We’re feeling optimistic at Amplify, but we know you can’t make a company succeed on optimism alone; fortunately, our confidence is correlated with the project’s progress, and that is why we are looking forward to what 2019 has in store for Amplify. That being said, there’s plenty of reasons you should have high hopes for Amplify too!

Recent Accomplishments

We’ve set up a new office in the burgeoning tech hub Knoxville, Tennessee, where new and veteran staff will continue to work on the exchange. New hires at our Knoxville office include two senior tech leads (one coming to us from Coinbase), a lead U/I U/X front end specialist, two junior developers, and four remote developers. And thanks to plenty of hard work by the Amplify team, we now have a front end design and framework ready for phase one of the launch!

In the past month, we have also made use of some of our valuable partnerships; we’ve received legal guidance from law firms DLA Piper and Goodwin Proctor, two industry leaders in securities, tech legal issues, and more. And we’ve been working with Verma Media, one of San Francisco’s premier crypto marketing firms, to get the word out about Amplify. With these partnerships providing legal and marketing support to the Amplify project, our core development team is free to focus the majority of their efforts on getting Amplify ready to go.

Amplify ICO Refund

We’ve also refunded all the participants in the Amplify ICO; this step isn’t as glamorous as opening a new office, but we think it’s a meaningful way to show that we take our Substratum community’s concerns seriously. You can read more about our decision to refund the ICO in this recent interview between TechBullion and Substratum founder Justin Tabb.

2019 Plans Underway

You might be wondering what we have in store for the rest of 2019?

To begin with, we will be continuing to build-out the financial and technological architecture underlying Amplify, that is our top priority. But we’re also developing banking relationships and building support infrastructure for ACH, wire payments, and credit card deposits.

Lots of the work we’re undertaking right now involves perfecting the user experience on phase one of the Amplify Exchange, the Amplify Brokerage. That means finding the appropriate markets to list upon launch, deciding on fee structures, developing cold storage and insurance options to keep users’ digital assets safe, and identifying target countries within Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America to release the exchange in.

If you’re eager to interact with the Amplify interface, an opportunity might be coming along sooner than you think; we’re preparing a pre-registration for the Amplify Exchange and plan to release the pre-registration form — along with a view-only demo of the brokerage — in the near future.

But that’s not all you can expect out of Amplify in the near future; our to-do list includes a website renovation that will help us better convey our mission, we will be working on elements of the Amplify user experience such as the research, news, charting, and order routing engines (which should all be complete soon!), and we plan on releasing the Amplify Brokerage in several different languages upon release!

Later in the year, we plan on opening an operational entity for the Amplify Brokerage. In addition to considering remaining headquartered in the BVI other locations we are considering include Malta, Switzerland, Gibraltar Isle of Man as well as some “sleeper countries” with progressive views on regulation specific to digital assets.We are considering these areas because the resources and laws in these countries could deeply shape the early stage development of Amplify, and that is why we are taking our time to thoroughly research each of these countries and other blockchain/crypto friendly and sophisticated jurisdictions.

All this hard work and preparation is building towards something significant — the launch of Amplify’s phase one, a brokerage that will become the bedrock architecture for a unique and innovative hybrid crypto exchange in the future. We anticipate launching the Amplify Brokerage by the end of Q2 or early Q3.

Amplify is an ambitious project — and we all know that Rome wasn’t built in a day, we also know that Rome wasn’t built by wasting time and dragging feet, either.

Projects that succeed do so by showing results and hard-won accomplishments, and the Amplify team plans on turning out plenty of those accomplishments in 2019.