As over 1.5 years of experience work with a cryptocurrency exchange, I always think about what the nature of exchange business. Looking from most success exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, OKEx, and CEX etcetera, and also dozens of those small and medium-size exchanges, from their and my own experiences on brand building, the community running, operation activities, I summarize my basic business as "To B" and "To C" business.
The idea makes me start a new exchange named "1st Trade" cryptocurrency exchange. The 1st Trade platform will be carried on the exchange business from 2 aspects: platform business with an institutional solution for "To B"; platform token will be the community incentive by Proof of Contribution (POC) on propagation.
To B: Core Business with Spot Trading and Derivative Services
The core concept of the exchange still the two points: Spot trading and provide a legal entrance for the traditional legal funds
The platform basic business still focused on traditional spot trading based on token and fiat, that's the foundation of all derivative business. To provide enough liquidity of major coin/token is essential, to work with like Staked.US or WETEZ who provide staking services of Tezos, Cosmos etc. to provide blockchain related services.
Furthermore, to integrate built-in broker layer to provide the institutional solution for VC, PE, Hedge Fund and Wealth Management company with high-frequency trading and margin trading. To build a reliable module of the institutional solution will need strong security solutions on multi-signature wallet solution, let traditional fund have a legal entrance with fiat to allocate assets to cryptocurrency.
To C: Platform Token with Decentralized Self-governance Community Incentive
To inspire self-governance community, I designed the platform token to be a utility token to incentive community contribution on propagation. Meanwhile, the token holder also can apply for two sizes of the node, a small node can share the trading fee, the master node can have more power on local community establish and maintenance, offline meetup support, even local PR budget support to help local community expansion.
Conclusion
For the exchange and blockchain business, according to my personal experience, the most important is the community. To build loyalty community needs a full aspect of PR and brand building. Unfortunately, most of blockchain and exchange employer and practitioner comes from I.T. and trading industry, lack of transparency leads their project and team cannot deliver the right information to the community, also, some of the project and exchange founder also start with bad motivations to the blockchain industry make people disappoint.
The most ironic fact is the decentralized community never been applied on a centralized exchange, so, I would the 1st Trade to be the 1st decentralized community-based exchange.