What’s coming next for trade.io and TIOx (end of July 2019 edition)
Did you ever feel like crossing the desert ? Well, that’s probably what many TIOx holders are actually feeling. Why ? For a few reasons :
– Not many news from the team on what is exactly being worked on
– Daily interests from Liquidity Pool keeps getting lower.
– TIOx price that keeps going lower and lower too.
– Crypto exchange volume stagnating and even going a bit lower.
– Very slow activity on community’s Telegram.
– Small bugs/glitches here and there which are still not fixed.
I think that covers about everything which is actually painful. Well, that’s already a lot of things, and by writing this article, I ll try to bring up some positivity by commenting on a some words given here and there by the management team and that a few might have missed.
This is probably the most important point. You have to realize that every single person from the team is connected every single day. They can be reached over telegram and the are actually working hard at improving things, hence the reason we might not hear a lot of them publicly. Just a few example of the activity :
– William Heyn (aka Bill), the CEO, is always answering the community over telegram, with his background in Finance, and his activity at Tritaurian Capital, we can expect that trade.io will always be at the leading edge of worldwide regulations.
– Roy Gutshall, the COO, is also always around when we need some answers about what’s coming next. He is probably pretty busy with finding new opportunities to bring more FIAT trading pairs on the exchange, but I ll come back to that a bit later and detail what he told us for the next coming months.
– Joaquim Pedro, the new CTO (replacing Marcin Zduniak). He is also pretty active, I had a few quick discussions with him, and he looks to have a strong blockchain tech background and is definitely passionate about decentralization. He has been given a clear task by the trade.io team : improve every single technical aspect of the trade.io exchange. And we already witnessed some of his work, with several improvements in the past weeks. He also was a speaker during the Barcelona Trading Conference about decentralization which was held mid-july.
– Manmohan Singh and Terence Tan, both seem totally focused on tiomarkets since a few months now. Tiomarkets was launched only two months ago, and is gaining traction everyday. We saw them being in Cyprus, for tiomarkets launch, in Singapore, for events they organized through Tioevents, and even in Barcelona, for Affilate World Europe (which is the ultimate place to find major affiliates to promote your products).
– Chris Psallidas, who is replacing Helen Astaniou (now working pretty hard at making tiomarkets marketing successful as the CMO on this new entity). He is handling the communication of any news over telegram (competitions, planned downtimes for maintenance, etc…) and he also said that he was working pretty hard on a marketing master plan to make everyone know about trade.io within a couple of months.
These people are only the tip of the trade.io huge iceberg. They are only the visible part, many employees that we have never heard of are all being dedicated to remastering the exchange and its marketing.
This is not a list that I created but a list that Roy posted on our community’s telegram, this list includes (I ll add my interpratation and expectations after each point) :
– Enhanced FX Trading — Additional PSP’s and fiat pairs on the exchange (including credit card deposits).
What I understand is that the fx trading on trade.io will have better spreads etc… just like on tiomarkets. The advantage of directly trading from trade.io is that you don’t need to create a second account on tiomarkets. The additionnal FIAT pairs is also quiet a big deal. EUR and GBP are already available, but apparently, there are more to come ! Also, as a EU resident, I processed a few wires to their EU account, and each time my trade.io account got credited within the day, which is pretty good. I also want to point how much FIAT is important. Because if you remember carefully the first time you purchased crypto, how did you do it ? With credit card ? With bankwire ? I did it with credit card and paid a BUNCH ON FEES, and I really mean a bunch. So if they can accept wires from many countries and also accept credit card payments with very low fees, it will defintely make the exchange more attractive.
– Stop Loss Trading Functionality on trade.io exchange
This is a feature that exists on many other exchange and that many people have requested on trade.io. So it will come at some point, we still need some litle patience here.
– Discounted fee’s on exchange via TIOx
Now this is some news that will definitely attract traders, because that will make trading fees very low and bring a great utility to the TIOx token.
I see 3 options for them to include this feature :
* We will be abble to pay the fees with TIOx and like binance, in that case, fees could be divided by two.
* Depending on the amount of TIOx you hold on your account you ll have access to different discount structure.
* Depending on the amount of TIOx that you locked in the LP you ll have access to different discount structure.
Currently, I don’t see the first option to be viable, because TIOx is a highly volatile token because of it s low liquidity (mostly because of all the TIOx locked in the liquidity pool).
The third option would also mean that people that can’t or don’t want to lock their TIOx into the LP wouldn’t profit from the discounted fees and if they force it that way, this utility would be some kind of redundant with the LP access utility of the token.
So I believe and I think they will go for option 2 : ie, the more TIOx you have on your account the higher your discount. However any of the other options could be justified in different manners, and there are certainly some points that I m not aware of. They could also try a mix of the different options.
– Semi-automated KYC + Mobile KYC verification functionality
This will be a great improvement, because currently the KYC is a bit complicated, and the easier and more automated it will be, the more people will get involved into trade.io, so defenitely a good thing to do.
– Convert dust to TIOx
This option already exists on different exchanges such as Binance, and it s also a much appreciated feature, to avoid having dust in many different cryptos. It s a great news to know they ll add this feature.
– Relaunch of OTC stand alone platform and Custodial Service
The OTC service will definitely be interesting considering trade.io also has FIAT deposits and withdrawals enables. It will bring a great synergy between those two services, and should definitely pump some volume.
– POS APP for NEST and other merchants to accept TIOx as payment
We don’t have any real specifications or explanations how the POS APP will work for people to buy TIOx and use them at different merchants, but we can assume that this will add some more utility to the TIOx token.
Then comes the long term roadmap (over 6 months):
– Bundled Assets and Indices
As you know, I m not specialized in finance, but from my understanding, this will allow people to buy a package of different crypto assets in one go. Should help improving the exchange volume.
– Educational portal
A lot of investissors in crypto need to be educated. They are definitely not the same that trade FX or even traditional stocks. The fact that crypto is really not much regulated also makes it even more important to educate people on how to protect their capital and not fell for scams. (washtrading, scam ICOs etc…)
– Margin Trading
At this poitn Margin Trading would be useless on trade.io because the volume is too low to handle that, but once it gets higher, Margin trading will definitely help reaching the next level.
So from all those things that were given to us, what we can realize is that TIOx utility will really increase. Making the token way more interesting and attractive for several people. TIOx is only available on trade.io which means that any increase in utility and usage will directly benefit to trade.io’s volume
We also know that the exchange is being re-worked a lot technically speaking, which is also the reason why we don’t see many new features being added lately. That means the exchange will be able to scale with new users who will be attracted by TIOx utility and trade.io’s liquidity.
Now, all this will most likely fall in place at the same time than the new marketing plan.
You probably have noticed, apart from the $KICK competition that happened some weeks ago, there’s absolutely nothing happening on the marketing side. While a new CMO was hired about 2–3 months ago (Chris Psallidas). So, many of us have been wondering what’ happening. Why our beloved exchange is not getting more attention ? Well, Chris answered publicly about that :
Dear Tionauts,
I would like to inform you about the changes that occurred on the dates on our pending deployment that can be found on howsitcoming.trade.io:
Affiliates: Despite the fact our new affiliates program is ready, and it looks amazing, we will push its release back a few months. The reason is we have more “goodies” coming and it would be more beneficial for all to release it than.
Stop Lose Functionality, Credit Card deposit option for trade.io and XRP integration have been pushed back due to other exchange improvements that had to be prioritized.
Thank you
I think this is pretty clear, all the marketing is being held back to be all released at the same time. We have no exact date, but once the exchange will be fully improved we can understand that all marketing efforts that have been accumulating for weeks or even months will be out. This is probaly very hard to live for many of us, because it looks like nothing is happening. But it seems that behind the things, a lot is happening !
All this time going by where it looks like we have been left alone, is probably a way for the team to build all the tools they need to sync all the departments for a major release in coming months.
And I have to say, from my point of view, this is exactly what is needed for trade.io : bringing new token utilities, new marketing campaigns, new tools all at once, to break the vicious circle in which the exchange was stuck. Getting out of that circle, and entering a new phase with a highly virtuous circle.
As you probably know, an exchange needs volume to attract traders, and traders are the ones that bring the volume. This is the story of the snake eating its own tail. If you have a huge marketing campaign but the exchange is not enough attractive, traders won’t stay and your top marketing campaign wll just be like throwing money out of the windows. And the same way, if you want a top exchange, but have not enough marketing to promote it, the exchange will never grow. This is the hardest part when launching a website, reaching the breaking point, to enter the virtuous circle that will make your website attractive to any users and where new users are sufficient to compensate any leaving users. This apply even more on crypto exchanges, because users interact between each others through the exchange, so you need enough users at the same time to have those interactions happen.
It’s true that trade.io’s ICO was finished 1.5 year ago.
It’s true that compared to the original whitepaper and roadmap, many things didn’t go as expected.
It’s true that TIOx price went down A LOT.
It’s true that the many changes in the team didn’t bring much confidence.
It’s also true that anyone that participated in the ICO and invested funds at the time can only be disappointed and even probably devastated by the current value of TIOx.
BUT, let’s put things in perspective.
Trade.io’s crypto exchange went through different failures, but the team is still there, trying to improve and test new things to get back on track with new team members. And they never stopped trying.
Let’s not forget that many ALTs are almost at all time lows because of the current (still a bit) bearish market (no one knows where we are heading honestly). TIOx most probably also suffered from that.
Many partnerships didn’t go through (whether crypto/blockchain partnerships or even in finance), but the team kept trying to build new sources of income, like tiomarkets, which onces fully active, should be a good way to compensate for crypto unstability.
Since day 1 and even if it decreased, LP is still giving us daily interests.
I want to ask you, how many blockchain or crypto projects are you involved in which have a real use case and which could be valued at their current market capitalization ? The honest answer is close to 0. There are basically no projects which results make it worth its market capitalization. The crypto/blockchain world is still on hopium. Everyone pours money into it, hoping that within a few years it will be the BIG THING. Yes BTC is doing great, but have you ever tried to understand how BTC is supposed to scale ? We are still struggling with adoption because the crypto world is struggling with scaling. And until a clear solution will be prooven as working and being used by real projects that do generate money, everything remain a huge sand castle.
This is where trade.io differentiates itself, they might be a bit slow on the technological side, but their financial intelligence made them think the right way : Creating a bridge between traditionnal finance and cryptocurrencies. Bringing real profits to an industry which only rely on technical performance with so few money generating programs.
Yes, I agree with you, some crypto exchange are highly successful, bringing millions, but they 100% rely on crypto, they are not yet diversified into “real world” finance. There’s still a huge gap, and I m not even talking about regulations here.
To conclude this part, I think all this shows a lof of resilience from the team. They keep working every single day to fill that gap and make things great for us. Still, we can agree they are not perfect, and there are a few points where they could and should definitely improve.
So here is a quick list of things that I would like to see being improved :
– Exchange mobile website and Apps (android and apple)
I heard that the team was starting to fix some of the issues on those, but unless I do see those improvements, I ll still consider those really low quality and way under the standard they should be.
– Informations and transparency regarding LP interests
Information and transparency is sometimes a double-edged sword. While I would, and probably many would, appraciate more informations regarding the origin of LP interests, it would also bring valuable informations to direct competitors. Information in this case has a VERY high value, and I m still not sure yet if my will of transparency on this topic is what I really want, as it might bring more competition where we don’t need it for the moment.
– Speed of technical execution
Considering at which speed some other exchanges are bringing new functions to their products, and how fast they keep moving forward, it s hard to remain calm. However, I d like to point out that it s not always the companies at the technological forefront that end up being #1. Even more in finance, where regulations will probably always be more important than any technical achievements.
– Communication
This is what has always hurt me the most. Not only with trade.io, but overall with the cryptocurreny industry. Communication is most of the time bullsh*t. There’s not a single project that didn’t go through major struggles because of communicating on things too early, or not the right way. Trade.io can really improve on that too, internally or externally. I think that we can all agree that there is still room for more improvements even if they are trying to change things.
I have been following trade.io and investing into TIOx since the beginning. I won’t lie, my journey for the moment has been a hell of a ride. I lived so many ups and downs. I have been spending more time digging into this project than in any others. I even lost some money because of some technical bugs. But the fact is that I m still there. I m still supporting trade.io’s work. I m still highly supporting the CEO William Heyn, and overall the team. Even if sometimes I can end up being pretty critic on some topics (my two favourite ones are technical and communication), it, in no ways, means that I don’t support the team. I only mean to help them improve on what I think they can and should improve. I often compare this project to a baby, struggling to stand up on his feet and starting walking. But the way I see it, I m pretty sure that little guy will end up running, and he will be preparing himself not for the 100m, but for a marathon. Hopefully, he will opt for less bumpy roads at some point, to make his way through it way more easier. And probably make ours lives more peaceful.
Published at Thu, 25 Jul 2019 08:40:54 +0000
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