Crypto in Every Wallet – Mission Impossible?

BITmarkets COO Peter Sumer Reviews 1 Year in Business

Granted, actually putting cryptocurrencies in every wallet is a bit of a stretch. OK; it is flat out mission impossible, when we look at the short term. Having said that, one thing is for sure – the overly ambitious claim definitely helps me keep my teams focused and motivated on our mission!

So, where do we stand 1 year into making crypto a household name? Having baby-stepped our crypto exchange project past the birthing pains, whilst offering live support in 16 languages, we can collectively exclaim “wow, what a ride!”, and I don’t mean cryptocurrencies’ inherent volatility here (laughs).

BITmarkets COO Peter Sumer on the blockchain trail

At the time we were getting BITmarkets off the ground, crypto was in a bit of a purgatory. Cryptocurrencies across the board were taking a severe beating with no end in sight. It seemed that besides the dormant whales, only the retail HODL-ers were among the last remaining crypto believers. The ranks of the sellers and doubters were swelling by the day as they watched the protracted train wreck from the sidelines.

In queries on the market trends, you could readily find searches like: Will Crypto ever Recover in 2022? The bot-generated reply would not offer much in the way of hope:

"The near future might not be positive for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continue trending downward, although at a much slower rate than during the early months of 2022."

New kid on the blockchain, but a love brand?

I was recently asked by a friend: “Is it difficult to build a love brand?” I replied with “I don’t have the slightest idea. I have never done it”. Even before you can even consider embarking on building a love brand, you have to be cognizant of just how difficult that is. Even though I knew nothing about making a love brand, I knew that first, you have to genuinely love the product.

What’s more, when my team were putting together a business plan, we instinctively knew that we had to focus on the “why”. In other words, why were we entering the crypto business in the first place? Our “why” remains to do our best to contribute to mass crypto adoption. From that mission follows our brand claim “crypto made simple” as a conduit for bringing crypto to the masses and making it a household name.

Doing our crypto due diligence

Whenever you are defining your services as broadly as “going for mass adoption”, you have to make sure that the fundamentals are all there. It is crucially important to have done your homework – arriving at a high degree of probability that you are building out your services from a solid foundation.

Equally as important is that you actually address your customers' problem(s), help them do things better, and respond to their present and future needs. These basic tenets have to come before everything else – including your company’s bottom line, especially if you are an industry newcomer.

Our analysts have reaffirmed that in the particular moment in time we were launching our exchange, we were just experiencing a low ebb on the crypto cycle; a regular occurrence that was nothing out of the ordinary. If you were to get into the crypto game, but did not believe in the underlying blockchain technology, you would be in this business for all the wrong reasons. So, once we have gone past the due diligence phase before launch, we felt that we have already won half the battle.

Looking past short-term obstacles

Looking at crypto’s track record, we knew that we were making the right decision – by staying the course to launch. Even though the current market at launch was going against us, we kept our eyes on the big picture, and looked to our analysts to give us the green light to cross the Rubicon.

Exactly as predicted, at the start of ’23, crypto has indeed found its bottom and swung around, taking the sentiment gradually with it. But not before more damaging news came in, which would dissuade the general public from (re)discovering cryptocurrencies. The sudden blow to investor confidence came in the form of unsavory behavior by one of industry’s giants, FTX. The investigators of its shadowy dealings raised claims that the company was more akin to a “digital Potemkin village” rather than a functioning crypto exchange under the former CEO.

To us, this was akin to poisoning the crypto industry. The only positive thing that came from it was that it shed a spotlight on the importance of trust and security in the industry, and welcoming scrutiny into how coins are managed and stored.

In crypto we (still) trust

Our founding long story short, we simply said to ourselves that we are in this for the long haul – and took the informed plunge. We were confident that it was only a matter of time before crypto would reverse its downward trend and recapture the attention and imagination of the public at large.

In our daily operations, we are doing our share to keep building public confidence in digital currencies and the blockchain technology that makes them tick. We want to make crypto a thing that everyone can relate to – because we believe it holds the key to making life simpler – and ultimately better for all.