The Apple of Exchanges with a Microcap Token (Blockport)

Upfront Admission

I know this will read like a paid shill post. I am not a paid shill, but other than looking through my Reddit history (u/nomjs), I have no way to convince you of this.

Purpose of This Post

I am here to suggest that those interested in seeking out promising microcap coins should look no further than Blockport’s token, BPT, which is currently sitting at $0.33 with a circulating supply of 52 million and market cap of $17.5 million.

Disclosure: I own some BPT.

What Is Blockport?

A cryptocurrency exchange currently in private beta, set to launch public beta before the end of May and release 1.0 in June 2018.

Another exchange? Seriously?

Yes.

That said, the significant value proposition of Blockport (BP) is the number of pain points that BP intends to address and the manner in which it intends to do so.

Blockport's Value Propositions:

(1) User Friendliness/Usability

I would recommend checking out www.blockport.io to get a sense of their design aesthetic. There are a few screen shots of the exchange as well. If I had to identify a central mission of BP, it would be on usability. BP wants to attract newbies and professional traders alike. I remember my first time navigating Binance and feeling like it was a bit of sensory overload. Now, Binance arguably has one of the more friendly UI’s out there, but in cryptoland, that’s not saying much. The goal of BP is to make buying and selling cryptoassets, including altcoins, as unintimidating for the new user as possible.

(2) Fiat Portal

BP, based in the Netherlands, has partnered with a Dutch bank as their custodian and will initially offer Euro deposits to purchase 5 coins (BTC, ETH, BCC, XRP, and LTC). Final fee structures and deposit limits have not been released yet, but upcoming beta will support instant Euro deposits through Bunq, depending on which country you live in. Future plans include addition of USD, GBP, and others. Additionally, the plan is to eventually pair fiat with >100 altcoins.

The Fiat portal is already included in the upcoming public beta.

(3) Hybrid Decentralized Structure

Although not available in beta or 1.0 release (due in June), an additional and also defining goal is for users to own and manage their own private keys. Anybody who has suffered through Gox, Bitgrail and the like knows the value of taking private key management away from a centralized exchange. While decentralized exchanges are definitely improving their user experience, they continue to keep the newbs away due to complexities of integrating with metamask, navigating dense UIs, etc.

To facilitate their decentralized approach, BP has also partnered with Ark and is exploring integration of Ark’s ACES protocol for value transfers between chains.

*Additionally, although currently only paired with Bistamp, future plans include connecting to multiple exchanges to facilitate crypto trades at the best available rates.

(4) Focus on Education

A significant amount of resources will be devoted to creating resources to educate new users about crypto in general, and also help them understand basic concepts (i.e., what it means to own your own keys, and what that responsibility entails). I am actually most excited about this under the radar concept given the potential to expand the user base. I know a few of my friends that started with coinbase, but got overwhelmed by Binance, Kucoin, etc and haven’t invested in alts, even though they want to.

(5) Copy Trading

Somewhat like covesting (but with crucial differences), copy trading is an additional defining feature of BP. This essentially means that a beginner investor can sign up to follow a professional trader (which will be able to be filtered by performance and other metrics) and copy the exact portfolio and timing of trades. Traders will be paid in BPT and will have a limited number of followers to prevent pump and dumps. This feature is not set to be released until later (3.0, I believe).

Edit: I have been corrected. Social trading will be included in the upcoming 1.0 release!

What does the BPT token do?

Currently, there are three defined use cases:

(1) Copy trading as noted above, with professional traders receiving their compensation as BPT for allowing users to copy their portfolio and trades

(2) Fee reduction, similar to most other exchange coins

(3) In the beta, increased deposit limits (not sure if this will be continued after beta)

The team has been clear that additional use cases are under consideration and will be added in the future.

Why buy BPT now?

As noted above, the exchange is about to go to open beta this month, with release of 1.0 in June. If one believes that the value proposition of BP could potentially allow it to pull away from its competitors, and assuming the roadmap is followed, this month could be the last time we see prices ~$0.3-0.4 , which are essentially ICO prices.

As a rough comparison: KCS currently has a market cap of $280 million with exchange volume of $43 million. Although not directly comparable with KCS given the varying use cases, a similar market cap for BPT would result in a price of ~$5, a fairly impressive ROI. It would be even less fair at this stage to compare to Binance levels of volume, but you can imagine what they might do to the price.

BPT currently trades on Kucoin.

Why not buy BPT?

(1) The exchange market is becoming saturated. Everybody, including I guess now Nasdaq, is opening an exchange. It will be difficult to stand out amongst the crowd.

(2) There is no profit-sharing mechanism (such as fee sharing with KCS or token buy/burns with BNB). The team has stated quite explicitly that the token will not be used for profit-sharing and will continue to be a utility token in the future. This is a shame, but understandable given the team’s desire to comply with regulations.

(3) The founders are frankly very young and without significant experience running a business. I’m reassured that they have hired at least 30 devs and partnered with Delloite + Ark, but they are unproven. I’m also reassured by the decision to only reserve ~14% of the token supply for the team and advisors, which are vested over 3 years. This points to a level of maturity that teams that assign themselves >50% of their token or coin are often lacking.

(4) The success of BP does not guarantee crypto-level price appreciation of its token. Although KCS and BNB provide positive examples, the exchange token model is still young, and price appreciation should never be presumed to be a guarantee.

Anything else to know?

The telegram community is fairly active, as is the team on telegram. Would check out Blockport Trading channel (@blockporttrading) if you have additional questions. There are a number of knowledgeable users (and whales) to answer your questions.

Why would you call it the Apple of Exchanges?

I stole this from one of the BPT whales, actually. If he wishes to identify himself, I will let him do so here.

That said, I agreed that BP has the potential to be like the Apple of exchanges due to its focus on usability, education of users, and quality (see a medium post here about why they decided to use a microservices infrastructure, for example, specifically why they decided to implement microservices even though it set them back a bit on their timeline and increased overhead due to necessary hires).

Are you a paid shill?

I promise I am not--but I am definitely excited for BP and hope that it fulfills its vision, as I not only own a fair share of BPT tokens, but also desire to see crypto expand its user base and began to reach the masses.

White Paper to do a deeper dive?

Here: http://files.blockport.io/file/whitepaper.pdf