We’re almost ready to launch the exchange our team has been working incredibly hard over this past year to build. We wanted to write an update on a few of the things that have been happening since our first post and tell you a bit about what’s coming next.

Fees

For the first two months of trading on Voltaire, there will be no trading fees. We hope this will encourage adoption but importantly allow you to jump on board and use Voltaire without any fee overhead. No fee trading will end two months from launch date — more details coming soon.





We had a re-brand

We hold a deep belief in the original vision of crypto — border-less, peer-to-peer payments without the need for a financial intermediary. We loved our initial brand (BitShark), but feel that in order to have a stronger brand that speaks more to our mission, we’ve re-branded as Voltaire. Voltaire stood for challenging the establishment and advocated for freedoms in society.

Having an authentic brand coupled with a strong message, (and one our users could have an affinity to) is of critical importance, and we’re incredibly happy to have a brand that we love and are proud to represent, and hope you are too.





Supporting the London Bitcoin Cash Conference

We feel it’s important to engage the community, and hence sponsored the London Bitcoin Cash speaker series — a continuation of the London Bitcoin Cash conference.

The event took place in London, UK on the 25th of July. Our Founder, Semyon Germanovich, gave a talk on the value of Bitcoin Cash and why we chose to build around it.

Members of the ecosystem like Jimmy Nguyen and Michael Hudson were amongst us discussing adoption, tech and the future outlook for BCH and cryptocurrencies in general. There were some great connections made — video is coming soon.

What’s also interesting is that we learnt a lot about what our users want. We’ve taken questions and comments about our platform at the conference and fed them into our product process. Clear communication about security and transparency is a must.





Development of Voltaire Philanthropy (VP)

We’ll be officially announcing the details of this initiative soon. As a primer, we believe the community requires two things to become mainstream — adoption and utility. Acting on this thesis, Voltaire will be supporting the best we can.

This is realised in three ways (and we’re open to other ideas too):

creating meet-ups, events and seminars across London and the rest of the universe, supporting Bitcoin Cash projects that help drive adoption and build utility (the overarching goal is to support projects that help Bitcoin Cash go mainstream), supporting not-for-profit (NPF) initiatives, this could be a coding school for children or a social project of a similar nature.





Voltaire Philanthropy utilises the proof-of-payment benefits of cryptocurrencies to be transparent about how we spend.





Voltaire’s team is continuing to grow

We operate very lean, with each of our team members being multidisciplinary but also masters of their own craft. We operate with the philosophy that we are a real team, supporting each other to pioneer within the crypto space. In the past three months we’ve added folks to handle engineering, scalability, security, marketing, social media and operations. We believe we have a great team. If you’re interested in working with us now or in the future, we’d love to chat, so do reach out on work@voltaire.cash





What’s coming next

We’re planning to launch to the world in August, so you’ll be able to trade Bitcoin against Bitcoin Cash very soon.

We’re also working hard to acquire a banking partner in the UK to ship GBP based pairs, hence bridging the legacy banking system with Bitcoin Cash. Putting our best foot forward to this end means we’ll be operating compliant KYC / AML checks in-line with other financial institutions based in the UK.

We are also actively considering BCH projects to back, so please send us any recommendation of brilliant community projects that need more support.

If you’re not signed up to receive a launch alert, you can do so here .





Feedback

We value thoughts and feedback from the community — you can reach us via Telegram or Twitter . If you’d like to email us, we‘re on hello@voltaire.cash

We’re thrilled to have you on the journey with us.





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