When you’re looking for an exchange your first criteria should be security. What third-party agency are they contracting to handle their hot wallets? Do they have any cold storage? Is there any insurance? You get the idea. These are the must-haves, because when (not if) the exchange is hacked and you lose your holdings, they will likely be gone for good. I say likely because some exchanges have taken steps to bolster up investor confidence, usually through making deals with banks and insurance companies, so it’s not a 100% guarantee that when your exchange is hacked, your money won’t be waiting for you when you log in next time.
That’s excellent news.
Once that hurdle is gone, then we can continue down our list of what makes an exchange desireable. Rather than choosing by security, we can start looking at convenience, because even more than security, convenience is what draws in the eyeballs and the activity.
BTCS (BTCS.Q) is developing an all-in-one platform that will connect multiple exchanges and wallets and aggregate portfolio holdings into a seamless platform that crypto-enthusiasts can use to analyze performance, risk metrics and potential tax implications.
“The digital asset market now records more than $37 billion of transactions daily. We believe the market has matured to a point that warrants and supports a more sophisticated method of tracking holdings and performance, and our first-of-its-kind platform is being designed to serve this unmet need,” said Charles Allen, CEO of BTCS.
The majority of the world’s exchanges lack detailed performance metrics. Either you get a handful of outdated charts, some statistical columns showing information updated only occasionally, or in many cases, nothing at all. The best exchanges, it should be noted, include detailed frequently-updated statistics regarding performance, liquidity, volumn, but never (or maybe rarely, I’ve never found one) that establishes relationships with other exchanges and their price fluctuations. This is important if you’re looking to squeeze a few extra bucks out of your crypto-holdings through arbitrage, but be careful here, because most of the time the entrance and exit fees mean that the only people making money from your crypto-holdings are the exchanges themselves.
BTCS analytics platform is being designed and built to provide a solution for this. By not being tied to any one exchange, it could theoretically be the one-stop-shop for investors looking for aggregate data related to their holdings in near real-time in a single view. The platform will also have a community focus allowing users to share their trade history with other platform users if they desire. Community participates can their choose to share their performance and trade data with other users for free or share on a user-selected subscription-fee basis. Eventually, BTCS plans to take a percentage of this fee, which could theoretically be another source of revenue for the company.
Most of the above offerings aren’t required. There are plenty of websites on the internet devoted to the performance of various cryptocurrency, and finding an exchange that offers most metrics isn’t hard. The only truly beneficial perk of this site would be the comparative data between exchanges, but that’s only for the convenience of choosing what exchanges you’d prefer to deal with rather than holding your nose and taking an estimated guess, which is basically the rule in crypto-arbitrage.
BTCS began development of its digital asset data analytics platform in mid-2019 and expects to open the platform in the second quarter of 2020 to invitation-only beta testing, with the goal of full commercial beta release by year-end 2020.
The thaw continues…
BTCS was arguably one of the biggest beneficiaries of the end of the crypto-winter, and when Bitcoin started to run in April of last year, they saw a respectable return to form in the form of their own stock price. At the time, we wrote, perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek, about nearsighted investors who saw BTC in their ticker and thought they were investing in Bitcoin.
Here’s what we wrote about them this time last year:
BTCS’s story is what happens when a company holds onto dear life when the market has moved on. They bought in as a bitcoin mining and digital asset company at 2015, focusing on products that are peripheral to the blockchain ecosystem including an e-commerce site and a cryptocoin wallet, both of which never got out of beta.
An attempted merger in October 2017 fell through and then someone broke in and stole all of their mining rigs. Their share price suffered some considerable shocks, hitting the skids at two cents after opening at $0.30 cents in 2015. Now tumbleweeds bounce through their offices and neighbourhood children tell ghost stories and dare each other to spend 10 minutes in their lunch-room.
Since then they haven’t done much, honestly.
But providing more convenience through this product could be enough to get them going again. I’d never use it, personally. I’d rather do the work myself for free rather than pay an aggregator to do it for me, but other folks just don’t have the time.
—Joseph Morton
