By Edward W. Mandel

An oracle of Gaea then prophesied that Metis’s first child would be a girl and that her second child would be a boy that would overthrow Zeus, similarly to what had happened to his father and grandfather. Zeus took this warning to heart. When he next saw Metis, he initially flattered her and put her at her ease. Then, with Metis’ guards down, Zeus opened his mouth and swallowed her and her unborn child. … After a time, Zeus developed an unbearable headache, which made him scream out of pain so loudly it could be heard throughout the earth. … Hermes realized what needed to be done and directed Hephaestus to take a wedge and split open Zeus ‘s skull. Out of the skull sprang Athena, fully grown and in a full set of armour.

GreekMythology.com, after Homer’s The Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony

Athena remains the only person, product or deity ever to come into the world fully formed. In the blockchain space, we shoot for a minimum viable product. If we’ve got the right team and a bulletproof plan we can stretch for a minimum commercially viable product. But when you offer or participate in an ICO, you know that what’s on display Day One is intended to be improved upon consistently over time.

BQT team is well aware of our current constraints whether they come from technology or market adoption or hours available in a day.

Grasp still exceeds reach

Although there’s little doubt that dexes will become viable options to centralized exchanges — if they don’t eclipse them completely — it’s clear we’re nowhere near that point yet. But a good hybrid is truly needed and being implemented by many players.

What’s lacking at this moment is the benefit of a network effect. In other words, the more people who participate on a platform, the more valuable that platform is as a whole — and thus the more value each participant gains from participating. If Instagram, for example, was just some photo exchanging site that had a few thousand participants, then it would probably have pretty much the same core functionality valued by its small but devoted band of sharers. But somehow it became Instagram, and suddenly you could make a two-comma living by being an “influencer”. This led to additional funding for incremental, bolt-on functions, but it’s still essentially the same platform its creators envisioned a decade ago.

Still, I don’t want to minimize the importance of added features which, I believe, would further fuel the dex bandwagon.

“The largest drawback of current DEXs is the lack of functionality, relative to centralized exchanges,” according to an excellent, though unsigned, Blockgeeks article I’ve referenced in earlier posts. “Most DEXs only support basic market functions, and not even features such as margin trading and stop loss. The technology has simply not yet caught up with the ambitions of most decentralized exchanges”.

What’s next

So let’s look first at Blockgeeks’ two prescribed functions.

Margin trading involves buying assets with funds borrowed from an intermediary. What makes this problematic with a dex-hybrid such as BQT is that we strive to be as minimally invasive an intermediary as possible. It’s that whole peer-to-peer ethos. That said, just because we don’t want to be your lender doesn’t mean that nobody does. It is our expectation that the exchange will attract, in addition to sophisticated traders, third parties who would be in a position to provide 10x plus leverage, enabling traders to make more efficient trades than are readily available in the crypto space today.

Still, margin isn’t the only, or necessarily the best, way to achieve the same end. More on that in a moment.

So what about stop-loss orders? These direct a trader to buy or sell a security once its price reaches a specified threshold, protecting a short-sell profit. And sure, we know that the Binances and Coinbases of the crypto world have found ways to make these happen. Even so, stop-loss orders have always been the purview of centralized exchanges — traditionally stock exchanges. They never really caught on in the pink sheets. We’re sure that centralized crypto exchanges will thrive by offering stop loss, and I’m confident that the CBOE and other commodity exchanges will include them as part of the service as they roll out crypto futures.

What’s after that

BQT team intends to integrate everything a sophisticated crypto trader can reasonably expect to find in a pure order-book exchange and a brokerage service as well as a trading platform. It’s our intention to accomplish this while maintaining the highest standards for security, privacy and liquidity. As we state in our white paper, we believe that we best serve our participants when we focus on enabling crypto-to-crypto trades, allow for sizeable daily withdrawals and accept deposits immediately from any widely used wallet.

Our competitive advantage is that we support P2P hedge trade capabilities and leverage offers. BQT system will offer an escrow-based solution for those who don’t want to find a third party unrelated to us who can synthesize margin trading. It might be far simpler and more efficient for you to avail yourself of our service as your escrow agent, and take comfort that your funds are safe in a high-security account.

But frankly, we’re doing all that already. We like to think we’re doing it better than anyone else does, but that’s not enough. Over the coming months and years, we’ll be inventing new ways to make sure we’re doing it better than anyone else can.

BQT will add bells and whistles over time, but only if and when they serve our target clientele. How will we know what you want? Because you’ll tell us. After all, the most important feature of our exchange is that we’re a community. Stay tuned…

Edward is an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, Blockchain Enthusiast and visionary behind many successful organizations. An avid entrepreneur, Edward has a knack for designing distinctive business models complemented with superior technology to deliver unparalleled service and profitability. Edward also has been advising and consulting for various successful Blockchain technology and ICO projects and recently launched his own BQT.IO P2P exchange helping traders connect with each other to leverage their crypto assets.

BQT.IO has been in development since March 2017 and its ICO launched September 18. The information can be found online at BQT.io, on Telegram @BQTCommunity and on Twitter as @bqt_ico.