Hodl peer-to-peer exchange Hodl is going to open its source code to everyone, so that everyone can launch their own version of the trading platform.

Such an announcement was made by the representatives of the exchange at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia. “History teaches us that if the government wants to shut you down, it will do so,” commented Hodl Hodl CEO Max Keidun on the exchange’s decision.

According to Keidong, the open source code for smart contracts that Hodl Hodl intends to develop by next year is a way to deal with regulatory restrictions:

“Let’s imagine that our domain is blocked — some enthusiast can just take the code on Github, invest and launch something new. “

Keidun said that he was already contacted from Africa, Asia and Latin America, asking if there was such an opportunity, because “Peer-to-Peer is the technology that is most interested in emerging markets.”

Hodl Hodl is a rare bird in the modern cryptocurrency market: the platform is oriented to bitcoins — the only cryptocurrency that the company founders trust — but does not use KYC procedures (“know your client”) and is not even going to start.

Why not? “Because we don’t like the three-letter abbreviations,” commented technical decision Roman Snitko at a conference in Riga.

Hodl Hodl does not want to store confidential personal information that financial institutions are required to obtain from customers in accordance with the Global Anti-Money Laundering Rules (AML).

“We believe that KYC / AML is mostly harmful by exposing law-abiding users to the risk of becoming victims of fraudsters and criminals. Information and documents uploaded by users to exchanges have been stolen many times. These procedures do very little to prevent money laundering and the use of this data by criminals who always find ways [to break the law] ”

However, regulators around the world are tightening their nuts to identify participants in transactions.

The founders of Hodl Hodl believe that they do not need to identify customers, because the site never takes responsibility for user funds.

“If we don’t switch to an open source model, it’s solely because of pressure from regulatory authorities,” explained Snitko. “However, we anticipate that regulators will become more desperate in their efforts to curb the spread of bitcoin, and we refuse to be victims of these desperate actions.”

At some point, exchange executives may transfer the management of Hodl Hodl to others in order to fully focus on maintaining and updating the code. The exchange does not have a head office; employees work remotely, serving 10,000 users around the world: “We want to create a community so that at some point we can transfer the reins of government to other people.” Most likely, the exchange code will be opened by the end of the year, the developers say that it needs to be cleaned first, the representatives of the exchange did not name any specific dates.