On October 22, 2019, EXANTE’s Executive Director Anatoliy Knyazev attended the Blockchain Finance Forum (BFF) 2019 in Vienna. Anatoliy was one of the key speakers along with blockchain gurus from IBM, Raiffeisen Bank, LSE, Börse Stuttgart, Ripple, MakerDAO, Kraken, Gnosis and more celebrated firms.

Vienna, Austria, hosted the Forum for the first time and gathered over 300 attendees and 20 international speakers. The one-day event focused on the implementation and prospects of blockchain in banking and finance. Traditionally, BFF catered to a variety of stakeholders in the industry ranging from banks and investment funds to fintech start-ups.

Anatoliy joined the ‘Future and Challenges of Exchanges’ panel. Along with Eric Demuth of BitPanda and Jovan Gavrilovic of OKCoin, he shared his views of the current digital exchange venues and their prospects.

Here’s a brief outline of Anatoliy’s ideas:

On the industry landscape: Out of hundreds of exchanges listed on market analysis websites over a half are fake and just a couple dozen have real volumes.

On decentralisation: We need to get away from custodial exchanges for decentralised exchanges. We have to fix the flaws of the existing decentralised venues, such as low liquidity or mediocre performance, and move forward in this direction.

Tip for token developers: If an exchange comes up and actively solicits listing by simply paying a fee, you may not want to do that. Well-reputed exchanges won’t list the token just for the money.

On negative speculation: There is no such thing. When someone places an order on the open order book, they may either win or lose.

On derivatives: EXANTE was one of the early responders to the Bitcoin futures listing on CBOE back in 2017. Derivatives are super useful as they encourage price discovery and gleaning new information. Derivatives can’t defy the laws of nature: you just have to try your luck and play smart.

On the new projects: We’ve seen how the regulators treat Libra and Gram and how it affects the entire community. In the mid-term perspective, only Proof of Work projects will survive. It’s expensive to keep them afloat and it’s hard to bring real value to the table, yet the future belongs to PoW coins like Bitcoin, Monero or Litecoin.

EXANTE keeps track of the industry dynamics and adds new well-performing assets to its offering. Together with digital exchange Gozo.pro, provider of the EURS stablecoin Stasis and developer of the VEO cryptocurrency Amoveo, we are building a financial ecosystem that would enable traders to make fast and secure investments in a variety of classic and digital assets.