Hi everyone, Joshua Scigala here, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Vaultoro.
I'm so proud of the entire team here at Vaultoro.
Since launching Vaultoro.com back in Feb 2015 we have had the mission to make crypto trading transparent. It all began after I lost a heap of bitcoin in the MtGox collapse. My brother and I were determined to build a transparency protocol for exchanges so that creditors could always see if the exchange was above reserve or not and by how much. It is a real-time audit that the exchange could not mess with without being busted. No need for Roger Ver reading from a tele-prompter saying "trust me the exchange is liquid" like he did with MtGox.
And so the glass books protocol was born. This protocol enables anyone, including a crack-smoking Grandma to see that the exchange is above full reserve.
We then didn't like the fact that everyone was trading bitcoin against fiat. When MtGox collapsed, their fiat holdings started getting chewed up by liquidators and administrators (still happening!). That's why we decided to use Gold instead of fiat as a counter asset. Gold can be allocated in a users name as their legal property, off the exchange's books and can be fully insured and physically audited. That way if anything happened to Vaultoro as exchange, liquidators could not touch our client's assets.
Since launching we have seen stable coins arrive on the scene who rely on un-audited bank accounts that supposedly have the backing fiat. The banks could easily freeze, get shut down by governments or go bankrupt then bail-in with creditors funds as we saw in Cyprus.
Gold on the other hand, is secured in top tier vaulting facilities in Switzerland, fully bank independent. The only thing a government could legally do is confiscate a single bad actors holdings but they could not take down the whole lot. This protects users as private property law in Switzerland are some of the strongest in the world. To even confiscate a single person's gold is a very lengthy process not like in other countries.
Almost 2 years ago we became the first exchange in the world to offer lighting network deposits.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/vaultoros-bitcoin-gold-exchange-implements-lightning-network-payments . Vaultoro has been a proud supporter of the lighting network and continues to be, and we also see great potential in other scaling solutions.
My personal goal is to see crypto scale so that we can truly compete against the global debt-based fiat monetary system. I don't care which one does it as long as someone does. This is the magic of competition. I'm interested in how bigger blocks go, but don't believe it will work long term and stay decentralised. I find the DASH masternode network an interesting solution to scaling and I find EOS's DPOS interesting too but I don't find voting to be an efficient governance model due to voter apathy and naivety on most subjects.
Back to Vaultoro, Since 2015 we have traded over 100 million euros worth of gold in only a single trading pair (gold/bitcoin). With the launch of vaultoro 2.0 we present a total rewrite of the exchange from the ground up, all built in house. A beautiful new interface with more advanced graphing features rolling out over the next few weeks. We will be having more crypto pairs as well as rolling out silver and more metals in the coming months.
We will also have a maker-taker fee model that will pay the market makers some of the fees that takers pay. This means if you are sick of paying trading fees you can get paid by placing an order in the order book and waiting for it to be taken.
Please feel free to ask me and the team anything.
