Highlights from Ivan on Tech AMA with QUOINE leadership

The QUOINE Leadership team and Ivan on Tech held an AMA on March 30 via Ivan on Tech's youtube channel to answer questions from the community about QUOINE and the LIQUID launch.

During the AMA, we heard from:

• QUOINE Co-founder and CTO Mario Gomez Lozada
• QUOINE Chief Trading Officer Andre Pemmelaar
• QUOINE Senior Vice President of Operation Seth Melamed

Mario on starting out

• Knew there was a huge opportunity for the future of finance.
• Fascinated with whole prospect and future of crypto.
• QUOINE started small and now have 180 staff.

Mario on how we compare to other exchanges

• We are up there in terms of trading volume, close to 30k BTC last 24 hours.
• Has been top 3 or even number 1 in volume in the past.
• But we took a step back to look at how we can become more secure.
• Most exchanges have been hacked.
• We wanted to focus on getting things right in terms of law and regulations.
• Spent most of the last year getting the JFSA license in Japan.
• With the team coming from finance operations and knowing how things should work, we brought the best of what we know from previous experience to the crypto world.
• We focus on safety, security, operating under a legal framework.

Andre on how we compare

• We were the first crypto exchange to get a license in Japan.
• Our philosophy is very white hat, very pro-regulation.
• We were the first crypto company to be audited by a Big 4 firm, Deloitte.
• We have taken a completely different approach to other exchanges and want to do build the foundation in a most secure way.

Seth on a use of QASH

• One use case which has become prominent recently is using QASH as a listing fee for tokens to be tradeable on the platform.

Andre on QASH

• QASH was the most successful ICO in Asia last year.
• We have been very happy with how QASH has performed.

Andre on liquidity

• If you look at all major financial crises, there was always an issue around liquidity.
• There is a decent amount of liquidity out there in crypto, but it’s all siloed, pockets of liquidity, with nothing connecting it.
• That’s what we are solving with World Book
• There’s a technical piece to it and also issues around financial infrastructure.
• If we want to offer liquidity, we need to have a sizeable balance sheet to do that.
• We’ve built the World Book, with multi market orders, so if you are trading in a market with one quote currency, under the hood, the World Book allows other markets to match your order, and effect the FX transaction needed to complete those layers.
• All this liquidity is available in other markets, so we are becoming one aggregated order book.
• How we structured the World Book and LIQUID, we are sourcing external liquidity. Matching you externally against other exchanges.
• Decentralised exchanges are another potential source of liquidity, other potential partners.
• With decentralised exchanges, people want to be able to maintain custody of their bitcoin.
• With centralised exchanges, the big concern is security and being hacked, which are issues we address.
• Pain points not around exchange mechanism or price discovery.
• In the next 2-3 weeks we will launch multi-market orders on QUOINEX that will demonstrate to the market that we are a group that delivers.
• We will see big jump in liquidity.
• At the end of May, the LIQUID platform will launch.

Mario on the blockchain

• We are building the QASH block chain and using DLT, with the main goal to achieve support for decentralised operations and perhaps a decentralised matching engine in the future.

Andre on other exchanges and competitors

• We don’t look at who they are as are our competitors. We see them as potential partners.

Seth on security

• Nothing is more important than the safety of our customers.
• We use 100% cold wallet storage.
• All private keys never see the internet.
• For account management, we have the Iron Shield programme, protecting customer accounts.
• We are regulated and have to have strict checks.
• Customers have a sense of security that if something were to happen, their assets are there.
• Other exchanges don’t have to do this and you don’t know what’s behind the curtain
• Some places you can’t even find their offices, people are welcome to come to our offices and say hello.
• Our approach is a long-term approach

Seth on hosting ICOs

• We will launch our ICO mission control platform for any project team looking to conduct an ICO.
• We will help team conduct ICO and provide liquidity on our platform.
• We are trying to address problems in the ICO market from many different angles.
• For an ICO, you have to do a lot of things that are really distracting.
• You have to do a lot of non-value-added work, which is distracting for the team.
• All ICO KYC is done by us at scale.
• We give projects a targeted base of potential customers
• When you conduct an ICO, we also handle distribution of tokens and funds received in real time.
• Projects are vetted by us and we eliminate a lot of problems and remove scammers because we are doing everything directly on the exchange.
• Launch in April and disrupting the ICO process.

Andre on pain points

• Counter party risk and the changing environment of the crypto economy

Mario on pain points

• We had a lot of growth, and with that a lot of tickets coming into customer service, worsened by the fact we are regulated and have to do proper KYC.
• Had a significant backlog in terms of number of customers.
• We are going live with a new KYC automation system.

Seth on partners

• We work with regulators, not run from them.
• Financial institutions will come to us.
• It’s important for us to keep bad actors off our platforms and adhere to regulations as they exist, making sure all due diligence is done.

Seth on access to services for different countries

• In some cases we may need to exclude participants from accessing some parts of the platform, such as ICOs

Andre on institutional investors

• We are making our platform as attractive as possible to traditional finance.
• We are rolling out a fixed API, and there are hedge funds and investment banks looking to get in and trade.
• We are focussed on building a strong platform that will stand the test of time.