Over the past 12 months, there has been an explosion of interest in the cryptocurrency space. New platforms, protocols, tokens, and currencies have sprouted like weeds, and in their wake, a slew of supporting infrastructure. Exchanges, news outlets, data hubs, and portfolio trackers have rushed in to fill the void and provide valuable services that will carry this niche space into the world spotlight.

Via is our contribution to this goal. Our intention: to make markets deeper and more efficient by streamlining crypto analysis and trading. In other words, Via’s purpose is to make the trading experience simpler, more secure, and professional.

Where Via Fits In

New exchanges pop up every week in an attempt to grab a piece of the growing global trading volume. Although most exchanges share the same core concept, they vary wildly in terms of their accepted fiat currencies, trading pairs, regulations, and user experience.

As many companies face scaling difficulties to meet the exponential growth in trading volume, they often under appreciate the need for professional quality trading tools. To effectively navigate worldwide markets, professional traders require tools that are secure, customizable, and help prevent losses due to trading downtime.

Via aims to offload this work: It gives every connected exchange the same amazing trading tools. Tools that are fast, responsive, customizable, and support traditional trading setups (e.g. multiple monitors).

Security

Security has been at the forefront of the crypto space recently in response to a number of high profile attacks. Existing web trading solutions — both exchanges and trading tools — put users at high risk of phishing, expose users to obvious man-in-the-middle attacks, and become high value targets for hackers.

With this in mind, we built Via as a desktop app that connects directly to your trading accounts through exchange API keys. Information about your accounts (including the API keys) are only ever stored on your device. Our servers send, receive, and store absolutely no information about these accounts, your trading history, or balances. Via also connects directly to exchange data sources and matching engines. We never proxy information on your behalf, which dramatically increases your security. This radical decentralization is key in reducing risk for users, and preventing massive hacks or loss of funds.

Exchange Downtime

Exchange downtime can be catastrophic for traders. Most often, it comes at times of critical volatility and price action (as this very volatility is what causes the exchange to break). What many traders don’t realize, is that lag and downtime often only affect an exchange’s web trading platform. Algos and bots can continue to monitor and trade the market, uninterrupted.

Via connects your computer directly to the exchange’s data feeds and order execution endpoints, completely sidestepping their web UI, so you can continue to trade, while others sit there in the dark.

User Interface & Customizability

Most exchanges rely on basic web interfaces to enable trading access for their users. Although these interfaces function adequately for the average long-term investor, they can be considerably underpowered for professional traders, market makers, crypto analysts, and miners.

Via brings a tremendous amount of flexibility on this front. Organize and panels into groups, and set up windows across multiple monitors. Via’s sophisticated package system lets you install (and uninstall) non-core features and themes, so you can customize your trading workspace for your specific needs. If that’s not enough, you can change visual styles and key maps to your exact preferences using CSS-based selectors within your user stylesheet and key map files.

Fundamental Data

Over time, we will be adding datasets outside of the scope of a normal exchange in order to give traders the information they need to make accurate and fast decisions. Expect to see blockchain data, mining metadata and even non-cryptocurrency market data pop up over the next few months.

What to Expect, and When to Expect It

Via is currently in the early-alpha stage. While most of the core infrastructure is complete, it must undergo testing before it can be marked as production-ready. However, in the meantime, we will be bringing on early adopters to experience a read-only version of the Via platform (i.e. everything except trade execution). We’re looking for people in desperate need of a new trading platform to help us put Via through its paces during the early alpha / beta phases. Once the bugs are worked out with market data and trade execution, we’ll open up the platform for general availability — likely in 2Q18.

If you like trading (and breaking stuff), please don’t hesitate to sign up for early access to Via. Via is 100% free during the alpha/beta phases, and I’m sure we’ll throw in some free licenses for those early adopters once the platform is ready for prime-time.

If you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions, drop us a line at hello@via.world, or by chatting us up on Slack, Twitter, or Reddit. Or read a bit more about Via at our website.

TL;DR

Super customizable, desktop-based cryptocurrency trading platform. Trade multiple exchanges without handing over your API keys. Sign up for the beta (it’s free).

Sign Up For the Beta

Signing up requires only your email, and you can do so on our website at https://via.world.