Key Takeaways from our CEO Mike Kayamori Year-end AMA (December 28th, 2017)

Hello Everyone, just wrapping up our year end AMA in Japan. There are 157 Japanese users participated on Year End Japan AMA. Im hoping we can pass that in our English user.

I’m going to cover some of the questions brought up from our community as well.

During this AMA, I am going to reflect on what we have achieved in 2017 and look at 2018.

There are 3 events that really defined who we were and what we wanted to become

Japan is the first and only country to embrace cryptocurrency and regulate cryptocurrency exchanges.

QUOINE is the first global exchange to get licensed by the Japan Financial Services Agency. No Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex have a license in Japan. It took us 18 months of intensive work on finance, governance, security, operations, etc to become regulated. I wanted to express my appreciation to everyone in our team who helps to make that happen.

We had a very successful ICO with nearly 4988 participants from 98 countries around the world. If you think about it, there are 176 countries in the world. More than half of that participated in our ICO. Our ICO is the largest ICO in Asia. This would have never happened without the team effort.

That’s the highlight of 2017.

Our company now is having nearly 100 people. Within 1 year, we have grown 3x. We will be close to 200 people by next year to meet with the expectation and to do better. And it’s not about headcount, hiring people is about finding the right talent. We appreciate your patience and your support.

We all try to predict the price of cryptocurrencies at year end. 1 bitcoin is around $15,000 USD today but 1 bitcoin was only $960 USD when we started. The highest price people used to predict for Bitcoin is $4,000 at one point. 2017 was an extraordinary year for cryptocurrencies.

2018 is going to be an even more exciting year!

As you already know, we have QUOINEX, our regulated fiat-crypto currency exchange. We also have QRYPTOS, our crypto-crypto exchange that will become the number 1 ICO and listing platform in the world, a self-service ICO listing platform. We are still trying to find the right name for it. Do let us know if you have an idea for a name of our ICO and listing platform! LIQUID platform for professional traders beta version will be out in Q1. Our Prime Brokerage Service will be for a little bit later. The QASH tokens will be used across all of our services. A year and a half from now, we will have the QASH blockchain. Our blockchain will be best of breed with high performance and low latency. QASH blockchain will be the most reliable blockchain in the world, tailored for fintech services.

Before I go into the questions, these days, we are focusing on our effort in performance, increasing our customer support effort, but it also needs to be done in a secure way. There is a trade off between convenience and security which we are trying to find the right balance.

Our partnership with Gibraltar. They are an independent government. They are one of the most progressive government in the world. They are the first to support e-gaming. Gibraltar is becoming the center for fintech. Their GDP is from these emerging technology. They are passing legislation for Digital Ledger Technology (DLT) this month. Gibraltar Stock Exchange (GSX) is the national stock exchange owned by the government. Gibratar Blockchain Exchange (GBX) is its subsidiary. We are going to provide the entire ICO platform for them and provide our QASH Token as a payment token for their services. They are going to do an ICO for their Rock Token. This is the first opportunity for QASH token to become an utility used on a national exchange. They are going to sell 5 million Rock Tokens, of which 3 millions will be sold on their exchange, 1 million will be sold on QRYPTOS, another 1 million will be sold on our QUOINEX Japan platform. I hope you are as excited as I am.

If ok please be totally truthful and manage our expectations with regards to Binance. I’m sorry it’s been brought up every once in a while by so many but it really is time to address it. It’s just so strange seeing new ICO’s such as ICX being listed on Binance within days of launch and seeing them do so well after can’t help but make me think there’s something sinister going on with regards to listing of QASH there.

I will be completely honest with you guys here. Where should we start?

As a regulated licensed exchange, it is mandatory for us to have all of our information provided on our website. A financial service is a trust business at the end of the day. An exchange needs to be real. Many exchanges don’t do that.

In October, Binance approached us and offered to list QASH on their exchange. They actually purchased QASH as well and wanted to be in our LIQUIDITY alliance. At some point later, that was no longer the case and they put an expectation. They wanted us to list Binance tokens on our QUOINEX exchange. We can’t do that because their token is not approved by the Japan FSA because their information is not fully disclosed. We can however do that for the Rock Token because we have come to the JFSA office and explain the token and the Rock is blessed by the JFSA.

Just wondering what is going to be the backbone and infrastructure to the Liquid platform, especially when it comes to fund withdrawals. If it’s going to be largely the same as QUOINEX/QRYPTOS, I worry your future LIQUID users will have a nasty surprise when it is time for the to move their funds.

We make it clear on our security policy. We are contemplating using hot wallet for QRYPTOS. But as i say before, most hack incidents happen on the hot wallet. There is a trade-off here between convenience and security.

There is a cut off time for processing withdrawals. Its 9AM JPT, which is 8AM SGT or 7AM VNT. If you miss that cut off time, it will be for the next day. But we are hoping to increase the cut-off times to 2–3 times a day. We are thinking to do withdrawal over the weekends as well. We are trying our best and we will keep you updated.

Over the past couple months, you’ve been in talks with Goldman Sachs and CME. Can we expect something to come to fruition with either of those entities, or another similar in scope? For example, Goldman Sachs just announced they’re going to offer cryptocurrency trading to their clients. Would a Whitelabel deal involving the Liquid platform be in play?

Anything is a possibility. When you look at our CxO, we have multiple people who come from Goldman. We have multiple meetings. That is the extend to which we can disclose. These things take time. You will be the first to know when things are ready. Mainstream finance institution are looking for partnerships, we are in a very good position.

Regarding CMEs, I was invited to talk at one of the CME panels. We would love to offer CME futures for our customers as well. The way this works is CME doesn’t on board customers themselves, they have this clearing partners. We have a lot of opportunities for partnership but as a start-up that have 90 people, it’s important to focus on doing our business well.

Why QUOINE needs to have our own blockchain?

None of the existing blockchain has the performance, the latency and the throughput to build a high performing trading platform. It’s just not available. We can’t do it on the ethereum blockchain. This is a good thing because we have the knowledge accumulated from looking at Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum blockchain, derivative blockchain, and others. We can pick and choose the best of breed to build our own blockchain. Once we achieve that, all of the new fintech companies and all of the financial institutions can build their services on top of our blockchain.

What do you foresee the biggest problem in getting banks and liquidity providers to partner up given the lack of regulations in today’s environment?

Japan is the first country to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges. Regulation is the way to go. All of the exchanges who try to go peer- to peer is not going to win, unless they go to a free country. It’s better to be transparent and pro-regulation. Japan and Gibraltar are the first to do it. Singapore and Korea are joining as well. All the exchanges who comply will make cryptocurrencies legitimate. Free society still needs rules and guidelines. Currenly, banks don’t know which cryptocurrency exchanges to work with. Once regulation comes in, it becomes easier to build an alliance of liquidity platform.

Although you have mentioned short term price increases/decreases, how do you think the sluggish performance of QASH price in bullish December will affect the community confidence on the token?

That’s an interesting assessment. I don’t think QASH token is sluggish. For the people who participated in our token sale, the price is 5x after 1 month and half. Where can you find a 5x return in other financial instruments in such short time? I prefer a price appreciation that is linked to performance (product launch, partnership, etc) instead of being linked to a pump and dump trend. It’s a good thing that your token is stable. We are building a fintech enabled ledger. QASH as a utility should grow as our business grows. We can’t compare QASH with other tokens. I think it’s a good thing that QASH is stable right now.

Updates on Marketing

The Xmas Campaign has concluded with close to 1000 participants joining the competition.

Last week’s Iphone winners/ Top Traders in each category are as follows:

BTC category: Charles Caverne

ETH category: Raymond Yeh

QASH category: WEI LIM

Monaco is still ongoing till end of the week. You can trade $MCO and $QASH To Win An All-Expenses Paid Trip for Two to the 2018 F1 Monaco Grand Prix And Other Awesome Prizes!

QUOINE will be doing a series of weekly blog posts to give QUOINERS trading tips, educate and familiarize QUOINERS with new dashboard features. The latest article posted on Steemit and Medium is Trading Tip of the week: Stop Order.

QUOINE Community Alert: We have received reports of scammers running QUOINE marketing campaigns under the email quoine.support@protonmail.com. Please do not contribute to this scam and block the email address immediately. All official QUOINE marketing campaigns will only come from our official channels on social media and our newsletter address from support@quoine.com.

Updates on QRYPTOS Self-Service

Per our product roadmap we should highlight QRYPTOS ICO self-service progress updates, namely:

• QRYPTOS ICO Listing Support: Marketing + onboarding of token issuers onto QRYPTOS starting w SophiaTX (already listed) and many more to come!

• Self-service dashboard for token issuers in development

• Listing fee in QASH — increased utility for QASH as liquidity token

Updates on Operations

We are hiring aggressively. The plan is too add over 100 members to our team.

https://medium.com/@QUOINE/would-you-like-to-be-a-part-of-quoine-f7024515973f

We are also planning on doing meet-ups in cities around the world. I would love to bring our hoodies and cups to meet with our community where you guys are.

And that is a wrap for our year end AMA. Thank you so much for your support in 2017. 2018 will be an even more exciting year and I am looking forward to it.