XTRD Product Update — October 11, 2018: http://bit.ly/2Sqc9ia.
New York Trading Show recap
XTRD took part in New York Trading Show 2018 on September 26, as a speaker and a Bronze sponsor. Here is a short recap with some details on this event: http://bit.ly/2AzmYrs.
VOA’s Interview with XTRD CTO Serg Gulko
XTRD CTO Serg Gulko gave an interview to Voice of America on clearing solutions for digital assets traders. Find the video and English transcript here: http://bit.ly/2CEJWi7.
Miami Blockchain Shift Update
XTRD recently attended the Miami Blockchain Shift conference on October 11–12. Here is the conference update: http://bit.ly/2PVCfYL. XTRD CEO Alex Kravets spoke on a panel with the COO & General Counsel as well as the SVP of Product Development of tZERO regarding Blockchain’s impact on Wall St, a great discussion facilitated by Stephen Obie of Jones Day. Here is the full panel video: http://bit.ly/2Sg9NCm.
Weekly CTO Q&A sessions
Starting from October 30, every Tuesday at 10 AM EST, XTRD CTO Serg Gulko will be running one-hour long Q&A sessions in our Telegram chat. We have prepared a short transcript from the first session. Prepare your questions for next Tuesday and join the discussion.
Market Identifier Code
Serg Gulko submitted the application to ISO 10383 Registration Authority to obtain Market Identifier Code (MIC) for the XTRD order routing system. MIC code is akin to a globally recognized ID for market participants e.g. ECNs (like XTRD) or exchanges. ISO maintains a global registry of all companies around the world and we would like to be a part of this ecosystem.
Starting from October 30, every Tuesday at 10 AM EST, XTRD CTO Serg Gulko will be running one-hour long Q&A sessions in Telegram. We have prepared a short transcript from the first session. Prepare your questions for next Tuesday and join the discussion!
Q (Bull Bittrex): How’s development going on DARK, SPA and PRO? When can we expect releases to roll out?
A (Serg): FIX API for trading and market data is live, PRO is under the heavy development and we expect to bring it live by the end of 2018 — beginning of 2019. DARK is still in progress. The main issue to solve is a legal framework. Technologically we’re almost ready.
Q (Bull Bittrex): Beaxy has been getting a lot of exposure and hype as of late can you explain how the partnership with them brings in the tokens?
A (Serg): I’m really happy for Beaxy guys, we chatted briefly a week ago but now they are very busy with conferences and exhibitions. We see Beaxy as one of our routing destinations. Why? Because their infrastructure is built on top of very serious and mature tech stack and they capable to handle serious load.
Q (Bull Bittrex): Can you explain a little more about the ISO you applied for? And how being a vendor in the FIX community works?
A (Serg): MIC code is like a globally recognized ID for market participants e.g. ECNs (like XTRD) or exchanges. ISO maintains a global registry of all companies around the world and we would like to be a part of this ecosystem. We also encourage all exchanges with whom we are working to start the same process. The reason we are in FIX Community is very simple — we are getting a clean, non-biased view what is going on in the industry. Plus, we have access to all FIX Trading Community events (read — networking, clients, etc).
Q (Mike P): I had a look through the token tracker and don’t see much happening other than IDEX and Coinsuper, some random buys and sells, but nothing that looks like, for example, FIX API clients paying for market data or similar. What is happening on this front? Are clients transacting in fiat for the moment, and if so, will XTRD settle that by purchasing tokens on the market as other projects who have yet to build their token settlement interfaces are doing?
A (Serg): Our current clients are initial token sales participants, so they are spending old tokens. Of course, we are working to add new clients to our ecosystem. We agreed to settle balances quarterly with existing clients (it was part of the deal), that’s why you don’t see too much on Etherscan.
Q (Mike P): The Whitepaper is no longer on the website; this makes it pretty much impossible for new folks to get to know what XTRD is all about. Is the paper being updated, or was this an oversight?
A (Serg): We will put much more useful information on the website soon — e.g. more detailed information about FIX routers (including full specs).
Q (fiftynineblake): Will there be reports for the public quarterly as well, or on some other timeframe about number of clients, average daily trading volume, etc.
A (Serg): This is not the information we can disclose publicly due to the NDAs. We usually share it with exchanges.
Q (fiftynineblake): But you’re not bringing to light anyones trading info by being transparent about how many clients you have onboarded, and how the system is being utilized. I think in this space transparency is king, we know you are not bound by anyone here having actual shares, but in my experience teams gain a lot of respect for being open by stating exactly their current treasury holdings (for better or worse), staff numbers and where they are based, number of clients and projections forwards for example.
A (Serg): It has a lot of sense to me! We will have an internal discussion to see how to apply these principles to new clients. But for now we will stick with the existing, traditional play rules.
Q (Matt T): Is XTRD looking at providing FIX services for tZero?
A (Serg): tZero is at least 3–4 months to trade and they will be focusing on security tokens what is really great. We are in good relationships with their team and looking forward to integrating their exchange into our ecosystem once they will be in production.
Q (Matt T): In the future, when the space is more clearly defined and regulated by the SEC and XTRD is highly profitable, would XTRD ever consider changing its token into a security token or some sort of profit sharing token?
A (Serg): To be honest with you, we mainly focused on building a working and sustainable business model right now with right tech stack, clients, vendors, etc. This is priority #1 for me.
Q (Mike P): Would it be possible to see some video updates of some of the new stuff in action, similar to that February video?
A (Serg): Nice one, thank you very much, Mike P:) We will create another video shortly! Real-time market data plus execution:)
XTRD recently attended the Miami Blockchain Shift conference on October 11–12. The conference’s focus was on emerging distributed ledger technology and the paradigm shift that will evolve traditional economies, with senior legal, finance, government, emerging markets, institutional traders, and fintech infrastructure leaders in attendance.
XTRD was one of the sponsors and were represented by XTRD CEO Alex Kravets and Serg Gulko, XTRD CTO. Through direct booth contact and networking events, they interacted with many traditional players in the fintech space with an interest in trading digital assets as well as though leaders with unique perspectives on the subject. We are happy to say that high quality connections were made, as a result several potential partnerships are in the works. The conference was a great venue to showcase the XTRD brand!
Alex Kravets spoke on a panel with the COO & General Counsel as well as the SVP of Product Development of tZERO regarding Blockchain’s impact on Wall St, a great discussion facilitated by Stephen Obie of Jones Day.
Blockchain’s Impact on Wall Street — The Efficient and Compliant Frontier
XTRD is working on product, additional exchange integration, and new initiatives. The landscape is changing with custodial solutions, and the real players are just around the corner.
Boris: It was a very active trading day, Bitcoin price went up to $7200 but retreated back to the $6600 level. There are two news items that impacted the price. First is that the American institution Fidelity with its branch Fidelity Investments started working with cryptocurrencies. And the second positive item is that one of the American exchanges — Coinbase — opened an office in Dublin to compensate for possible problems caused by Brexit. Their main European office will remain in London but in order to support their expansion, they opened a new office in Dublin.
To understand, which of these news items is more important and has a longer-term impact we invited our old friend, Serg Gulko from XTRD.
Boris: Let’s try to compare which one of these two news items have a larger long-term impact on digital assets trading?
Sergii: Hello, Boris! First of all, I would like to comment on yesterday’s rally on the market. It happened because people tried to get rid of Tether. Several companies decided to “exit” back to Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other asset. But the end goal was to have a zero Tether balance.
Regarding your question — we believe that the most impactful thing is the Fidelity announcement. I’m not very optimistic about the Coinbase move, because the current volume distribution clearly says that the United States is the biggest and most lucrative market.
Boris: Maybe they are trying to expand an existing business? Thing is that the article I found on Reuters says that the European market is growing very fast.
Sergii: Well, in Europe Coinbase will compete with HitBTC, BitStamp, and CEX.IO and I wish them good luck! Ironically, most of the exchanges I mentioned are trying to get into the US market. Why? Because the money is here.
Boris: Ok, let’s go back to Fidelity. How important is what they are doing in the scope of attracting more investors from Wall St into digital asset trading?
Sergii: This is very important! We are speaking about clearing for the last three or four months and now, finally, it’s happening. Players start to see a difference between custody and clearing. Basically, Fidelity is going to provide clearing services. Very likely that right now, at this moment, it’s an advertisement rather than an actual solution.
For example, our company XTRD is working with two traditional clearinghouses from the FX world. We are building a pilot project which involves clearinghouse, several exchanges, and XTRD as an intermediary. Our partners are no less reputable than Fidelity, but they decided to build the mechanism first and only after — make an announcement.
In general, Fidelity’s move is the next logical step. Once the industry will have rock-solid clearing we will definitely see big institutional players.
One of the biggest advantages of Terrapin’s Trading Shows is that they are a nice combination of traditional financial technologies (servers, NICs, service providers, hedge funds reps) and emerging crypto-markets. This helps companies to understand each other’s technologies, workflows, pain-points, establish good contacts and relationships.
XTRD, as a Bronze sponsor, had a booth that gave us the ability to promote our services in a more efficient manner as compared to only walking around.
Most of the people we met were traditional finance hedge or broker-dealer guys looking to add the new digital asset classes into their portfolio. This is why XTRD’s way to provide routes (FIX 4.4, cross-connection) to the cryptocurrency exchanges works the best — this is a natural way for these people to trade.
We also spoke to several crypto-only hedge funds that were interested in our real-time market data feeds and forthcoming GUI platform.
In addition to the regular in-booth activities, we had a chance to run a presentation during the all-exhibitions prime-time — around noon. Based on a number of questions afterwards, it went very well. If you ever spoke on stage you, probably, are familiar with this unpleasant moment — “Ok, we have 5 minutes for questions…” and zero interest from the auditorium:)
Two boxes of business cards later, with literally no ability to speak, we realized that even more work is coming. Numerous follow-ups, in-person meetings, calls — this is how we spent past eight days.
To name a few — we hosted BitGo and OTCXN in our office to discuss potential cooperation.
XTRD will definitely participate in upcoming Trading Show 2019 in Chicago. This is the right place to be to promote our services to the financial community.
Those who don’t learn history, are doomed to repeat it. Because of our experience in the Equity and FX space, we are facing a real deja-vu in crypto. Retail driving markets followed by institutional players, initially dispersed pools of liquidity lately consolidated into one global eco-system.
Of course, crypto markets are different to the let’s say, FX but core concepts will remain the same.
And, based on our own forecasts and observing huge interest from institutional players, we are exploring several promising venues:
– become a licensed market data vendor. Our tech stack allows us to stream market data in a very efficient way (check this articles for details). XTRD is in negotiation with several exchanges (names will be disclosed shortly) to obtain a legal agreement to resell this data. It opens a door to many companies like Bloomberg, Reuters, ICE and so on.
– become an active member of the upcoming clearinghouse/prime brokerage shift. We currently running several pilot projects with cryptocurrency exchanges and traditional clearinghouses to bring this concept to production. XTRD role is a pipe between buy-side firms (and market makers) from one side and exchanges and prime brokers — from another side.
Twitter is a great source of information, especially if you deal with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies — it helps to stay up to date and have your finger on the pulse of the market not only by reading the news but also by watching the influencers.
The XTRD team has compiled a list of Twitter accounts you probably would be interested in following if you work in blockchain & crypto related fields. Of course, there are hundreds of them, but we decided to select the one hundred most popular people in crypto space, based on relevance and the number of followers.
Note: XTRD does not endorse any of these sources or endorse any of their opinions, and we encourage you to consume all publicly disseminated information with a few grains of salt.
American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. Serves on the board of Facebook, eBay, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Kno, Stanford Hospital, Bump Technologies, Anki, Oculus VR, Dialpad, and TinyCo. A proponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
Computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” was developed by this guy. Also designed Bit Gold, which many consider the precursor to Bitcoin.
Creator of Statoshi and Infrastructure Engineer at Casa. At the moment, he’s most interested in opportunities within the Bitcoin and crypto asset ecosystem.
Software developer best known for his involvement with Bitcoin. In 2012 founded the Bitcoin Foundation to support and nurture the development of the bitcoin currency, and by 2014 left his software development role to concentrate on his work with the Foundation.
Venture capitalist. Before she started investing, Arianna was a PM at BitGo, where she was the third employee. Prior to BitGo, she worked at Facebook in Global Marketing Solutions and at Y Combinator-backed Shoptiques, where she ran sales.
Bitcoin Core developer, known in the Bitcoin world as Luke-Jr. Founder of Eligius mining pool. He has made over 200 contributions to Bitcoin Core, and maintains the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals section on GitHub.
Software developer and cryptocurrency serial entrepreneur. Created the cryptocurrency platform BitShares, was a co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit, and is CTO of EOS, with the company block.one. Creator of the DPOS consensus algorithm and Graphene technology.
Blockchain technologist, independent consultant, lawyer. Founder and former COO of Monax, a company that created the first open-source permissioned blockchain client in 2014. Advocates for civil liberties, digital rights, due process rights, free markets, and sensible regulation of cryptography.
Cryptocurrency consultant. Jill has done academic research on blockchain and built enterprise products with banks. Right now, she mostly works on cryptocurrency and token projects.
Developer and designer. Built ZeroHouseEdge, JacksChess, LanternHQ and RollWithMe. Currently, Jack is crafting consumer experiences at VC-backed startup Label Insight.
Author, advisor and early blockchain investor. Founding Partner at StillMark Co, Founder and Executive Director of City Fellows Consortium and Women in Venture.
Attorney at Perkins Coie. Advises entrepreneurs, fintech companies, investors, and innovators in the blockchain space. Previously Regulatory Counsel at Coinbase.
Please let us know if you think that there anyone that should be included in this list or excluded from it, and share your ideas about any other similar overviews.
XTRD is a company founded by Wall St professionals dedicated to bringing battle-tested financial technologies and standards to cryptocurrency markets. This means higher liquidity, lower fees, and combined platforms.
