The idea for creating an affordable and easy to use peer-to-peer cryptocurrency insurance marketplace, came naturally with the cryptocurrency market growing and diversifying so rapidly during the course of the last year. With over 1,500 altcoins out there and the decreasing dominance of bitcoin, it was only a matter of time before someone created a handy tool for safer trading.
The world of business is constantly evolving. And if we talk about blockchain, it’s in a state of the eruption with everything happening very fast. Let’s look at the blockchain startup creation stages, taking the case of BITRUST as an example.
Finding a problem in the market
And not just a problem — there has been a real pain in the market. “Before we started BITRUST, there wasn’t one single person on our team — a team of true blockchain enthusiasts — who would not lose money trading cryptocurrencies in the past, one way or another. One day we were all saying how great it would be to have an affordable tool for hedging trading transactions. And that’s how the idea of BITRUST came naturally into being,” says Alex Duhamel, CEO of UK-based BTF Project Limited.
Therefore,
- look closely at the growing markets
- find the one you can become really interested in
- make your research, become a participant
- identify room for improvement, locate those gaps
- assess the size of the market — how much is it worth?
- test your idea with some masterminds in your niche
In the case of BITRUST, everything was ready for it to come about. The accelerated growth of the cryptocurrency market cap, and growing numbers of exchanges and crypto wallets all strongly indicated that the market was booming and new participants were joining every day. At the same time, the very infancy of the cryptocurrency market meant that there was a lot of room for improvement and appearance of the conventional fiat currency trading risk management solutions.
Solve it better than anyone else
So, a great idea has been identified. The first question is, how to bring it to life? What technology is best? What is the business model going to be? All these topics should be approached with both practicality of implementation and long-term implications of these decisions in mind.
BITRUST utilizes Ethereum smart-contract technology which guarantees the execution of transactions that have been pre-agreed by both parties. Company CEO Alex Duhamel comments on its goals: “Two of the major values we wanted to bring to cryptocurrency investors were transparency and affordability of this hedging tool. We didn’t want to make it a complicated and expensive instrument that was only for professional investors. We wanted a wide pool of investors to benefit. That’s why making it a P2P marketplace was such a natural step.”
The entire transaction within BITRUST requires both parties — the buyer of insurance and the seller of insurance — to lock their funds in either BITRUST tokens (BTF) or a certain set of cryptocurrencies. After the pre-agreed insurance contract date expires, the BITRUST smart contract is executed in a decentralized and automated way — ensuring that the agreed terms are carried out.
This mechanism eliminates the possibility of fraudulent behavior by any of the parties involved; for example, one party not delivering on the promise (the payment) in a situation where their market prognosis did not go in their favor.
The team makes all the difference
It’s accepted as standard now that there should be a hacker, a hipster and a hustler in each tech-based startup to develop a promising idea into a successful business. At BITRUST — where mature business and entrepreneurial experience meet leading blockchain engineering expertise — things are indeed done from the ground up with particular attention paid to the quality of the user experience.
The business wing of BITRUST — its CEO and heads of business and product development departments — have Master’s degrees from prestigious business schools in the UK and Canada, and have extensive hands-on expertise across multiple industries like banking, HR, finance and audit, and are indeed already accomplished entrepreneurs themselves.
The CTO, Sergey Silin, comes from a FinTech background, and succeeded in attracting a team of talented software developers to launch BITRUST. He introduces the company’s leading engineers:
*Mikhail is an IT Professional with a solid track record within the reinsurance and banking industry. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Riga Technical University. Over the last 5 years he has led the development and engineering activities for core business applications of Fortune Global 500 companies. Mikhail is actively engaged in product requirement elicitation, solution design, product development & delivery (applying practices from Agile methodology and Scrum framework) as well as production operations.
* Alexey Vinar graduated from the Novosibirsk State Technical University. He started his career as a digital producer in one of the leading digital agencies in Russia, gaining experience in working with well-known international brands like IKEA, GoPro, the Discovery Channel, Burton and others. In 2017, Alexey joined the BITRUST team as an Ethereum blockchain developer. He focuses on smart-contract development for the BITRUST platform. Alex believes that no development task is impossible and any idea can be realized.
* Oleg Lupikov joined the BITRUST team in 2017 and is the UX/UI designer for the BITRUST platform. Since graduating from Novosibirsk State University of Telecommunications and Information Science he worked in one of the world’s top five digital agencies as a front-end engineer. Oleg also has extensive experience in launching new startups and is a product owner in a number of promising startups. Oleg is very efficient at designing user-friendly interfaces and attractive product landing pages.
To accelerate its development and meet timeline deadlines, BITRUST works in close cooperation with Hook Production Ltd., one of Russia’s leading digital production agencies, based in Novosibirsk. The firm’s clients include well-known brands from the USA and Europe. Their team of talented software engineers is now working to launch the BITRUST platform by January 2019.
Think long-term and create a community around the business
Every startup should strive for community-scale value growth driven by their product over the long term. To finance the development and launch of the BITRUST platform, the company’s founders — firm believers in blockchain technology and its decentralized nature — decided to create a limited-supply sale of BITRUST tokens (BTFs).
“We want to give everyone an opportunity to be part of the BITRUST project and to attract ecosystem members from different parts of the world, from South Korea to Russia, Japan to Brazil, and further,” says Alex Duhamel, the company’s CEO.
The sale will start on 5th of March 2018 — see more information about the BITRUST ICO structure and the company here.