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Commission-free cryptocurrency trading market is booming. New startups are exploring the idea of zero-fee trading platforms where trading charges won’t be levied from traders.

Right behind Robinhood, Voyager, a startup announced its plans on Wednesday to host trading of at least 15 different cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum for zero fees.

The company will aggregate cryptocurrency prices from over a dozen trading venues. This will let customers trade the digital assets by choosing the best value from among the trading venues. Voyager hopes to compete with Robinhood, a stock trading app which hosts five cryptocurrencies with zero trading fee.

“We saw an opportunity to build a dynamic smart order router that can take advantage of the marketplace and also offer customers no commissions,” said Voyager CEO, Stephen Ehrlich.

When asked about the revenue of the company he said revenue will be earned “by beating the average price of the coins at the point in time we execute the trade.”  Ehrlich is the former CEO and founder of Lightspeed Financial, a retail brokerage.

He also previously headed the professional trading arm of the online stock broker E*Trade. Ehrlich, a crypto enthusiast plans to help both individual and professional investors in the cryptocurrency market.

See Also: Robinhood strives to “unquestionably” become a leading crypto platform

Along with Ehrlich, Voyager is co-founded by Uber’s CTO, Oscar Salazar. Salazar will serve as the main tech advisor of the company. Gaspard de Dreuzy, Voyager’s chief product officer, and board chairman Philip Eytan, an early Uber investor, are also among the co-founders of Voyage.

Ehrlich said that the company could only raise significant capital from friends and family.

“Sometimes you go to trade on a certain exchange, but there’s no liquidity there,” said Ehrlich.

Voyager will showcase prices from 10 different cryptocurrency exchanges and three additional market makers from across the world. The company believes that this will enable the customers to buy and sell stocks at better prices. This is a much better option than the practice of visiting just one exchange for trading.  

According to Fortune, Voyager intends to release its zero fee trading app by the end of October. It also aims to provide cryptocurrency news and analysis features in the app to help the buying and selling decisions of the traders. It also plans to add an additional functionality for hedge funds for institutional investors.

According to Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood commission fees are a thing of the past. It held importance during the time of electronic trading but no longer has a place in the modern broker world where brokerage expenses only include operation and maintenance of data centers, networks, and infrastructure.

Image via Shutterstock

Imagine an art market in which existed an industry-wide registry of all traded works of art, complete with cataloguing details, certificates of authenticity, provenance records and sale prices.

Such a vision may seem contrary to an industry known for its opacity, but it was nonetheless proposed last week by Anne Bracegirdle, a specialist in Christie’s photography department.

Speaking at Christie’s first art and technology summit, dedicated to blockchain and co-organised by the online art platform Vastari, Bracegirdle outlined how the technology’s permanent, immutable record-keeping properties could revolutionise the market.

“There is currently no singular record of all fine art purchase prices; some results are withheld from popular databases, such as buy ins, after sales and online sales. Equivalent databases for retail prices and private sales does not exist,” she said.

The idea, Bracegirdle said, is that auction houses and galleries “would feed verified information onto this blockchain that would be accessible to all clients”. Elements such as insurance, shipping, appraisal requests and copyright issues could also be streamlined on the blockchain, she said.

However, such a database would still rely on the knowledge of experts and “key players doing their due diligence”, said Nanne Dekking, the founder of Artory, an independent digital register, and the chairman of Tefaf (The European Fine Art Foundation). “Blockchain is not a magical cure,” he warned.

“We have to be careful we don’t corrupt systems with bad information.”Blockchain could negatively affect the secondary market, said John Zettler, the co-founder of the RARE Network, a platform for artists to sell their digital works.

He cautioned that smart contracts, which execute and update themselves, “can do all the clearing of the secondary exchange”. They also offer artists a percentage of secondary market sales, potentially solving the thorny issue of resale royalties.

Zettler said the primary market was not at risk, however, “because galleries help ascribe value; they vet artists, nurture a collector base and then help sell art”.

Consumers will increasingly decide “which middlemen they need and which they don’t”, said Masha McConaghy, the co-founder of BigchainDB, a blockchain database, among other companies. “Galleries are not going to disappear, but their functions and value might change.

”In an increasingly financialised art market, opportunities are cropping up in other areas such as lending against digital goods and tokenisation, whereby portions of masterpieces are traded like assets.

Niccolò Filippo Veneri Savoia, the founder of Look Lateral, a start-up aiming to develop fractional ownership of works of art, said tokens could be sold several times a year. “The crypto world will bring huge liquidity,” he said.

Bracegirdle said tokenisation will greatly expand the market and give more people the opportunity to engage in fine art as an investment asset.

“One could even envisage a future where people bid on a portion of an art work at auction,” she said.

Such enthusiasm was tempered by skepticism among several other speakers. Regulators are grappling with issues of data privacy, cyber security and competition laws, according to Jonathan Kewley, a London-based technology lawyer who predicts global regulatory oversight to be a major stumbling block.

“A lot of nonsense is written about blockchain, that it frees us up from a digital oligarchy, which in theory is great,” he said.

“But in reality the majority of blockchain projects rely on cloud platforms, and who provides those platforms?

A small number of big tech companies in the US that are pretty much unregulated.”

After being touted as a game-changing cryptocurrency-friendly economy, Switzerland faces a potential brain-drain of cryptocurrency projects as local banks refuse to lend services to the sector, contrary to the government’s push.

 As reported by Reuters on July 19, 2018, several cryptocurrency projects are departing the European country, famed for its banking industry, as financial services are either disallowed or gradually cut off.

Swiss Banks Back off from Cryptocurrencies

Despite its ethos to stand against banks, the cryptocurrency industry massively depends on banking services for its smooth functioning. A shortage of such liquidity in countries like India and Columbia has effectively killed the local cryptocurrency industry, without the need for a blanket ban such as China’s.


Now, recent actions from Swiss banks are threatening the digital asset sector in the country, and businesses are moving to nearby Gibraltar and Liechtenstein, which offer significant banking support.The cryptocurrency sector in Switzerland has provided much-needed employment to hundreds of citizens, as per reports.

Although the figure is substantially lower compared to the traditional banking sector, observers consider it a “key innovation for the future of global finance.

”For example, Zug was dubbed “Crypto Valley” for its optimal practices towards the development of blockchain technology and has an estimated 300 cryptocurrency businesses in operation.

To put things in perspective, the canton has a population of approximately 30,000 people, according to 2016 estimates, meaning one digital asset business for every hundred citizens.However, Zug’s finance director Heinz Taennler expressed his concerns:

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“They may leave if the government does not take steps to give them access to the banking system, without which they struggle to function. All their banking relationships are going to Liechtenstein.”

Taennler emphasized that “hundreds of jobs [have] been created,” and considers every added job to be of vital importance.

Banks Share Concerns

As per reports, Swiss banks express their concerns echoing an omnipresent, and alleged, cryptocurrency issue: The asset class is used to fund terrorism, and investor identities remain perpetually unknown.

Zuercher Kantonalbank (ZKB), the fourth largest Swiss bank, closed the bank accounts of over twenty cryptocurrency businesses in 2017, despite once being a prominent authority to provide services to the sector.

Reports suggest the bank cited concerns of digital asset companies conducting illegal ICOs and potentially breaching local Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.

Banks additionally claim token issuers do not perform their due diligence on investors before depositing contributions, meaning the primary source of funds remains unknown.

Not all Is Doomed

Banks have reportedly approached Swiss regulators to help them define and implement financial legislation for cryptocurrency businesses, indicating the traditional sector is open to providing their services subject to strict laws.Interestingly, only “a handful” of Switzerland’s 250 established banks ever offered their services to cryptocurrency firms, especially to deposit ICO funds.


The number has since dropped down to two banks at the time of writing.These are Hypothekarbank Lenzburg, a regional lender located between Zurich and Basel, and Banca Zarattini, a small bank in the predominantly Italian town of Ticino. The latter has self-imposed AML and KYC checks in place which companies need to adhere.

Meanwhile, Bank Frick in Liechtenstein has turned into a Swiss bank alternative for cryptocurrency firms, and it remains to be seen if the trend entitles the tiny landlocked country as the new Crypto Valley.

A recent report from the Policy Department of the European Parliament, titled Competition Issues in the Area of Financial Technology (FinTech), warns about some of the challenges Bitcoin $7710.19 -0.09% will have to overcome.



The report, requested by the ECON Committee, claims that digital currencies issued by central banks will have a substantial impact on the current cryptocurrency market. It notes:

The arrival of permissioned cryptocurrencies promoted by banks, even by central banks, will reshape the current competition level in the cryptocurrency market, broadening the number of competitors.

What is more, the report differentiates privately issued digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, from those issued by central banks, pinning them against one another.According to the study, central and commercial banks could essentially price out Bitcoin $7710.19 -0.09% and other cryptocurrencies by blocking access to exchanges or wallets for the users or by instituting denials of service.

Furthermore, the report noted the market power of banks in traditional banking services can be harnessed to “limit competition in the cryptocurrency market through pre-emptive acquisitions or predatory pricing schemes.”

OTHER COMPETITION ISSUES

The study goes on to differentiate two types of competition issues – those which take place between cryptocurrencies as part of the “inter-cryptocurrency market” and those between the service providers, such as exchanges and wallets, referred to as “intra-cryptocurrency” market issues.

When it comes to inter-cryptocurrency market issues, the report concludes that large networks might pose a distinct barrier to entry for other market participants who attempt to join the market. This “may lead to potential collusive agreements between members of hypothetical cartels.

”The issues of the “intra-cryptocurrency” market are, more or less, similar. Service providers are capable of creating practices which would essentially keep others from joining the market. For instance, they might receive incentives from miners which favor a certain cryptocurrency over another one.

Further attesting to this issue is the fact that 79 percent of the entire Bitcoin (BTC) mining industry is controlled by five mining pools, according to the study.

Do you think bank-issued cryptocurrencies could present a threat to Bitcoin? Don’t hesitate to let us know by clicking here to make a comment: https://bitcoinist.com/eu-parliament-battle-banks-bitcoin/

Jeremy Allaire, cofounder and CEO of Circle, and Sean Neville, cofounder and president, discuss why they think the internet of value will be even bigger than the internet of information and how all assets will be tokenized.

Click to Listen Here: http://unchainedpodcast.co/circles-jeremy-allaire-and-sean-neville-on-why-crypto-will-be-bigger-than...

They also talk about why they're launching a stable coin, how their services in payments, exchange and investing will compete against decentralized versions of the same, and how they chose the assets for Circle Invest -- and why XRP didn't make the cut.

They also address the investor presentation circulated that claimed the SEC would not pursue enforcement against Poloniex for prior activity and explain why Circle took investment from Bitmain despite negative sentiment against the mining equipment manufacturer. And they explain how Circle could compete once Wall Street incumbents begin to offer competitive services in crypto.

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Links:

Circle.com: https://www.circle.com/en/

Circle's plans around a federal banking license and brokerage and trading registration:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-06/circle-in-talks-with-u-s-to-become-licensed-bank-trading-venue