How my journey of over 3 decades started a crypto revolution

From childhood dreams to start up in the crypto world. The personal story of the CEO and co-founder of X8 Gregor Koželj.

Yugoslavia in the 80s. The era of cold war, Deutsche mark dominance and something called Teletext. These were the first years of my life and also my first steps into the world of currencies.

At the time the Yugoslav economy was entering a well known volatile period, and the effects of the degradation of the country were also reflected in its currency called the Dinar. You are probably wondering why a child was thinking about currencies. But the answer is simple.

For a kid, his birthday is one of the biggest days in the year. In my family presents were usually in the form of money so I could learn the lessons of saving. I was trying to buy a new bicycle for some time and the money I received for my birthday was the last capital influx that I needed. But the next day in the store a lovely lady told me that I did not have enough money for the bike. Because of something called hyperinflation. Essentially, I could not buy one tire for the amount I have been saving for months.

This is how I gradually became interested in monetary developments and in how money works. At home, I was talking with my dad about it. It was a persistent topic among people in the environment every single day as well. And my infatuation with currencies started. At that time the main currency in our world was the Deutsche Mark. Every day I checked on Teletext what the exchange rate between Dinar and Mark was. I still remember the number of the page on Teletext: 310.

It was the era of government meddling with the value of Dinar. The currency changes were almost as rapid as ones we can see today in the crypto world. One day a loaf of bread was 50 dinars, the next day in the morning 500 dinars and in the afternoon 5000 dinars.

At one point people were carrying around millions, billions in cash of more or less worthless currency. Banknotes that were circulated were sometimes so fresh and directly out from under the printing press that on more than a few occasions people found banknotes practically glued together as one banknote. The ink had just barely dried. It was almost surreal. People were forced to think about it constantly. Our local environment still has vivid memories of it.

Two decades later after finishing my studies, everything was different. New system, new currency and a different environment. I started to work for an asset management company. I worked as a portfolio manager taking care of tens of millions of euros of clients capital. But there was one problem I stumbled upon very soon.

Economies of scale were not possible because the work was actually craftsmanship. It was not scalable without automation. In the beginning, I tried to automatize processes in the company, but soon I decided to start my own businesses.

Together with two of my best friends Ervin Marguč and Simon Hohler we have begun to develop a platform that would address the problems of automatic execution and scalability of active investment portfolio management business. At the time the project was our hobby, and we still had regular jobs because at the end of the day we had to pay the rent and buy food. Bootstrapping the idea in the early years brought the team together. And Ervin, Simon and I are still working side by side, and we are part of the core of the team behind the X8 project.

The year was 2005, and the stock markets were in a frenzy that ended abruptly in 2008 with the collapse of the financial system. But in 2005 only the sky was the limit.

One of the main issues that I was facing as a portfolio manager in the era before the collapse of Lehman Brothers was the liquidity of assets. The company I was still working for was already managing enough assets that our actions had a response in some markets. For instance, once we made a transaction of 100 millions of dollars into Japanese yen and briefly changed the price of the USD by more than 0.5 percent. It was a surprise. At the time everybody thought the market was much deeper, but most importantly we came to an important realization about actual liquidity limitations.

One of the first problems we decided to address was how to be able to rapidly scale the size of investments without actually influencing the market.

With persistence, we tried to solve a new problem and add new features to our solution every two years. By 2013 we brought our architectural product, called ioNectar, into production for the first time. The three of us were now 100% focused on our original work. With the new platform, we were finally gaining a better position in the market, and we found first clients for our technology.

Later in 2014, the decision has been made to prepare for steps ahead that would enable us to enter the crypto world.

We were looking at bitcoin from its early beginnings. We discovered that bitcoin has its logic but that there is also a correlation with the “old currencies”. And when in 2014 bitcoin started to gain mainstream attention and in some way established its proof of concept we knew that the next logical step was the crypto world.

Soon we began to expand our team, and as the token economy started to take shape with the rise of ethereum, we knew what we had to do. Our ioNectar platform has already proven its worth. We still had further upgrades in the pipeline. It was about ARM AI (Automatic Reserves Management AI). This unique and revolutionary portfolio risk management system gave us a key advantage in successfully managing assets. Especially from the perspective of minimizing risk while still enriching our clients. Even in times of unforeseen market volatilities. Now we had a compelling package.

And looking at the crypto world, we knew that every crypto investor wanted a safe haven for their assets. A proven, secure and liquid haven. Bringing ioNectar into the blockchain community is not only a great business opportunity for us but also something that would happen anyway.

If we would not do it, somebody else would.

Last year we decided to bring ioNectar into the crypto through crowdsale. In November 2016 we started working with Cofound.it. Yes, we spent almost a year preparing for the crowd sale although most teams do it in just three months. Why? Because we wanted it to be perfect.

The next step for us is going to happen on the 12th of September when the crowdsale goes live. But we dream big and this is just one of the steps in our 10-years plan. We believe that in the next 18 months after the crowdsale our crypto solution X8C will be one of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the world.

But our dreams are even bigger. So if you want to become a part of our mission to bring revolutionary advancements into the financial system all around the world joins us on x8currency.com. And we will infuse the revolution together.