Tokenplace recently spoke with our investors at Kyros Ventures and the GTA trading community. The conversation was translated into Vietnamese. Vietnam is in second place worldwide in terms of the number of crypto users per capita. Here is the transcript:
Brief introduction about project
Tokenplace is a single window into the world of digital assets. We bring pro traders and new users a seamless dashboard for navigating the entire crypto market. Our Beta release lets users connect 30+ exchange accounts via API and trade on them with our unique order-splitting multi-exchange algorithms. The platform is offered at a low subscription cost that pays for itself in a single trade.
Our full release, scheduled for next year, will be the first-ever exchange aggregator. With a single account, users will trade on all exchanges as a single marketplace. This will be the best entry point to the market for new users and an indispensable tool for pro traders.
Highlights/features
The Smart Post algorithm is based on an order-routing system that has previously been available only to institutional traders. It finds the optimal price in real time among all connected exchanges, analyzes the market to determine optimal order size so as not to move the market, and executes the order in small pieces. Our order-splitting algorithms, in addition to our beautiful UI and low subscription rates, are our key features in the Beta release.
About the founders
Nina Knox had a successful career at major consulting firms, working closely with a variety of startups, before becoming co-founder CEO of Tokenplace. She has long been an advocate of blockchain technology, working with organizations like the Digital Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC, with a special focus on developing the role of women and girls in blockchain.
Evgeny Grachev has had strong business experience in large companies and as an entrepreneur. When he became active as a crypto trader, he saw that the market lacked a viable single-account trading platform, and became co-founder of Tokenplace.
AMA transcript:
Could you please introduce yourself to the chat, and can you please also share a quick overview about Tokenplace? What does the name Tokenplace stand for and what problems are you solving?
Greetings to everyone here! Thanks to the fine folks at Kyros for inviting me. I’m Gleb, head of content with Tokenplace. I’ve been with the founders, Nina and Evgeny since the early days, helping communicate their vision. This is a great opportunity to share that.
The name Tokenplace communicates our vision of an inclusive, powerful platform where users can access the whole world of digital assets from one window. The problem we are solving is that the current landscape of dozens of competing crypto exchanges is too fragmented, confusing, and hard to deal with.
Our cofounders are Nina Knox and Evgeny Grachev. Evgeny worked as a crypto trader and Nina has been an advocate for greater acceptance of crypto and blockchain, especially with girls and women. Both came from strong business backgrounds. So the two of them came at the same solution to the problem from different directions: all the various exchanges needed to be aggregated into a single service. Then the pro traders could save time and money, new traders would feel comfortable, and the industry would grow as a whole.
Trust is very important in business. So, what makes investors, customers and users feel safe when working with Tokenplace? And how will you get the trust of many users that have negative thoughts about Blockchain and DeFi?
Trust is certainly important in business, and in blockchain it’s truly a key issue. People active in blockchain and crypto know that the technology is reliable, but we also realize that much of the population still sees blockchain and defi as untrustworthy. We want to do our part to change that by making a product that makes sense and works great.
For example, a user new to crypto may wonder, why are there so many exchanges with different prices and different trading pairs? Why is the UI so confusing? We work really hard to have a great visual design that is not alienating, and we create a single tool you can rely on for all your needs without feeling like you have to research 100 different exchanges.
Then there’s The question of security of our platform from hackers. We’re working with a great system called Vault, which has an amazing team devoted to secrets management. They’re open-source, so they’re constantly audited by a large community.
Who are the competitors and what are Tokenplace’s advantages compared to them?
This question gets us into our 2-stage plan of development. In order to build a full-service aggregator with a single-KYC account for the whole market, we first built an API-based trading service to gather a community of traders. This is our Beta version, coming out in about a month.
Our Beta service has many competitors, including Coinigy and 3commas. To set ourselves apart from them, we’ve created multi-exchange order-splitting algorithms that automatically find the best price on all collected exchanges. The Smart Post algorithm also breaks orders down into perfectly-sized pieces so that you don’t reveal your whole order to the market.
We also feel that our UI and user experience overall is just better. And we charge no trade fees and have a lower subscription fee, which pays for itself with a single trade.
Once we launch our Token Trade engine in 2022 we will become the first single-KYC aggregator of the whole market. At that point we will have no competitors!
Have you formed partnerships with existing organizations/projects that will use your products? And do you plan to make such partnerships? The basic question is: what do you plan to do in order to increase the demand for your products?
One of the exciting things about Tokenplace is that we can collaborate with the exchanges, although it looks as if we should be competitors. If we drive volume to their exchange, they don’t care if it goes through our service or through their own UI. We’ve already signed one revenue-share agreement with a major exchange to get a cut of their trading fees from our users, and are in talks with others. Our business model is based on subscription revenue, so the revenue we get from deals can be used to pass discounts on to our token holders.
In general, we see demand for crypto trading exploding right now, so our challenge is to capture that as well as possible. That’s why we balance catering to both pros and newbies. Ultimately we will drive demand by creating a more mature crypto scene with new, business-savvy and high-tech solutions. Does that answer your question? It would be interesting to know what partnerships you had in mind.
With the development on many popular networks today, what does Tokenplace expect from the positive user growth in the near future of its project? To ensure the safety of your users, have you done audits by security companies? Wait until its release?
We’re in the process of finishing our Beta release, and the code will be audited when the product is finished. Security is a key concern, and we have a great internal team on it. But we know that we can’t solve this issue alone, which is why we’ve partnered with Vault.
The near-term growth on the platform will be driven by our community and our technology. Once our Smart Stop and SWAT algorithms get into the hands of traders, we hope to see videos of people using the product and saving money on trades. We want to have a great community so people can have a place to talk about crypto trading, and also will deliver a superior product that will generate word of mouth on its own merit.
Tell us about your plans for 2021, what are you currently working on, and are you going to expand the list of big exchanges?
Our Beta version already has the ability to access 30+ leading exchanges, and that list is growing. Our priorities for 2021 include growing the team, building a user community around the Beta version, and integrating DEXs, as well as futures trading. We’ll also be preparing for the launch of our revolutionary Token Trade engine.
Almost 80% of investors have just focused on the price of the token in the short term instead of understanding the real value of the project. Can you tell us the motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in the long term?
That’s true, and we hope that people investing in our project will see its long-term potential. If you look at the potential market for crypto trading and digital assets investment tools, we know that it’s big, at 100 million crypto users today. It could be gigantic, if the money in traditional investment and retirement planning migrates to digital assets. This is already starting to happen, as millennials’ retirement funds are now holding crypto at a high rate. So as a company trying to be the leading one-stop-shop for crypto investing, we have a very high ceiling, in the tens of millions of users at least. We hope people will hold the coins as we grow, and use them for discounts and other benefits on our platform!
Indeed, is community everything? How important is community to you? How can you attract multiple communities for your Project? Can we collaborate or help you develop your current project?
To me, the name Tokenplace also speaks to the goal of having a place for the community to gather. And you are right that there will be multiple communities. Right now we have a community of investors and early supporters on Telegram and social media, which will support us and challenge us to be the best we can be. We want to expand this conversation, so you can definitely help with that. Then we hope to build a community of active traders, and create space for them to discuss the product as well as the industry as a whole. Ultimately we want to have a broader community conversation about the future of blockchain and crypto. So community is important at all stages, but especially now, so thanks to everyone who is with us today!
How do you plan to educate people about Tokenplace?
We have big plans for educating the public about our product, as well as starting a conversation about blockchain as a whole. Our beta release is coming in Q3, and once it launches we will be looking for crypto traders and investors around the world to test our product, talk about it to their community, and give us feedback.
Southeast Asia has a strong crypto community. What are your plans for expanding in the region?
Hooray for Vietnam being a world leader in crypto adoption! You guys are leading us into the future. We most definitely see Southeast Asia as a major market for us, and are glad to have started to build a network there. It’s a region I personally would like to learn a lot more about, and to come visit!
There was another question earlier about reaching out to communities who are non-english speakers. As we grow, we want to develop community chats in many languages, and I hope Vietnamese will be the first!
How can you attract users who are new to crypto?
Thanks for your question. Making things much easier for the average user to engage with crypto is key to our vision. Just the fact that there will be one trusted service, Tokenplace, where you can have a wallet, change fiat for crypto, and trade on all exchanges will help people overcome their hesitation to join the movement. Right now, you have to get multiple exchange accounts, trust one company to host a wallet, another for crypto-fiat exchanges. And you have to figure out which exchange is the best. So we will gather all those functions in one account. We also want a lot of input from the community about how to make crypto more accessible for all!!
What are the challenges for a new company entering DeFi?
DeFi is a challenging space, since it changes so rapidly. However, our team has a vision for helping take DeFi to a more mainstream status. I do think that ultimately decentralized finance will emerge victorious over traditional finance. We can cut out the middle-man in many cases, and avoid such waste on big banks. We can also take full advantage of the internet; the traditional banking system runs on an outdated network that should be replaced.
Stay tuned for more info and follow us at:
- Website: tokenplace.com
- White Paper: tokenplace.com/white-paper
- Twitter: @TokenplaceTOK
- Telegram Community: @tokenplace
- Telegram Announcement channel: @TokenplaceAnnouncement
- FAQs: tokenplace.com/faq
