A letter to crypto exchanges

A Letter to Crypto Exchanges

The story must be all too familiar by now. Though I expect some of you may have experienced it from a different angle. Maybe you were part of a tight crypto community, fighting to get your favourite asset listed. Maybe you were part of an exchange, asking for a fee you needed to hit your income targets, or to not have to fire staff that came on during the bull run…Maybe you are a developer, who was charged insane amounts of money for something that’s not really your responsibility at all.

Perspective isn’t everything though. At its core we find an unsustainable business model, driven by greed and month-by-month growth KPI’s.

ICO versus Exchanges

I was contributing to Vertcoin at the time. As a writer mostly. I just really started contributing around the time the whole exchange listing deal started going crazy.

Listings used to just sort of pop up. New small businesses would deem it worthwhile to engage with tight online communities by listing some asset for free or in exchange for some mutual promotional activities.

These “friendly neighbourhood politics” were completely pushed aside by big business by late 2017. We all blame the ICOs…Even if you did cash out that SUB at $2.50, somewhere you must know you contributed to the whole gigantic fuck up we did as an industry. The huge budgets crowdsourced from our money were used to essentially bribe exchanges to list an asset. The exchanges corrected their ask upwards. Times had changed and they could now ask for way, way more money. And all the while, ICO ‘investors’ were happy with the progress, until they weren’t.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

I am not pointing fingers though. I admit it, I bought whatever, whenever at some point. My news feed and Reddit dictating flavor of the day investment routes I should take.

But that wasn’t the sustainable choice. Nor did it contribute much positive to the overall state of the market. The problem is not just in the fact that it turned into a high stakes game, it’s that the people with the stakes didn’t really contribute a lot.

The commonwealth mentality

When Queen Victoria was still young and athletic, two brothers took over their father’s cocoa business and started making chocolate bars. Their surname was Cadbury so–spoiler alert–this is a success story. They outgrew their factory in the U.K.’s industrial heartland of Birmingham, so they began planning to build a bigger one. They bought land, lots of land; far too much land for a chocolate plant. They had a vision for a factory in a garden, and a town that would grow in that garden. George Cadbury decreed that, “one-tenth of the Estate should be laid out and used as parks, recreation grounds, and open space.” Those spaces weren’t just for Cadbury’s employees. They were for everybody. Fast Company, Brand purpose is a lie.

I am a marketeer by trade. When I read the story above about brand identity on Fast Company I was intrigued to say the least.

Here you see this extremely successful family. They founded companies like Barclays and Lloyds, Nike and Sony. Yet…They didn’t believe in simply just taking. They deemed success to be a combination of their own wealth and that of their direct environment. After all, A healthy tree grows on good soil.

Photo by Tom Parsons on Unsplash

And this is exactly where we have an incredible opportunity in crypto.

Change is coming

I have been rather bleak about the state of crypto exchanges so far. But we have to be honest…Most exchanges have only cared about lining their own pockets and have been taking advantage of the immature market to do so. It isn’t all bad though, and several exchanges/businesses have shown there are different ways to do things. Here I want to highlight some of those.

Binance academy

The popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been trying to make amends for its dubious history regarding listing fees. The company was often mentioned in the media as one of the exchanges charging ridiculous amounts for listings. However, more recently it seems that Binance has learned its lesson. It has now started to focus on contributing to educating people regarding cryptocurrency with its platform called Binance Academy. In this way, Binance gives back some of their time to the crypto community by educating and spreading the word. I applaud their efforts, and while they may have a lot to make up for, it certainly is an amazing start!

Vertbase giving back

Vertbase is a company that offers a fiat gateway to cryptocurrencies that are otherwise a bit more cumbersome to obtain. One of the interesting things is that the company started by giving back a part of the fees obtained from trading to the development teams of the coins listed on the platform. I think this is a great way of giving back to the environment that makes your company succeed, and it’s very much in line with the spirit of the Cadbury brothers. Vertbase’s moral stance has already inspired other similar developments, such as the creation of a swap service that gives back called Changeangel.

All in all, we can see some positive developments happening in the industry. While the ICO madness and insane listing processes have made a negative impact on the industry, the good news is that I think we are still on time to save it. Do you have any ideas on how companies can contribute more to the industry? Or perhaps on how to convince companies that they should? Leave a comment and let’s discuss.

A letter to crypto exchanges was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.