QASH is the life force and native cryptocurrency for the popular exchange platform called Liquid.com. The use case of QASH is similar to other crypto exchange tokens where you can get extra benefits when you hold some QASH tokens in your Liquid.com account. With this article, we will talk more about the crypto exchange platform Liquid.com and its token QASH. Let’s just begin right away.

What Is Liquid.com And How Does It Work?

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Before we get into QASH, you need to understand more about its native platform, which is Liquid.com. So, just like its name, the goal of Liquid.com is to bring liquidity to the cryptocurrency space with its unique features called World Book and Prime Brokerage. Not only that, but Liquid.com also aims to be the ‘most compliant’ crypto exchange in the first world country. And yes, Liquid.com has been fully cooperating with Japanese FSA (Financial Services Agency) to get regulated in Japan. Liquid.com is also Big four audited, and its trading volume has been 100% verified by BTI.live.

Basically, the main selling point of Liquid.com is to ‘connect’ different liquidity pools from different exchanges into one combined pool. As we have mentioned earlier, to do this, Liquid.com uses two different features, which are called World Book and Prime Brokerage. So, with the World Book, the orders and prices from different crypto exchanges are combined into one order book for Liquid.com traders. So, the idea here is that every trader (does not matter where they are from) can use different types of fiat currencies to buy or sell cryptocurrencies. Because the World Book ‘combines’ different liquidity pools into one big order book, the potential suddenly becomes huge, as it eliminates the liquidity problems with many small trading pairs.

The World Book has three main features to improve the liquidity of Liquid.com. They are called the Matching Engine (ME), Smart Order Routing (SOR), and Cross Currency Conversion Engine (CCCE). So, Matching Engine (ME) is the technological feature to process millions of TPS (transactions per second). With ME, major token pairings are scalable fairly easily, and it will natively support new trading pairs whenever they become available.

Meanwhile, Smart Order Routing (SOR) will analyze all big crypto exchanges and ‘externally’ finish orders that cannot be completed by the World Book. Last but not least, the Cross Currency Conversion Engine (CCCE) will automatically empower instant conversions among different currencies. Using an example, an ETH/USD pair can be automatically ‘routed’ to another trader who is currently searching for BTC/EUR pair. When there are more users and more exchanges in the ecosystem, this feature will be further improved. Theoretically, there will be more trading pairs when the user base gets bigger, as well.

Beside all these features provided by World Book, Liquid.com also has one more selling point, which is its Prime Brokerage. The idea of Prime Brokerage is to give traders access to all the points mentioned above for World Book. So, you will get instant market access to all the exchanges that are already in the World Book. With Prime Brokerage, you won’t need to create different accounts with every exchange. You can just use the Prime Brokerage, and you get access to them all. Not only that, Liquid.com has been improving its network with different banks to make sure fiat deposit and withdrawal of its crypto traders remain seamless. One more thing. With Prime Brokerage, you will be able to stick out a credit line and leverage your own trades with your Liquid.com account.

History of QASH and Liquid.com

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Both of QASH and Liquid.com were created at the same time. At the beginning of its creation (in 2014), Liquid.com was named Quoine. The project was started by Mike Kayamori and Mario Gomez Lozada. Mike Kayamori acts as the CEO, and Mario Gomez Lozada acts as the CTO and the President. Both of them are very high profile individuals in the corporate world. Mike was the Senior Vice President at Softbank and the Chief Investment Officer at Gungho Asia. Meanwhile, Lozada was the CTO of Merrill Lynch Japan, and the CIO of Credit Suisse Japan.

And due to their huge connections in the corporate world, Quione was able to get the trading license from the Japanese FSA (Financial Services Agency). It was the first crypto exchange in Japan that was able to do so. In 2018, Quione also became one of the first crypto exchanges that got verified by the BTI.live (Blockchain Transparency Institute).

For your information, Quione got funded through an initial coin offering session (ICO). The ICO ended on November 8, 2017, and successfully collected $106,400,000 USD. At the time, the ICO was considered one of the biggest ICOs in the world, although some projects (such as EOS) successfully received even more funds.

And a side note. Quione was actually started as two different projects under the same umbrella. They were Qryptos and Quoinex. Eventually, the two projects were combined, and it got rebranded to Liquid.com.

Use Cases of QASH In Liquid.com Ecosystem

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So, Liquid.com’s native cryptocurrency is called QASH. Due to its ICO beginning, Liquid.com core team has responsibilities to ‘involve’ QASH in Liquid.com’s many trading features. And yes, the core team promises to keep expanding QASH use cases. At the present time, QASH’s use cases include Iending, margin trading, ICO/IEO participation, and to provide different trading pairs on the market.

With “lending”, it means traders in the Liquid lending platform will be able to use QASH token as one of the main collaterals. With “margin trading”, traders can fund their accounts by using QASH. And when they do so, the traders will get 0.05% margin fee back in the form of QASH token itself.

Meanwhile, for “ICO/IEO participation,” QASH will be one of the default payment systems to participate in. For your information, Liquid.com regularly holds a new coin offering for new startups. One of the most famous token sale events on Liquid.com was the Gram (Telegram) token sale. And yes, at the time, the participants were able to use QASH to get some extra benefits like cashback.

Not only all these features, but Liquid.com team also promises other appealing features in the near future. QASH token holders (in the future) will be able to enjoy 50% trading fees discounts by using their QASH tokens, just like how other crypto exchange tokens work. Liquid.com also wants to introduce what they call “proof of HODL” where special discounts and airdrops will be given to loyal QASH holders.

Controversies

There’s almost no controversy around the QASH and Liquid.com project, considering they have a very “corporate” background and did everything right from the very beginning. Liquid.com typically distances itself from controversies and maintain its professionalism and transparency since the beginning of its existence.

However, there’s one event that was heavily criticized by the crypto community. It happened when Liquid.com announced the GRAM token sale. For those who don’t know, the GRAM token sale wasn’t officially supported by Telegram Blockchain (TON) core team, but it was the partnership of Liquid.com and GRAM Asia. GRAM Asia was one of the biggest participants of the official Telegram ICO 2 years ago. So, basically, they participated in the Telegram ICO, and they sold some of their GRAM tokens through a partnership with Liquid.com. And they, of course, sold those tokens for a huge amount of profit.

The criticism was directed toward Liquid.com for being “greedy”, considering the token sale itself did not really involve the TON team. The GRAM token sale on Liquid.com was a success from the sales perspective, but it was not considered that good from a reputation perspective. Some skeptics also criticized Liquid.com for intentionally left out the part where GRAM Asia wasn’t an official representative of the TON team. Many casual investors thought the GRAM token sale at the time was officially supported by TON itself.

Competitors

Basically, all crypto exchange tokens are natural competitors to QASH. Arguably, QASH’s biggest competitors are BNB, Huobi Token, and UNUS SED LEO. These three tokens are the biggest crypto exchange tokens in terms of market cap, and each of them represents big crypto exchange with huge volume. BNB is the native cryptocurrency of Binance exchange. Huobi token is the native cryptocurrency of Huobi exchange. UNUS SED LEO is the cryptocurrency of Bitfinex. All of these three exchanges have large trading volume, and Binance alone is more popular than Liquid.com.

QASH In The Crypto Market

At the time this post was written, QASH was ranked 139th in the crypto rankings. Its market cap was $22,891,864 USD, and its daily trading volume was $212,510 USD. You can find QASH mostly on its own trading platform, Liquid.com. Other than that, you can find QASH on Hotbit, Huobi, Gate.io, and several other exchanges.

Conclusion

QASH and its platform, Liquid.com, have a really bright future. It is one of the ‘old’ players, and yet they are still able to stay relevant today in the sea of other crypto exchanges. The fact that it’s fully regulated, audited, and verified by different third parties, make Liquid.com (and QASH) even more appealing to institutional investors. The only challenge here is the relevancy and popularity of the trading platform because competition will only get tighter from now on.