Top 5 Methods of Running an Effective Cryptocurrency Exchange

This week marks the second anniversary of KickEX – a licensed exchange with minimal fees, a referral program, and a cool team. Anti Danilevski, the exchange's CEO and founder, talks about what has already been done, how it came to be, and what is planned for the future.

I've been working in high-tech companies for most of my professional life. I've created game dev startups, organized fundraising platforms, and finally launched my own ICO project. Before founding and heading a cryptocurrency exchange, I had studied the crypto sector deeply, giving me the necessary experience and understanding of how the system works from the inside. 

When we started actively moving forward, however, I realized as the head that the exchange's entire internal structure, along with its interaction with the outside world, were much more complicated endeavors than I had previously thought. There are a lot of processes in KickEX that aren't visible to the general public, the exchange's members, and even some members of the team. Therefore, to ensure successful development, I have come up with certain principles for myself. These principles are ones that I believe to be the defining principles of a manager. I'll talk later about how they work for the exchange.

Partnership and Open Dialogue

There's a reason that this principle is first on the list, and that's because I believe that partnership, openness, and a willingness to listen should be the top priority everywhere. That includes families, business, and even the government. I'm confident in saying that in these two years, together with our team, we've listened to everyone who came to us - listed companies, stock exchange members, people wanting to launch an AIO, and the media. And we didn't just listen to them, but also gave useful advice. In some cases, we even took recommendations for ourselves. On the one hand, together with our market community, we exclusively create our applications for mobile devices: adding new languages and constantly pushing updates (including an Android version very soon). And on the other hand, we can advise companies coming to us for listings or for AIOs with solutions that will be right for them and for the market. 

Strive for Digitalization and Simplification

The fact that you can register for the exchange and use all of its features online is pretty straightforward. Being online-compatible isn't just a trend in the market, but a genuine requirement for the crypto world and the times we live in. Nevertheless, everyone's services work differently, so we strive to make both our users and our partners feel most comfortable working with us. This is really important to me, as I am a technocrat by nature. To put it briefly, we've synchronized and linked up all our services—the exchange, KickICO, and KickWallet—as much as possible. And the KickID feature, for instance, allows users access to one of the ecosystem's platforms automatically, without having to re-register for all of them.

Fear Nothing

We're pretty much operating in a new segment of a once-conservative financial system. It's a fairly competitive one, but in ten months, we managed to rank 70th in the spot exchange rankings on CoinMarketCap.com. After the ICO boom, we took on a new direction – AIOs. Last year, we did two rounds for QUASA, and now we're planning a campaign for a new game project called Star Strangers. We're listing new tokens that have never been listed anywhere before. Some of our newest ones have been the STRM and DIT tokens, letting us provide our participants with the latest, most interesting tools for trading.

Take Responsibility

Similarly to fearing nothing, there's one more principle that I consider a rule of life, and that's taking responsibility. And I don't just mean taking responsibility for the team and our participants. I boldly answer for the regulation of the crypto-market as, in fact, I'm an advisor to the Russian parliament on this issue. I believe that legalization will be able to give cryptocurrency new incentives to develop, and Russian citizens will be able to use their money in spite of bank restrictions. 

Think Big

A few years ago, could anyone have imagined that an ICO platform could've been started from scratch and raised $20 million? Sure, that was a while ago, but it laid the groundwork for what we have on the Kick Ecosystem today. Was it possible to run the lowest exchange fees on the market? Hardly, but we did it.

Final Thoughts On How To Run An Effective Cryptocurrency Exchange

So, in the grand scheme of things, my dream is for there to be a full-fledged exchange for the free flow of cryptocurrency, where all the links in the chain work successfully: token issuers raise funds, there are investment instruments, sufficient liquidity, and the platform itself is profitable. This allows people to use a variety of tools for their financial freedom. This may be an ambitious goal, but all of us, those who work with cryptocurrency, blockchains, startups, are in this together. It happened once with the Internet, and it will happen again with the economy and the financial industry. We are already witnessing the early days of this transformation, and we're seeing how governments urgently try implementing CBDC, and how different countries are adapting to and legalizing cryptocurrency. None of this would have happened if it were not for all of us: the participants, the developers, the traders, the holders, and many, many others.