On Friday (29 June 2018), Trade.io, a FinTech startup based in Lugano, Switzerland announced the upcoming launch of its blockchain-powered decentralized exchange at a half-day event in London called “The Future of Cryptocurrencies” that was organized by Bloomberg Live and sponsored by trade.io.

These were some of the key points expressed by its CEO, Jim Preissler, about the company’s trading platform:

  • “We saw the opportunity to utilize blockchain technology to disintermediate and commoditize many of the key banking and finance verticals, ultimately changing the model for the better, and to the benefit of the key constituents: the consumers.”
  • “If trade.io is event modestly successful, the ‘screw your customer’ business model maybe finally driven out of existence for good.”
  • “Our key innovation is the shared peer-to-peer (P2P) liquidity pool, where the users can for the first time participate and share in the benefit of this key banking profit center.”
  • “Our trade.io exchange… has a number of key innovations, in addition to our Liquidity Pool, such as the customizable widget interface.”
  • “The official exchange launch will be on July 17th. Additionally, we are going to announce that we are offering commission-free trading for at least the first month, and we are going to continue to evaluate this policy going forward.”

Pre-registration for the trade.io exchange is available at exchange.trade.io. It is going to be a staggered launch to 1,000 people initially, with additional clients to be invited to use the platform later.

Later, Preissler added:

“Following the BETA version of our Exchange where select members tested the platform, we are confident that we will satisfy the specifications stipulated to us by our community, and look forward to sharing in the successes of our upcoming official Exchange.”

The trade.io exchange is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and it uses the Raiden Network, an off-chain transfer network for Ethereum ERC-20 tokens), to solve three important problems with the Ethereum mainnet: scalability (Ethereum currently has a cap of around 10 transactions per second); latency (Ethereum’s on-chain confirmations can take several minutes); and high transaction fees.