Dear TIOnauts,

Happy summer TIOnauts (at least those of you in the Northern Hemisphere). I used the alliteration gag in my last letter, so we are not “jumping into July” or any such thing. We are moving with dignified excitement into the summer months. While summer has traditionally been a time of reduced activity, we at trade.io have no intention of slowing down, there is just too much to do at this point.

Following our May filled with exciting change and additions, June felt a little quieter, but I think that is just by way of comparison. In truth, we had a number of great things happen and I have been delighted with the opening salvos provided by our two newest team members, CMO Chris and CTO JP.

On the marketing side, we have begun to see the tip of the iceberg on Chris’s new strategy. While the full campaign will obviously take time to design and implement, the first steps have been impressive:

If you are in the LP you would have received your airdrop portion of 1,000,000 COY tokens. Perhaps more interestingly, all TIOnauts, and especially LP users, will get a free look at the CoinAnalyst trading data platform when it is ready.

LP users also got the first airdrop in the KICK coins, 1,000,000 to start and millions more to follow. We are also in the middle of a trading competition for KICK with millions of coins to be won.

We also added the TRX token to the exchange.

Lastly, we have begun to see the positive impact of TIOmarkets on the LP payouts.

If you noticed the beginning of a trend in the points above, you are correct. We are refocusing and rededicating our efforts to provide additional value to traders who own TIOx and who are in the liquidity pool. As we have always planned, there will be more benefit to holding TIOx in the LP than just the existing great return on investment. More to come on that front.

On the technology side, as usual, the efforts of JP and his team are often hidden in the background but are critically important to our success. As you all noticed we had a few stumbles this month that resulted in some additional downtime for the exchange. What you do not see, is the positive effect these interruptions have had based on a new approach that JP has brought to our company. All too often in the past, we have succumbed to the temptation of using the quickest fix to tech issues instead of the best fix. If slapping a band-aid on an issue takes fifteen minutes, but really fixing it takes several hours, the later is the harder but, in my opinion, better choice. I have been absolutely delighted with the way that JP approaches these issues, he looks at the exchange like a business process, not just a neat science experiment. The improvements to the exchange have been impressive so far and there is more to come.

As usual, we have a number of things on the horizon. In the upcoming months look for us to add Komodo, XRP and AION tokens, deploy the new marketing campaigns, re-launch our new affiliate program and our automated OTC platform, deploy our improved AML/KYC process and add new fiat offerings and PSPs. Overall though, we are going to slow the pace of deployments a little so that Chris and JP can work their magic as described above.

Lastly, I wanted to continue my thoughts from last month about the issue that our industry is facing as we deal with young companies in a, comparatively, infantile market. As you may recall, I asked the question last month if our TIOnauts would rather see fewer, but perfect, order books representing more generally traded tokens or more order books, even if they were ugly, for lesser known, but promising tokens.

You all spoke, and you spoke loud and clear. You want full order books with multiple levels and high liquidity, even if that means listing far fewer tokens. We heard you, we listened and we are acting. You will have already seen a number of token de-listings and there are more to come. This process is also helping us identify a few last holdouts of fake volume on the exchange. Because of our never-ending efforts to ban and eliminate wash trading, you may see overall volumes go down on the exchange for a while, but your LP payouts should not suffer. How is this you ask? Good question. First, as per above, the TIOmarkets revenues are bolstering the payouts and second, because of some old deals we cut in the past, long ago, we often don’t make any money off of the market making certain tokens provide. So, we are getting rid of fake volume that doesn’t make us (and you) any money. Seems like a win-win to me.

Anyway, back to the liquidity and order book question. As I mentioned above, we are in the process of making the changes you requested, moving away from low volume tokens and focusing on the bigger players. However, this doesn’t completely sit well with me. I think my bias on this front comes from my career having played out in two distinct phases. Originally, I worked in the big investment banking world, we raised billions for the behemoth companies of the day and helped big companies merge and become really big companies. It was a fun and exciting world, however, sometimes it felt like we weren’t making much of a difference. We were supposed to be raising money for companies so they could develop and grow, not just helping one giant multi-national eke out a few more percentage points of market share versus another. That led me to the second and current phase of my career, raising money for small companies, helping them develop and become successful businesses. I think this is part of why I am so focused on figuring out ways to let the little tokens get some exposure to our markets and our exchange.

Perhaps, to put it another way, sure, I will buy stock in companies like Amazon or Google when they are good investments, but neither of those companies needs my paltry sums in order to complete their ongoing domination of the world. I would so much rather invest in smaller, developing companies where my money might make a difference, while hopefully also being a good investment. This brings me back to the small, theoretical company that has a real business and is chugging along, but only trades a couple of times a day, or week or month that I mentioned last month.

This letter is once again getting far too long, so I will leave some details for next month, but here are the two basic concepts that I have been bashing around. The first concept would be to create a different version of the OTC Desk technology that we are getting ready to roll out where traders could request quotes on just about any token. There wouldn’t be an order book, just a request for a price, which we would provide and you as a trader could accept or decline. If you hear about some new, interesting token, enter a request and we will see what price we can get for you.

The second concept would be a sort of trade.io Pink Sheets. If you are not familiar with the term “Pink Sheets”, look it up, then have a good laugh at the fact that I am old enough that I remember when quotes for over-the-counter stocks were actually provided on pink sheets of paper that were delivered to investors. This would be a separate and distinct page on the exchange where we would list the “ugly” tokens. A place where our TIONauts could go look for the diamond in the rough, the small, developing company that just might be the next big thing, even if its order book looks like crud today.

As always, if you have an opinion, let us know, we are here to listen. If you would all just prefer to stick to trading the bigger tokens, that is completely fine, we are here to provide you with the service that you want. However, think on this for a while. Once upon a time, Amazon was just a place where you could buy paper books online, and Google was just the third or fourth best internet search engine — if you could go back in time and invest in those stocks back then, would you?

That’s it for this month folks. It may be a beautiful summer day here but we remain hard at work, trying every day to make things better for you, our loyal TIOnauts.

Sincerely,

Bill Heyn

CEO