We are proud to announce the newest addition to our advisory team — Erik Voorhees, the founder and CEO of ShapeShift, a leading digital asset exchange. Erik is a successful serial crypto entrepreneur and also one of the most renowned advocates of crypto technology.

A longstanding and well known public defender of Bitcoin, Erik believes it is one of the most important inventions ever created by humanity due to the role it’s playing in the separation of money and state. He has been featured as a guest on Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC, BBC Radio, The Peter Schiff Show, the documentary “Banking on Bitcoin”, and also numerous Bitcoin and crypto industry conferences.

In his recent interview with CoinCentral, Erik explained why he decided to become an adviser to MARKET Protocol:

“I’ve met the team, and I can tell they know what they’re talking about. They come from a financial markets background, and they’re using crypto technology to apply traditional financial methods to new tools, and I think they’ll be making technology that is both magical and powerful. I got a really good feeling about them as people and entrepreneurs, so I was very honored to join as an advisor, and I’ve also invested personally.”

Erik’s long-term experience building successful crypto businesses and his deep industry knowledge will both be huge assets to MARKET Protocol. We are very excited to have him onboard as we leverage the benefits of blockchain technology to build a superior derivatives marketplace that is open to all traders. Regarding the mainstream adoption of decentralized derivatives, Erik shares the perspective we’ve gained from experience: derivatives have traditionally been beyond the reach of most people, and this is something MARKET Protocol can address. He said,

“Derivatives trading is generally not for mainstream, but part of that is the huge barriers to entry that have been erected in the traditional financial world. Crypto dissolves some of these barriers, and while not everyone in the world needs to understand financial derivatives, some of them will likely find their way into mainstream use, perhaps without the users even knowing it.”

At MARKET Protocol, we believe that anyone should be able to easily trade the price of anything. We’ve worked hard to realize this vision by building MARKET Protocol, a first-of-its-kind decentralized derivatives protocol that enables investors, traders, and token holders to buy or sell the price of on-chain, cross-chain, and off-chain assets, from cryptocurrencies to stocks and commodities. On November 12th we released MPX, our beta decentralized exchange built on MARKET Protocol. Now we are focused on a mainnet launch in Q2 of 2019.

The beta version of MPX runs on Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet, so that you can experience what it’s like to trade MARKET Protocol contracts today. If you need any help completing your first trade, please read our user manual. We encourage you to try MPX today to discover the future of trading!

To learn more about MARKET Protocol, or to discuss the exciting steps we are taking, join our community on Telegram and Discord. And one more thing…our friends at ShapeShift are cooking up something exciting! To reserve your place in line, check out their launch page.