out on the exchange is important, therefore, with regard to users, we always work in accordance with the regulatory policy.
If we talk about blocking accounts, we never block user accounts if there is no corresponding reason. Accounts on which suspicious activity or fraud was discovered are blocked, and all the activities are checked by us. If no violations were found, users can continue to use the exchange.
We strictly control the issues of regulatory supervision and actively cooperate with regulatory authorities, including such requests.
If we talk about the situations with claims from the SEC in relation to individual exchanges, we are always ready to provide all the necessary information and answer any inquiries.
Q: As a final question for today. What is really important for you in your work – can you share some words about values that stand behind the project team and that you are trying to broadcast in the company and the market?
Nataly: The basic principles in the work of our entire team are quality, speed, the ability to navigate the market and think ahead. That is exactly what allows us to provide our customers with the best service.
In addition to the development of the exchange, we take an active part in educational events as sponsors, organizers and speakers. Such social load is important for us – to share experience and talk about the current situation on the market, present and future trends. For example, in January 2020, we organized the largest blockchain conference in history – Chain2020 in Hong Kong. The event was attended by over 14 thousand people. In addition, we also sponsored conferences such as BlockchainUA, Blockchain Life, and participated in many other major events.
Vincent: It is very important for us to love what we do and to feel the energy of our entire team, the awareness that we are creating the future and are recognized by the community. The active promotion of the platform in international independent ratings confirms this.
Every day a lot of new exchanges appear on the market and the competition is very tough. However, my team and those innovative products and solutions that we create also inspire us. At this difficult time, each of the products that we create are the solution to many problems for people from all over the world. Despite the difficulties, I understand that a new stage in the development of the digital economy is being formed and this is a great chance for all of us.
