Bibo Exchange 2nd Anniversary
Bibo Exchange is thrilled to celebrate her second anniversary, congratulations to the team and everyone who has been with us for the past 2 years! Thanks to our loyal user base, strict adherence to compliance and safety measures, user-friendly interface, and our commitment to serve the community, we are now stronger than ever. We have lived through the coldest crypto winter and the hottest DeFi summer, never letting our users down.
Since we started our journey on 1st of November 2018, the blockchain industry has changed and also the exchange business has changed a lot. Now it is time to review the past year and look at some of our achievements and, even more importantly, to see what the future holds for us!
In 2020 we achieved several important milestones, the most outstanding of which are our crypto and exchange licenses, the Euro gateway, our venture into the DeFi space as well as Filecoin futures and spot trading launch.
Crypto exchange & wallet licenses
The most significant achievement for us in 2020 has certainly been the official granting of our licenses in Estonia. Estonia is a small eastern European country and EU member well known for her bold digitalization of government bureaucracy and promotion of novel digital services such as the e-residency. Wired magazine called Estonia the “most advanced digital society in the world” and many globally successful tech disruptors such as Bolt, TransferWise or Pipedrive started from there. After the emergence of digital assets as a new industry, Estonia quickly moved to establish itself as one of the crypto friendliest locations in the world.
On January 8th 2020, Bibo Exchange OÜ, the operating company of Bibo Exchange (www.bibo.gold) was formally granted two operating licenses in Estonia. The subject fields of those two licenses are (1) providing services of exchanging a virtual currency against a fiat currency and (2) providing a virtual currency wallet service, license numbers are FVR001301 and FRK001183 respectively. You can check the licenses in the official registry here.
This marked a major milestone for the Bibo ecosystem and will have major implications for our business. First of all, it takes a lot of uncertainty from our business, we know exactly which guidelines to follow and can be sure not to be targeted by regulators in the future. Moreover, holding licenses will allow us to access commercial banking and thus enter the exclusive club of crypto-fiat exchanges. This will open up a myriad of new opportunities for us and our customers to facilitate international payments and money transfer. This is important not only for our retail users but also for businesses that are interested to use a cheap and efficient solution to move their money around the globe. The first obvious target for our expansion is naturally the Euro zone, with our Euro gateway already operational.
Euro gateway
Euro currency trading has been enabled on Bibo since March 13th 2020 on the Bitcoin and Ethereum trading pairs. While we see limited interest in the trading pairs as such, we are focusing on offering purchases of ETH/BTC to corporate clients and high net-worth individuals, of course with all necessary KYC/AML procedures. We are seeing lots of interest from such entities and individuals, many of whom prefer cryptocurrency as a much more convenient way to move money internationally.
Crypto finance is an emerging section of international business and still in its infancy, but Bibo Exchange is building the foundations for it right now. Contrary to the reputation of cryptocurrencies of being used for mostly illicit activities, crypto finance needs a regulated environment to thrive. We believe that countries like Estonia are the testing grounds for building an alternative financial system, with best practices to be adopted sooner or later by major economies. Building bridges between the legacy financial system and the newly emerging global web of crypto finance is what we see as the prime task for the near future.
DeFi exchange: listings & more
DeFi is a new and trending field within the crypto industry that attracts a lot of interest, with many of the most successful apps on top of the Ethereum blockchain being DeFi-related. In short, DeFi (also called open finance), is a blanket term for financial services like borrowing, lending, and trading built using decentralized infrastructure, such as public blockchains and smart contracts. However, despite its popularity within the crypto space, DeFi is hardly accessible for average users not familiar with cryptocurrencies or blockchain.
It is not only a matter of easy-to-use tools, which are increasingly available (e.g. DeFi Zap, Uniswap), but also a matter of fiat on- and off-ramp. If users do not possess ETH or DAI in the first place, even the simplest tool to lend or invest it won’t help much. We therefore are convinced that exchanges will need to serve as DeFi access points or gateways, with fiat on- and off-ramps as well as integrated DeFi tools. Such one-stop DeFi shops will likely capture a large part of those users who want to access DeFi, but without having to deal with smart contracts, wallet passphrases and transfers where small typos in recipient addresses can lead to complete loss of funds.
Bibo is taking steps to develop into such a DeFi gateway exchange, especially targeting non tech savvy users who still want to benefit from the promises of open finance. We are aware that this comes at a cost of decentralization and self-custodianship, however it should have become clear by now that the overwhelming majority of users do not care about decentralization as much as they care about convenience. As a first step, we have already listed 9 different DeFi tokens on Bibo, with many more to come!
Filecoin
No doubt the hottest project this year is Filecoin. After years of development and hundreds of million of investment, the Filecoin mainnet has been launched successfully on Oktober 15th 2020. Filecoin provides one of the last crucial building blocks for decentralized applications, which is sufficient storage space. Although blockchain technology has a lot of great capabilities, it is certainly not the most efficient way to store data. Many put their hopes on Filecoin and its base technology IPFS to provide not only sufficient storage to the blockchain industry but to eventually recreate the internet itself in a decentralized and fair manner.
Bibo Exchange has early recognized the potential of Filecoin and decided to forge a strategic partnership with an overseas mining manufacturer, Rhino Mining. Rhino Mining’s Filecoin pool is about to reach 15,000 Tebibytes of storage capacity on the Filecoin network, an astonishing achievement. Miners will receive their mining income directly on Bibo Exchange and it is further planned to develop Filecoin-based financial products and projects together. Additionally, Bibo has listed Filecoin futures early AND provided immediate exchange for spot Filecoin upon mainnet launch.
Bibo 2021: what’s in the pipe?
We have achieved a lot in the last 2 years, but we have even bigger plans for the next 2 years. Building on our past successes, we will push forward on our way to become a regulated crypto finance platform providing access to DeFi as well as money exchange for businesses and high net-worth individuals. With DeFi and crypto finance we want to capture two major trends in the industry which will experience explosive growth over the coming years. It is our goal to provide safe, secure and convenient access to DeFi and crypto finance for businesses as well as average users.
Another focus lies on Filecoin and its flourishing mining and application ecosystem. We believe that there is tremendous potential in the decentralized storage space, it is one of the very few genuine use cases for cryptocurrency. Filecoin clearly has the potential to become a top 5 coin, on one level with Ethereum and BTC. As the ecosystem is just starting to develop and decentralized applications are starting to be deployed, we think there is still a long way to go for Filecoin in terms of value growth. With our strategic partner in the field, we are ready to capitalize on this growth.
Visit & follow us here:
Market Website: www.bibo.market
Exchange Website: www.bibo.gold
Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/BiboExchange
Official Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BiboExchange/
Official Telegram: https://t.me/BiboExchange
Email: contact@bibo.gold
