Building a new kind of Liquid: Mike’s monthly message

Liquid exists in an ever-changing landscape. As a company, we do our best to make a positive impact on the sector. We are growing rapidly, pursuing aspirations and dreams of not just ourselves, but the wider community.

Startup culture is fast and dynamic. With the added complexities and nuances that operating in a new sector like cryptocurrency brings, re-prioritization and change is inevitable.

Much like Bitcoin in a bull market, we continue pushing onward and upward. The theme of this month’s update is progress: Where we began, where we are now and where we are heading.

Our journey began back in 2014 when Quoine was founded.

We’ve been through a lot since then: Qryptos, Quoinex, QASH, Liquid. Many of you have been with us from the start.

The unicorn rises

As most of you will be aware, the entire landscape, much like our company, is vastly different now than it was in 2017. We’ve changed, you’ve changed, the whole sector has changed – evolved really. We’re now a blossoming company (a unicorn) building awesome products and features with ambitious yet achievable goals.

So there have been some shifts for us along the way. New products have been added, others have been moved around or remained in development. This is the nature of tech. Milestones shift.

You can see what we’re working on in our roadmap, which was recently updated.

There are some important areas that I want to talk about where we’ve made real progress recently. 

Quick Exchange

This week we are unveiling Quick Exchange, our new feature that allows you to quickly and easily swap one crypto for another. This product will help traders who don’t want or need to interact with the full trading dashboard.

Isolated Margin

An enhancement to our leverage trading products, isolated margin allows you to isolate your margin from any other positions in your funding currency balance. Cross margin, on the other hand, backs your positions with the full balance of your funding currency. This neat feature gives traders added flexibility.

Improved Margining Model

Our new Margining Model is a vast improvement for trades on Liquid who now have even more control and protection against forced liquidation The new model separates Initial Required Margin and Maintenance Margin, with forced liquidation happening when Maintenance Margin is breached.

Withdrawals

We have always taken a hard stance on security. In the past, the tradeoff was slower withdrawals.

Thanks to multi-party computation technology, withdrawals of Bitcoin and Ethereum are now processed multiple times a day, every day. This is actively being rolled out to other currencies and will become the standard withdrawal process on Liquid.

Liquid brand

Branding matters. With Liquid, we’ve created a brand that complements our product and future visions.

Liquid Pro

Our new mobile app is certainly a welcome addition to our suite of tools. Traders can get away from their desks more and trade on the go.

Liquid Infinity

We saw there was demand for higher leverage, hence our decision to build a CFD trading product on Liquid. Being able to trade Bitcoin with up to 100x leverage is desirable for many traders.

US expansion

Expanding into jurisdictions with new regulations is demanding. Our recent announcement of our US expansion plans is a big step and will be a great contributor to the longevity of Liquid.

IEO

We were ahead of the game with our IEO platform, even with the bear market. As a product, our IEO platform is powerful. We are looking forward to hosting more IEOs in the near future.

World Book

Most QASH investors are keen to hear more about the World Book. We understand this.

The World Book, both Internal and External, is absolutely still part of our ongoing development. The internal World Book has been online since the launch of Liquid for select cryptocurrencies with fiat pairs. This rollout is ongoing.

The External World Book garners even more interest. Traders are interested to see how we will connect to other exchanges to share liquidity. We are currently preparing for the first external exchange integrations. We will begin with Litecoin pairs, which will coincide with the launch of LTC/USD. Other pairs on the platform will also start to see the enhanced liquidity the World Book can bring. This is a major step on our journey.

For our community, we know you want regular updates about progress and partnerships. This comes when ready. No amount of AMAs, video messages or status reports will speed up development, but what we can do is deliver a working, competitive product that our customers will love.

QASH

It’s been a long year for QASH holders. The bear market didn’t help, but we acknowledge that QASH has yet to reach its full potential.

It’s important that QASH holders understand the significance of platform updates that don’t necessarily directly introduce QASH utility. Every update that we release is to make the platform bigger, better, stronger. These updates are planned and prioritized strategically based on market sentiment and needs.

Every new user we attract is a potential QASH holder and investor. So while the utility may not always seem like it directly correlate with our updates, we are looking at the bigger picture.

We are always open to discussions about QASH utility. You can reach us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or Telegram.

The locked tokens

We have already outlined our intention to release the 650 million locked QASH tokens slowly over a five year period. To date, we have not begun releasing these tokens. Regardless of the direction we will take with these tokens, we will always have QASH holders interests at the forefront of our plans. We will endeavor to refrain from any action that will negatively impact the QASH ecosystem.

Fees paid with QASH

Many traders have asked about the impact of introducing trading fees for global users on Liquid.

While the majority of our volume comes from Japanese traders, global customers account for a significant portion, which means there are considerable trading fees being collected, the majority of which are paid in QASH.

We’re extremely satisfied with performance since the introduction of fees, as not only is QASH being used on the platform, but trading volume continues to increase.

The Liquid Distributed Ledger (LDL)

This LDL is an ambitious project. A decision was reached to hold off on further communication around the LDL until everything is more concrete. Plans evolve and change and we don’t want to be tied to old targets or ideas.

Rest assured that the LDL is an integral part of our process and we will ensure that QASH has a prominent role.

Banking license and prime brokerage

These are two very important pieces of the puzzle. A banking license will strengthen our position in the cryptocurrency sector. Prime brokerage will help us attract institutional clients, along with a possible custody solution we are working on.

Both of these milestones are still part of our roadmap and will remain so.