Interview

Bitfinex is one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchanges still standing. Founded in 2012, which in crypto terms is almost ancient history, the exchange has faced many obstacles during the course of the industry’s rocky ride, yet it remains one of the top trading platforms to this day.

Kris Marszalek, the CEO of leading cryptocurrency payments platform Crypto.com, has reinforced the company’s values and noted companies in the space needs to do more to achieve mass adoption.

CryptoGlobe has recently caught with the chief executive of Genesis Global Trading Michael Morro, one of the most famous cryptocurrency traders in the space. Genesis Global Trading is a firm providing over-the-counter cryptocurrency trades to institutional investors.

Since Bitcoin’s emergence in 2009, the sheer myriad of cryptocurrencies available has continued to proliferate. While some believe this saturation is negative for the mass adoption of cryptocurrency, Bitgo’s CTO, Benedict Chan, thinks it could be good for the market. 

Tom Maxon, Head of US Operations and Business Development at CoolBitX, a Taipei-based firm focused on providing “secure and easy-to-use” blockchain-based solutions, told CryptoGlobe recently that FATF’s recent recommendation on the regulation of the crypto industry is “an undeniably positive development for the industry.”

Walking out of Deutsche Bank’s London offices into a swarm of photogs, the Bitcoin bag-carrying besuited gentleman became an overnight sensation. But who is Bitcoin Bag Guy?

We spoke to CODEX CEO Serge Attic about the bear market, the unique features of their exchange, QuadrigaCX and their roadmap for 2019.

Beniamin Mincu, the Founder of Elrond, a high-throughput, public blockchain network focused on enhancing interoperability, recently shared his views and insights regarding how developers are using various blockchain scalability techniques to improve the performance of cryptocurrency networks.

There are few people in crypto who can lay claim to having founded three successful ventures in the space. Even fewer can claim to be driving the technical vision of a top project while living on a horse ranch in Boulder, Colorado.  

Will McDonough has one of the most interesting backgrounds in the crypto space. I spoke to Will about his story before crypto, why he got into the space, what will bring the institutions to crypto, and what’s in store for Diginex in 2019 and beyond.

Dr. Lesley Czuma, the Head of Communications and Partnerships at Insolar, an organization focused on developing an enterprise-grade, blockchain platform for “enabling seamless interactions between companies”, has argued that modern businesses are still in need of a full-featured software product which would allow them to build DLT-enabled applications.

Joseph Toh, the founder of SignKeys, a Singapore-based and Hong Kong-registered firm focused on supporting cryptocurrency transactions through popular messaging applications, has argued that securely storing digital assets involves having “true ownership” of your account.

Jez San is a tech veteran. Founding Argonaut software as a teenager in the 1980s, he went on to pioneer 3D gaming on the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) and work on various classic nineties games, including Star Fox and Croc.   

Speaking to CryptoGlobe at the CryptoCompare Digital Asset Summit in London, the author of “The Internet of Money” and a well-known cryptocurrency expert, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, revealed his thoughts on future cryptocurrency technology and impact of regulations on the market.

Udi Wertheimer describes himself as a Bitcoiner, coder, troll, adversarial thinker and toxic podcast host. I asked him some questions about Bitcoin, Blockchain and privacy.

As we seem to be on the cusp of greater institutional involvement in crypto, the race is on for crypto companies to fulfil the roles that exist in traditional financial markets.

One of the interesting applications of crypto and blockchain technology that is seeing actual use is business lending.

Doron Rosenblum, the managing director of eToroX, the blockchain division of the global investment company eToro, has recently revealed he believes moving fast is a necessity to survive in the crypto space, more so than in the traditional financial system.

Crypto analytics is one of the fastest growing and most prized sectors of the nascent industry. We chatted to Scorechain CEO Pierre Gerard about this growing sector.

Donald McIntyre, one of the most active communication coordinators in the Ethereum Classic (ETC) community, has drawn some interesting comparisons between ETC and Ethereum (ETH), the world’s largest platform for building decentralized applications (dApps).  

Matthew Branton, the Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Neutral, a smart contract-enabled platform that provides various financial instruments for the cryptocurrency industry, has predicted that stablecoins will have “a tremendous impact on the future economy.”  

Carmen Benitez, the Chief Executive Officer at Fetch Blockchain Ltd., a London-based firm that “specializes in blockchain technologies for land registries, government and property stakeholders,” has told CryptoGlobe that the nascent “crypto economy [represents] the new era for financial markets.” 

Launched in 2017 via an ICO for its Aeon (AE) token, the project aims to offer a more scalable smart contract platform. Moving smart contracts off-chain, the platform also utilizes “decentralized oracles” which allow for data from outside sources to be used in smart contracts on the platform.

We spoke with Ledger President Pascal Gauthier about how the bear market has affected Ledger, their roadmap ahead and whether people are ready to “be their own bank.”

We spoke with FIO Protocol founder David Gold about the project, the current problems with transacting cryptoassets, and what industry trends excite him.  

In the second part of our interview with Zebpay CEO Ajeet Khurana, we discuss the Indian crypto market, exchanges and customer surveillance.

The growth of decentralized exchanges is unquestionably one of the trends to watch in 2019. Fabio Canesin is a co-founder of Nash Exchange (NEX), a decentralized exchange aiming to make blockchain technology accessible to a wide public.

Ajeet Khurana, the CEO of Zebpay, a global cryptocurrency exchange with business offices in Malta, Rezeknes, and Latvia, can recall that in 2012, “the first exchange-like businesses” that were established had operated more like over-the-counter (OTC) setups.

Tone Vays is one of the best known names in the crypto industry. Getting involved in the space in early 2013, he has taken an active role in promoting cryptoassets as a means to achieving economic freedom.

Elizabeth White, the CEO of The White Company, a New York-based crypto concierge service for upscale clients that helped facilitate over $250 million in digital asset transactions last year, recently shared her insights regarding the future of financial markets in an exclusive interview with CryptoGlobe.    

We spoke with Paybase CEO Anna Tsyupko about how Paybase is changing the landscape of payments processing, regulation and the challenges of crypto payments.

Leo Cheng, the co-founder and CEO at Machi X, a marketplace for “discovery and exchange” of intellectual properties (IP) and their rights, has predicted that “every product and service that lives in the digital world, which should be most things, will be tokenized in order to interact natively and more efficiently with an increasingly digitized world.” He also told CryptoGlobe in an exclusive interviews that the future will consist of “a hybrid” of centralized and decentralized networks.  

Zac Prince, the founder of BlockFi Lending LLC, a “secured non-bank lender” focused on providing cryptocurrency-backed USD loans to digital asset investors, has argued that “we are [transitioning] from a painful [crypto] bear market into an undecided market.” Prince told CryptoGlobe that “overall [his firm] remains incredibly bullish on the sector and believes” that bitcoin (BTC) price will be “between 25-200% higher at the end of 2019″ than what it was at the start of the year. 

Hendrik Hofstadt, a Berlin-based software developer who has co-founded Certus One, Inc., a company focused on building “validator infrastructure” for proof-of-stake (PoS)-based blockchain networks, recently shared his views regarding the recently launched Cosmos platform with CryptoGlobe.  

Narek Gevorgyan, the co-founder at Coin Stats, a cryptocurrency research and portfolio management solution, has said that “it will take some time for bitcoin and [the larger] cryptocurrency market to go to new highs again.” 

Juan M. Villaverde, an econometrician focused on developing various crypto index models at Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, has said that the digital assets industry is currently lacking “a robust and liquid derivatives market and trusted trading platforms that can create the liquidity.” 

Lane Rettig, an Ethereum developer, has said that cryptocurrency “prices and usage were completely decoupled in 2017 and into last year.” He also argued that this “may still largely be the case today.” 

We interviewed Bitcoin consultant and educator Giacomo Zucco. We talked about Bitcoin, privacy, ETFs, crypto media and why he hates Coinbase.

As the tax deadline is fast approaching in the US, we spoke with Brennan Snow, president and co-founder of BitTaxer – a company that makes it easy to file your crypto taxes.

Adam Cole Jacobs, the co-founder and CEO of Spend.com and Bitsdaq, a newly launched digital asset exchange supported by leading crypto exchange company, Bittrex, has said that one of the main “challenges facing the cryptocurrency industry is security threats from untrustworthy exchanges.” 

Rhett Creighton, a prominent member of the crypto community who previously made contributions to the Bitcoin Core codebase, has argued that “nothing compares with the proof-of-work (PoW) security of Bitcoin” Creighton, a nuclear engineering postgraduate from MIT, told CryptoGlobe that the “worst and least secure PoW networks are the ones with low hashrate and an algorithm that is used on a network with higher hashrate.”

Alena Vranova, the head of strategy at Casa Inc., a New York-based startup that helps consumers securely store cryptocurrencies, recently shared her views and insights with CryptoGlobe. Vranova, the founder and former CEO of SatoshiLabs, a company that developed TREZOR, the original and leading bitcoin hardware wallet, confirmed that developers throughout the world are “working like crazy” to further develop and improve the Lightning Network (LN) protocol.

Stevan Lohja, the technology coordinator at Ethereum Classic Labs, has argued that proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithms are a “red herring for incorporated through blockchain.” In his interview with CryptoGlobe, Lohja explained: “Proof-of-work (PoW) has miners that stake in hardware, energy, and investment. By definition, anyone storing value on chain has a stake in the chain. PoS chains are incorporations through blockchain…..” 

Vitaly Mzokov, the head of commercialization at Kaspersky Lab, a leading Moscow-based global cybersecurity and anti-virus solutions provider, recently shared his views with CryptoGlobe regarding the main security threats related to decentralized cryptocurrency platforms such as the Bitcoin (BTC) network. 

While the launch of WBTC hasn’t perhaps garnered the attention many expected, AirSwap, a decentralized, peer-to-peer trading network for Ethereum tokens, is a company that is trying to change that.    

Donald McIntyre, the former business development manager at ETCDEV, a company that focused on contributing to the ongoing development of Ethereum Classic (ETC), has said that Ethereum (ETH) is “not a valuable network except for experimenting.” McIntyre, the former vice president of giant financial institutions, Morgan Stanley and UBS, told CryptoGlobe that Ethereum (ETH) is only good for “testing and demonstrating what doesn’t work.”

John deVadoss, the president at NGDS, an organization that supports the ongoing development of NEO, a leading blockchain-based platform for deploying decentralized applications (dApps), told CryptoGlobe that “developers [are motivated to] build on the NEO platform because of the market-leading innovation that it offers.” 

John Carvalho, chief communications officer at BitRefill, a Silicon Valley-based firm that allows users to “top up [their] mobile phone using Bitcoin”, has said that “there are many, many altcoins that could easily claim to be successful at many facets of blockchain, but I don’t think any can claim to be more secure and safe than Bitcoin.” 

Alex Krüger, a prominent economist and trader, recently said that the “largest asset managers” have “little interest” in the cryptoasset market because it is “too small to accommodate their size and justify their time.” 

Elizabeth White, the CEO and founder of the White Company, a New York-based company that provides the “opportunity for clients who hold wealth in cryptocurrencies to [anonymously] purchase luxury goods”, has said that we need to “encourage merchants to accept cryptocurrency” through “payment systems where they don’t have to worry about the volatility as they have the option to convert immediately to fiat.”

Sheila Warren, the head of blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) efforts at the World Economic Forum (WEF), a Switzerland-based non-profit organization “committed to improving the state of the world”, recently shared her views and insights with CryptoGlobe regarding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Warren also explained what she thinks will be the potential role of smart contracts and DLT in future economies.

In this short interview, I asked bitcoin veteran Peter Todd a few questions about bitcoin, block sizes, what interests him in the space, and why he doesn’t like smart contracts and Ethereum.

Erik Zhang, the co-founder of NEO, one of the leading blockchain-based platforms for developing decentralized applications (dApps) and issuing smart contracts, recently revealed that he “doesn’t care about NEO’s price and market capitalization at all.” Zhang, a self-taught computer programmer and graduate of Shanghai University, explained that his main role at NEO was to work on the blockchain-enabled platform’s ongoing development.

Vinny Lingham, Civic CEO and former Shark Tank investor, in a recent interview where discussed the price of Bitcoin. The video interview was published yesterday by Cheddar.com. 

Kiran Pachhai, the development manager at the Elastos Foundation, an organization focused on the development of a “decentralized ‘smartweb’ project that allows users and applications to communicate through a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of nodes”, recently shared his insights with CryptoGlobe regarding Web 3.0 and its relationship with blockchain technology.    

Daniel Schwartzkopff, the CEO of Invictus Capital, a cryptocurrency investment management firm, recently explained how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning may be integrated with blockchain-based digital currency platforms. In an interview with CryptoGlobe, Schwartzkopff explained that “machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence and the only workable technology able to create self-learning systems at this time.”

Dr. Ben Goertzel, a renowned AI scientist and entrepreneur, discussed blockchain technology on the popular Joe Rogan podcast. Dr. Goertzel is the CEO of SingularityNET a blockchain-based AI marketplace, which raised $36 million in just one minute in an ICO last year.

Marshall Hayner, an early bitcoin adopter and the CEO and founder of Metal Pay, a fully operational payments app with support for cryptocurrency payments in 34 US states, recently shared his views and insights with CryptoGlobe for the cryptoasset industry.    

Mati Greenspan, the senior market analyst at giant social trading platform, eToro, recently shared with CryptoGlobe some of his views and insights regarding cryptocurrencies and how he thinks they will contribute to the global economy.

Craig Steven Wright, a prominent Australian computer scientist who is currently focused on the ongoing development of Bitcoin “Satoshi Vision” (SV), recently shared with us some of his views and insights regarding how a peer-to-peer electronic cash system should work. Wright told us that his long-term vision for the Bitcoin SV protocol is similar to that which is outlined in “the original Bitcoin protocol.”