Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not really a shill - except for perhaps when it comes to bitcoin or my personal websites vmpayday and tepayday. I have 28,000 connections on linkedin, 4950 connections on facebook, 4275 connections on apsense, and am currently growing my twitter account - and one thing anyone who knows me or has followed me for any length of time can tell you is that I don't shill.

I like people to know my intentions are pure. Yet as of late, people see me talking about NEXT exchange ALL the time. So why is it I have changed my stance? What is it about NEXT that makes me think it's not just another exchange? Why am I breaking all my own views for this project?

This was exactly what was asked of by humpty in the comments on my article "The truth about the falling bitcoin values."

How I found my way to NEXT?

It was a little over a year ago when it all began. I was the main moderator in the Coin Payments telegram chat at the time. Coin Payments had created a token called CPS Coin. They had announced that they had no intentions of adding their token to any exchanges out of fear their project would be deemed a security.

They said if they were to be listed, it would be up to exchanges to list them, not out of any efforts of their own.

I had several thousand CPS Coin tokens and it was pretty devastating to hear this news. So I started going through my LinkedIn contacts checking who owned exchanges. That's when I ran across the profile of Chrisiaan van Steenbergen. He is the founder of the NEXT project and at that time was also CEO.

He was one of several people I reached out to, but was the only one willing to list Coin Payments token without any involvement from the development team. He said it would take a public vote and if we received enough votes we would have the token listed. Within a week of campaigning we had topped over 150 votes to get the token listed.

At this point NEXT had not launched and wouldn't launch for a few more months yet to come.

When they first launched the rules of using the exchange were that you had to be holding 200 NEXT tokens to get early access. This didn't last long but allowed them to test their exchange - so I purchased.

To say I was unimpressed would be a bit of an understatement. However it was merely an MVP launch so I began researching. I read everything about NEXT that I could find - and what I found was something that interested me. Over the course of the next year things became more and more clear and I simply fell in love with what they were doing.

Unfortunately Coin Payments did a lot of very unusual things with their project causing their CPS token to never get listed, and now the token no longer exists at all - however that is irrelevant to the story.

The first NEXT feature that made me interested

What I learned when researching NEXT was that it was building an exchange from ground up that was focused more on security than trade volumes. In fact they made the claim many times that unlike the majority of exchanges - they would never falsely inflate trade volumes.

One of the key aspects of their exchange for me was that they were going to be offering, in the future, all users the ability to access all of their wallet keys in their account.

For me and my beliefs about cryptocurrency this was huge. An exchange that ran very similar to a centralized exchange, only your coins were always held in your own wallets and you would have access to the keys!

So how are they able to make this work? It works fairly simply. When a person places an order to sell coins or tokens, those coins or tokens are removed from their main wallet to the NEXT blockchain.

When someone else comes and buys them, the coins used to buy are also moved to the next blockchain. The buy takes place on NEXT blockchain, then the tokens or coins for both the buyer and seller are moved back to their main wallets.

The only time the user loses control of their funds is from the time they are selling until the order is filled. This all takes place in the background of NEXT exchange but will be clearly visible on the NEXT blockchain.

FIAT Pairings on NEXT Exchange

One of the things NEXT plans to do doesn't really have a huge effect on me as I do not mix my cryptocurrency transactions with fiat currency, however I think the idea of it is absolutely perfect. This has been made possible through an advisory partnership with Dutch National Bank.

They have plans to make every single asset listed on their exchange paired with fiat currency. For the past few years one of the things projects have had a seriously hard time with is breaking away from bitcoin. Most tokens and currencies tend to follow the market trends of whatever bitcoin is doing.

Sure there are times this isn't true but for the most part when bitcoin goes down, the whole market goes down and when bitcoin goes up the whole market goes up.

Part of the reason for this is because everything is listed with values in bitcoin. Even tokens feel this effect. For example an ethereum token will be paired to ethereum, however ethereum itself is valued in bitcoin making all tokens feel the effects of what goes on with bitcoin.

By having an exchange that pairs everything to fiat currency this breaks all the trends of bitcoin being the main value of tokens and currencies and it also allows tokens to break away from the value of the parent blockchain they were created on.

NEXT Staking and Fee Distribution

Moving on another awesome feature of NEXT is fee distributions. Although NEXT will have very low trading fee's, these fee's are in part to be redistributed.

Keep in mind this is not a promise and are based on specific exchange goals, NEXT also has plans to redistribute a portion of their trading fees back to users who are staking NEXT coin.

The exact method that this will be handled is still unknown. We are not yet sure if this means there will be an actual staking option or if it means one just has to be holding the coins.

We are not sure if there is a specific length of time one has to be holding for before being eligible for these rewards or if those who have been holding longer will receive more or if it will be an equal distribution based on the amount held.

We also are not 100% sure if they will receive more next coins or if they will be receiving various other coins or tokens.

Many of these aspects are still being worked on and developed and discussed.

NEXT Interface for the masses

NEXT exchange also plans to have two interfaces - one for advanced users and one for the masses of users who may be new to trading or completely new to cryptocurrency.

They want an interface that is both visually appealing and easy to use for every single user that exists.

The above interface screenshot is from their testing servers and is similar to what the new interface will look like when it goes live later this year. At the moment this is still in a testing phase and not available to the masses but will be coming soon.

This is to be their basic interface.

Personally I hope in the future they will also have an even more basic interface that is similar to the way changelly works to make for 3 separate interfaces.

One for brand new users to cryptocurrency, one for new traders, and one for advanced traders - however this is just my hope and no suggestion of this being the case has ever taken place.

NEXT is a HEX

You may have noticed while reading this that NEXT exchange has some features that resemble a centralized exchange and other features that resemble a decentralized exchange.

For this reason, NEXT considers itself a Hybrid Exchange, or a HEX.

As mentioned already all trades will take place on the NEXT blockchain. For this reason speed becomes a potential issue, which is why NEXT has opted to create a blockchain using DAG technology.

DAG technology is a second layer blockchain technology that allows tokenized transactions to take place in a secure manner without needing confirmations.

This makes the trading on NEXT exchange as instant as any centralized exchange while allowing proof of transactions to be maintained and reviewed on the blockchain.

NEXT Audits

The final thing I think that needs mentioned is unlike most other exchange, NEXT will have regular audits performed. I mentioned already that NEXT has an advisory partnership with Dutch National Bank.

This means they have to ensure their record keeping is perfect. This also means there will be regular audits performed on the blockchain and the trades and will be made public.

Things like wash trading will not be possible on NEXT Exchange for this reason. It is also because of this NEXT will be able to prove to the world, unlike most other exchanges, that their trade volumes are real.

Nothing about NEXT will be inflated. According to Bitwise research of 83 different exchanges, only 5% of all bitcoin trades are real. However Bitwise didn't take into account wash trades, trades between the same people over and over, or a vast amount of other things.

Instead they based their research solely on what he blockchain shows without being able to connect trades because when looking ONLY at the blockchain records, some things are not easy to follow - for example multiple accounts constantly trading back and forth between each other o inflate trade volume.

Without proper auditing by an outside source, one can only hope that the 10 exchanges they deemed as being honest in volumes, are actually being honest.

Since NEXT is working with a banking partner, their audits will be regular and will show such false inflation even if they are happening on chain and the fact wash trading will not be possible means NEXT will not only make the claim of honest trade volumes they will be able to prove it.

Conclusion

Hopefully I didn't leave anything out of my explanations on why I think NEXT is an awesome project that is not just another exchange. I also hope you can see why I oped to embrace this project when I have avoided shilling any other projects.

I think NEXT is perhaps the first exchange to do things properly.

To give a few final tidbits before I close this article, NEXT will require KYC if and only if you plan to trade with fiat pairings. For users who do not opt to trade to fiat pairings, there will be no requirement for KYC document handling.

Overall I hope NEXT is a huge success. I hope they set a trend in how other exchanges operate in the future because currently exchanges are the most hacked services in crypocurrency, the easiest way to lose funds and they have the most corrupt and untruthful reporting that exists.

It is for these reasons so many want regulations in this space and I think next has the right idea on how to manage things while keep regulators away.

I expect great things from this project in the coming years and I think now is absolutely the perfect time to buy NEXT Tokens, which must be converted to NEXT coin by Dec 31.

If you are interested in buying NEXT you can currently do so on CREX24 with BTC (US residents need to use a proxy service to create an account, which I found can be done using a free copy of tunnelbear) or on iDEX with ETH (does not apply to US residents).

Keep in mind although you can signup to NEXT exchange at the moment (in fact hey have a nice referral program), trading is offline until upgrades are complete.

*** UPDATE ***

Regarding Staking:

Coins have to be hold in the exchange wallet

Snapshots will be taken several times a month and dates of snapshots won’t be published

There’s no eligibility date or term as long as you are holding during snapshots

Minimum of 100 NEXT must be held

Regarding Regulations: