... BNB, the inhouse digital asset of leading crypto exchange Binance.
Part of what will make BQT Exchange (BQT.IO) unique among decentralized exchanges is our approach to curating pairs. As we covered in this space last year, some exchanges are overly aggressive with how they limit what’s traded on their platform, while others offer absolutely any fleabag token if someone, somewhere, might get hoodwinked into buying it.
“We best serve the sophisticated market — traders who know what they’re doing. We don’t see the sense in reining in their instincts if they want to buy an obscure coin that I might not want to put in my own rainy-day fund. But we also don’t want to waste their time with pairs of obvious failures or frauds just to say we’re libertarian purists,” I wrote in October. “We will bring to market not a specific number of coins but a specific mix of them. Each must have a reason to exist in the market and an ability to create a community of buyers and sellers. We can facilitate, we can make it easy to trade, we can provide support. But no exchange can by itself, not even Binance, can create liquidity.”
I honestly wasn’t tipping my hand at the time. The broader point was that the popular query speculators ask issuers, “When Binance?” is the wrong question. It is an example of irony rather than of calculated misdirection that our dex’s first non-currency token will be the one listed for the world’s largest centralized exchange.
Which raises the question, why?
Token interest
Obviously, BQT will trade BTC, ETH, XRP and other widely adopted cryptocurrencies. The next step is to introduce those tokens which we believe will have the most robust investor interest. BNB emerges from the pile because of the BQT team’s abiding trust in its issuer, Binance. We simply respect how they do business in crypto. Their core operation of centralized trading might not be our business model, but you can’t ignore how well Changpeng Zhao’s team executes on its own.
A big part of that execution is that they don’t stick to their core. They are building a dex affiliate, as well as pumping a ton of money into R&D with the brief of strengthening the overall blockchain ecosystem and driving wider adoption of the technology.
This comes from The Cryptonomist’s interview with Mariana Gospodinova, CZ’s handpicked second-in-command who was tasked with establishing Binance’s headquarters in Malta. Here’s her full interview with editor-in-chief Amelia Tomasicchino.
(On a side note, Mariana chose to establish Binance’s corporate residency in Malta while locating the exchange in Jersey, an offshore haven nominally within the United Kingdom. This is actually the opposite of BQT’s position at this time, as we intend to establish our exchange in Malta and continue to find a venue for our corporate headquarters — although it probably won’t be Jersey.)
Personal touch
It’s not just Binance’s fundamentals that support strategic choices for listing in this space. Fundamental analysis is great — as long as you’re not the only one it’s matter to. And sometimes it feels like we are.
Same can be said for technical analysis, although it’s obvious that BNB scores style points there. After only a year and a half of existence, it boasts the 14th-highest market cap of any digital asset. It also managed to hold onto its value throughout the dismal bear market of early December 2018. Maintaining its exchange rate relative to the U. S. dollar, it had quite the run-up in bitcoin terms. (“Crypto winter? What crypto winter?”)
Sometimes it comes down to who you know, especially when dealing in a space that has seen so many bad actors distract from the truly transformative work to be done.
In this case, we can point to the mutual regard shared by Mariana and our strategic advisor and investor (“ICOdriver”) Luca Cotta.
Cotta is the core team member of blockchain lender ETHlend, a respected ICO analyst for ICObench and a successful educator and advisor on all things crypto. He is also, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, “il fratello mio. ... Every ICO Luca touches goes to the moon!”
Mariana wasn’t among Binance’s founders. She was hired last year because of her expertise in payment processing and talent as an executive. She’s the kind of pro you hire when you’ve grown your business to the point where the people who wrote the white paper are at the end of their organizational skills.
If these two people are telling me that we should be listing BNB, then we’re going to list BNB.
“BNB is a really useful token,” Cotta told me shortly after meeting with Mariana at a recent industry conference. “It’s not only an exchange token — you can use [it] on a lot of platforms.”
Takes two to pair
The BQT team understands you can’t establish an exchange with only one asset. It doesn’t make any sense to trade one widget for an identical widget. So it becomes important to define why you should use BQT to make your BNB transactions.
Intuitively, you’d think Binance would be the place to do that. And if you’re using BNB for its utility value, that would of course be the way to go. But if you’re exchanging it for another coin, you might want to consider a dex such as ours because of lower fees and enhanced privacy.
You might want to pick our dex as opposed to others for our user experience tailored to sophisticated traders who want our proprietary hedging and leveraged trading tools as well as a community with whom you can interact via functions inspired by social media and online messaging. Like I said, personal relationships are important. That’s especially true when you’re both trading over-the-counter and eliminating the middleman.
We have one more fundamental requirement when it comes to listing new coming tokens. BQT is decentralized COMMUNITY DRIVEN exchange platform. This means we are building a culture of traders that benefit from each other, learn from each other’s trading success and rate each other. True and transparent trading environment is what is our aim to achieve. Therefore we must always bring into listing equation “how can we benefit our community” ... a requirement many exchanges forget to think about and often take advantage of their traders instead.
Taking listing fees is not our revenue source. Any new token our management selects will be listed for FREE but the requirement would be certain percentage of the tokens must be released to BQTX holders as introductory airdrop at no cost upon listing and certain percentage to be allocated to BQTX holders for “fair swap” opportunity (with certain premiums and time sensitive). We must find ways always to contribute to our trader community and show true value of BQTX tokens... receiving crypto assets and fair swap offers upon listings is one of them. Management is also working on releasing BQTX security token “Fork” sometimes in Q4 2019 to all BQTX token holders, which will be paying dividends based on our revenues. I can’t discuss much details now until all legal part is worked out but this is another way we look into in order to benefit our community of traders.
But ultimately I think you’d consider us because we spend a lot of time and perform a lot of research settling on which digital assets to list. BNB is likely to be one of at least a couple dozen coins in our freshman class, and I’ll report back to you as that list comes into view.
After all, we’re not just pairing tokens with other tokens. We’re pairing them with investors. We’re pairing them with you.
Edward is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, Blockchain Enthusiast and visionary behind many successful organizations. An avid entrepreneur, Edward has a knack for designing distinctive business models complemented with superior technology to deliver unparalleled service and profitability. Edward also has been advising and consulting for various successful Blockchain technology and ICO projects and recently launched his own BQT.IO P2P exchange helping traders connect with each other to leverage their crypto assets.
BQT.IO has been in development since March 2017 and its ICO launched September 18. The information can be found online at BQT.IO, on Telegram @BQTCommunity and on Twitter as @bqt_ico.