Decentralized Exchange Altcoin.io Secures Almost $1m from WeFunder
Altcoin.io, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in San Diego, has raised nearly $1 million through WeFunder in its bid to become the world’s safest platform for exchanging digital value, the company announced in a September 2, 2018, press release.
Solving Crypto’s Hacking Problem
San Diego-based cryptocurrency exchange startup Altcoin.io is looking to revolutionize the way digital currencies are traded. The company managed to raise just under $930,000 from a total of 1,125 investors on WeFunder and has seen more than 110,000 traders pre-register for the platform since September 2017.
“Billions of dollars of digital assets, or tokens, are exchanged every day. The bulk of this volume is through centralized exchanges, which generally hold traders’ funds inside centralized repositories that attract hackers. Since 2011, almost $3 billion has been stolen from such exchanges,” the company said in a PRNewswire press release.
CEO and Co-Founder, Andrew Gazdecki, said, “The team and I are really excited about building an exchange where you can trade securely, staying in complete control of your tokens at all times. Altcoin.io combines the safety of decentralization with the speed and usability of a centralized exchange, which we believe is the next evolution of cryptocurrency trading.”
Altcoin team
(Source: PRNewswire)
Gazdecki founded Bizness Apps, an app development company recently acquired by Think3 that, at its peak, was behind five percent of all the apps on the Apple App Store. Having helped grow thousands of businesses through affordable yet effective app development, Gazdecki is now looking to fix the broken exchange market.
While centralized exchanges are still responsible for the bulk of the crypto market trading volume, they also store users’ funds which makes them a frequent and easy target to thefts and hacks. With more than $1.2 billion worth of digital assets stolen in 2018 alone, it’s no wonder why tech startups are racing to solve the looming security problems in crypto exchanges.
How Does Altcoin.io Work?
Apart from storing its users’ funds in a single place, centralized exchanges are also highly regulated, with intensive KYC/AML procedures making even the simplest transactions both difficult and time-consuming. A decentralized exchange, such as the one Altcoin.io is working on, would provide crypto investors to trade without these restrictions. The company enables peer-to-peer trades direct from users’ wallets, thus effectively removing the middleman from the exchange process.
The Altcoin.io exchange will also integrate an atomic swap wallet, which enables fast trading between different networks. Co-founders Andrew Gazdecki and Sulejman Sarajlija made headlines with an exchange of bitcoin for ether using atomic swap technology back in 2017, making it the first successful swap of its kind in history.
The company’s atomic swaps use hashed-time-locked-contracts (HTLCs) to ensure neither party loses out  if the transaction isn’t successful. The Altcoin.io HTLC issues a cryptographic code that both trading partners have to declare in a preset amount of time. If neither or only one trader confirms the trade, the exchange is automatically canceled and both participants regain full control of their tokens.
