The Truth Behind the XLM and XRP Markets on Stronghold

How Does Stronghold Decide Which Markets to Support?

This week, there’s been a lot of discussion about how Stronghold changed the number of markets that are supported on our exchange and platform APIs. As co-founder and CTO, let me give you the inside scoop on how we think about what to focus on.

We break our markets into two tiers to make it easier to determine what we should support:

Stronghold USD pairs Top digital asset pairs

Tier 1 markets

Our Tier 1 markets contain every asset we fully support, paired against Stronghold USD, our asset-backed U.S. dollar token. This ties in strongly with our payments infrastructure, as the overwhelming majority of the settlement we allow for is sent or is in with Stronghold USD. That gives us six markets:

BTC/USD

ETH/USD

LTC/USD

SHX/USD

XLM/USD

XRP/USD

Tier 2 markets

Not everyone has access to or wants to access Stronghold USD. In order to assist them in trading, we offer select assets paired with Bitcoin. To concentrate liquidity and trades, it is our preference that we maintain as few Tier 2 markets as is reasonable.

While market capitalization does not equal demand, it is a reasonable proxy, and, therefore, we picked the top three cryptocurrencies by market capitalization that Stronghold already has support for to add.

This gives us an additional three markets:

ETH/BTC

LTC/BTC

XRP/BTC

Changing markets

Given the nine markets above, we simply overlapped those with the markets we had previously to see which needed to be added and which were to be removed. It is coincidental, but reassuring, that the markets we continue to support had the highest demand, by volume.

The Stronghold anchor

Some are wondering what this means for Stronghold assets ‘anchored’ on Stellar. No changes have been made here — we continue to anchor USD, BTC, ETH, LTC, and XRP on the Stellar network.

Listing new assets

Stronghold has added new assets in the last 2–3 months, including the retail release of the Stronghold USD and support for two cryptocurrencies: LTC and XRP. XRP is the newest addition and has been available for deposit or withdrawal since mid-February.

Conclusion

That’s all there is to say. We made this decision solely by looking at what we want to focus on, not by thinking about which markets we should be taking down.

Join Us

Stronghold is actively hiring forward-thinking and bold team members. Our team is working with bleeding-edge distributed ledger protocols as well as traditional payment systems and is focused on building safe, compliant, and useful products to our enterprise customers.

https://jobs.lever.co/stronghold