Message from the CEO

Dear TIOnauts,

What a month it has been. My plan with this letter was to start it with some alliteration based on “May”, the Magnificent Month of May, or the Marvelous Month of May but it all got just a bit too corny for me, so I will leave it with this: I promised you big things in my last letter, and, I am proud to say, we delivered.

Without further ado, here is an overview of the (monumental, momentous, monstrous, mythical, massive… OK, I will stop) month of May:

Beyond the list above, we have continued our tireless work in the background to make the exchange more robust and resilient and to improve the basic trading services. Much of this work is being done in the background so you will not see it directly, but it is happening and things are getting better every day.

One obvious sign that we all witnessed was the fiat launch. It was an enormous undertaking and it went off without a hitch; demonstrating a perfectly seamless technology integration of a major change to our platform. Congratulations to the development team, that was masterfully done.

With a month like that, you might expect us to sit back and rest on our laurels for a bit, but there is more to do and more to come. In the upcoming weeks, we plan to:

In closing, I thought that I might give some insight into the community on an internal discussion that we have been having for quite some time.

I thought that you might find it interesting and, as always, if you have an opinion, let us know. We are always here to listen. This discussion stems from the absolute infancy of the crypto market. It is tempting to think of crypto as maturing, but it really only has been a few years.

Compare that to the centuries of history that have led the traditional stock markets to the form that they are in now. Crypto has a long way to go before it could possibly be considered a mature market.

This leads me to the two issues we are discussing internally, these are things that are new for crypto and have not yet been fully addressed as they have in traditional markets.

In any new market, especially one this revolutionary, one would expect to see projects that are outright scams and projects that are just simple business failures. Case and point, consider the difference between ICO Watchdog (DOG) and Fructus (XFRC).

We listed Fructus because they won a Twitter poll we offered. We were trying a new way to find tokens that you wanted to see listed. You voted for it so we listed it.

As we now know, Fructus bribed a bunch of people to vote for them, rigged the election so to speak. By all appearances, they then took their investor money and disappeared; we tried to reach them for weeks and could not. As far as we can tell, Fructus is a scam, bad people running a bad company and we can only hope that Karma catches up with them one day. Even though we had nothing to do with that project other than listing them at your request, we regret even that small level of involvement and delisted their token.

On the other hand, DOG was one of our consulting clients, we knew the team and the project well and vetted them thoroughly. DOG was a real business that was based on attempting to provide due diligence for ICO offerings.

Sadly, when the ICO market died, so did their company. When we reached out to them, their management responded, they were open and honest about the failure of their business and understood why we needed to delist their token. They handled it as well as an unfortunate turn of business can be dealt with.

Still, we hear people calling them a “scam”; they were no more a “scam” than the last company selling buggy whips, their company failed due to changing markets. As we delisted them, we tried to provide some small gesture of recompense to you — apparently, you all hated it, so we will not do that again, but there is a reason that we tried. DOG was a real company that just failed, this happens sometimes when you invest in companies.

This leads to the more contentious side of our internal discussion. The debate centers around what to do with tokens that do not have enough trading to create full, multi-tier trading books on the exchange.

Since the crypto market is so young and so attuned to scams, we worry that traders (especially new clients) might be put off if some of our listed tokens do not have deep, perfect order books. The debate is between, on one hand, only listing a smaller number of tokens with full order books and market makers and, on the other hand, listing many more tokens even if their order books are just plain ugly.

Some tokens are obvious “delists” per the discussion above. However, what about the small company that has a real business and is chugging along, but only trades a couple of times a day, or week or month? Do traders want to have that option, even if the book is really ugly, or should we avoid/delist these tokens so it does not make the exchange look bad? I have an opinion and I am sure that each of you reading this does as well.

Let us know your thoughts if you like, but expect to hear more about this in the near future. We have multiple options we are considering.

This has turned into a Mammoth May Monthly Missive (sorry, couldn’t help myself) and I am going to leave it there and get back to the grind.

If you have not already, give fiat or TIOmarkets a try and support the new services. On our end, we will keep working every day to make things even better on the exchange and make your TIOx more valuable.

Sincerely,

Bill Heyn

CEO

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