Day 2 of Money2020 was only more packed then the first, the ThinkCoin booth is right behind Mastercard and the coffee area so we get tons of traffic in general combined with the overall packed presence at the expo we were going nonstop speaking to investors and overloading on coffee of course to keep the momentum.

Here are some overall themes from the Expo that I feel should be clarified not only for ThinkCoin but a few things about the various ICO’s coming and going into the market. Along this I had a very interesting conversation from what seemed to be a proprietary trading firm and its Co Founder. I appreciated his time and also the very detailed mechanisms of his questioning of the Whitepaper which I primarily authored.

Real World Problems — What are the real world problems we are solving ? I think this is important to cement and clarify further as this is what makes us different then the various other tokens on the market



I have summarized three key ones which have material impact.

1) Lack of Transparent Pricing

In my whitepaper I wrote a section about the mid price and pricing in general regarding the important aspect it plays in any market especially a peer to peer venue such as TradeConnect . In order to match peer to peer a certain element of pricing component will need to remain stable otherwise the orders will never match . The definition of stable will vary significantly depending on which market professional you speak to . In my perspective and with regards to TradeConnect I define it as the sudden vanishing of bids/offers and liquidity by the market makers. I see no reason in a primarily retail driven venue why this would be allowed and I wanted to build a structure that would prevent the price feeds from being manipulated .





To Control this I created “Oracle Price Feed’ for each asset class and security inside it , the price that is presented to any participant on the network is what the network would consider by default the mid price and the maker would have what experienced traders will call “last look” on the price by creating their orders around the oracle price feed . To some professionals this might come as outrageous but it actually makes sense when you look it from the retail investor/traders point of view. Given that my company ThinkMarkets has been servicing retail traders across the world for nearly a decade we know what retail traders want .

Here is a simple example , Apple sets the price in the market for the Iphone , no matter where you go every single retailer will offer the same price . Now in many circumstances the retailer will offer various incentives to offset the price of the phone as they know they make more money in the value added services such as when you actually sign up for service. A experienced market maker on TradeConnect will appreciate the “Oracle Price Feed’ and focus on capturing as much of the order flow as possible by bidding for the details of the trading characteristics on the individual ,and reducing the spread on the trade , rather than competing on a significantly narrow band of price movements.



No Different then what a retailer does when selling a Iphone , they give you tons of incentives to open an account where they make more money on the long term revenue stream .

2) Multi Asset Trading

Currently there is not a single crypto currency or Smart Contract that is designed to allow trading in the more mainstream financial products such as equities , futures , commodities , currencies ( FX) and cryptocurrency using a single venue. The non crypto market needs to adopt the blockchain and most importantly the use of a smart contract to trade products like Stocks , Currencies and Futures . The regulated exchange markets are in the trillions the crypto market has barely reached 500B with the recent drop from coinmarket as of today with nearly half of that from BTC .

I see tremendous potential in creating a single venue to allow trading on regulated exchange products on the blockchain, and on a network like TradeConnect.



The other problem right now is that in almost every one of these asset classes there is a concentration of large well know exchanges that control these venues where the products are listed. For example the CME controls most of the futures market , the NYSE , NASDAQ and a few others in the US have a large share of the global equities portfolios , eventually you then get into OTC produces such as Currencies and Crypto Currency . I believe in a future where one day companies that want to get listed will go to a “Digital Exchange” to attract a significantly broader pool of investors . Instead of listing on the NASDAQ why not on a Multi Asset Digital Exchange like TradeConnect where you can attract millions of investors into your company vs a limited geography?

3) Liquidity

This will be a contested topic and its possible the opinions on my whitepaper on Liquidity will be debated by many professionals but its ok , I like a good debate as I believe in my product.



With the large mushroom like growth of crypto exchanges there has been a sizeable gap in Liquidity in cryptos and cryptos . After all there is only so much of a bid/offer pool that can go around for a given asset. On CoinMarket Cap I saw nearly 100 + exchanges listed , and I am sure more are coming .

In the FX world where I am from Liquidity is generally not a material issue if your trading ticket size is under 5M depending on the pair , most retail traders concentrate their ticket sizes in the 100K-500k range on euro dollar with a spread of around 0.3/0.4 but what if market makers can be incentivized to reduce their spreads , provide a better price if they had some very detailed information on the trading style and characteristics of the individual . Hence I created a architecture called Digital Personas, this a proprietary architecture that allows real time modeling of a individuals trading profile into a pools of scores and breakdown further of those scores into various statistical averages against the rest of the market on the network.

In a FIX 4.4 Tag which is the most commonly used API format in FX , a maker might see the Time , Price , Security , Venue , and Size of the order. Beyond that its one black hole and anyone’s guess what comes after . In order to maintain a liquidity pool and not have everyone vanish their bids and offers makers have to be incentivize properly to take risk and only way that can be achieved in a retail venue is providing detailed information on what is on the other end of the trade in a structured smart contract such as ThinkCoin ( TCO) . From a retail traders perspective regardless of the product they are trading they should expect consistent liquidity and significantly reduced pricing with this model on TradeConnect. As more participants grow I expect to attract non bank market makers and institutional funds to participate in the venue as “oracles”

Stay Tuned for Day 3 !