A lot has happened since we left our private beta and opened up GO.Exchange to the broader crypto community through our official launch nearly 3 months ago. During these past months, we’ve learned many things that have helped us better define our way forward. And we wanted to take the time to update our valued community on the path ahead.
When Omise Holdings decided to start its own exchange, the crypto exchange industry was in a much different place than it is today. Many regulations were not in place yet and many exchanges capitalized on this lack of clarity to get high trading volume in a short amount of time. This usually took form in listing tokens regardless of securities law considerations, big marketing promotions, and oftentimes, sharing revenue to holders of the exchange’s native token. Back then, we wanted to develop a model that would be competitive with what most other exchanges were doing so that we could also hit our initial main goal of attracting trading volume. To do so, after a lot of research, we came up with an interesting idea for revenue sharing.
However, around the same time, reports such as the Bitwise and BTI publications shed some light on exchanges that were inflating volumes. Lawsuits and events such as exchange delistings started to happen across the industry as well. The crypto exchange landscape was changing fast, shifting from a wild west to a more regulated financial market. We chose to re-evaluate our planned operations in light of the dynamic changes across the crypto exchange landscape.
Given that we still had our goal of incentivizing volume quickly, we developed the GOT model. There was a lot of work that went into finding a way to create an incentive model that would be safe from a regulatory perspective. We were excited to have developed a model that was interesting for both the crypto community and our team.
Fast forward, on June 25th, we opened to the public. With the ever-changing landscape of crypto, we decided to take the path of transparency and compliance with regulators because we believed, and still believe, the relationship between a user and an exchange is defined by trust.
When we launched, we were very happy with the public response. Our volume was surpassing our expectations for an exchange in its early days. With all of this coming together, we were more than excited to continue to develop strategies to increase our volume even more. But as time went by, we realized that our short-term goal of incentivizing large volume was in constant conflict with our long-term goal of building a world class compliant platform. Many tactics we could employ to incentivize further volume had become increasingly risky due to the maturing compliance framework in the crypto exchange industry. It became clear that relying on short-term tactics to increase volume was not going to be a sustainable path.
We later realized that we had to take the longer term view of this market and grow with it in a way that would position us for success in the long term rather than in the short term.
As a crypto exchange, there are different ways to add value to our company. High volume is an obvious one. Building an exchange in a world class, compliant way to serve our customers best is another way. This has probably been our biggest learning since our launch — focusing on a long-term mindset will add more value to GO.Exchange than a short-term one. We believe this will add more value to our users as well as it allows the company to operate legally in various jurisdictions. We believe the more the crypto ecosystem evolves, the more people will look for trusted crypto companies that are transparent and compliant.
We have spent a lot of time on building the exchange with a solid technical and compliant base to meet what we believe will be a de facto global norm demanded by different jurisdictions around the world. Requirements to operate legally are different depending on the jurisdiction.
Our focus on the long-term future of the exchange rather than the short-term volume incentivization has also led to another change in how we move forward. When we opened to the public, we introduced GOT as a reward mechanism that would allow our users to vote for which tokens they want us to burn. We called this interesting mechanism community burns. But due to dynamic regulatory landscape, voting for community burns with GOT will no longer happen and burns of GOT themselves will no longer happen.
For those of you who may wonder what will happen with the GOT they already have, further details will be communicated in the future.
Now what? Everyone in the team is putting a lot of effort in building an exchange that is compliant, continuing to improve the exchange through new features, and improving our UX/UI. Evolving in crypto is like being on a rollercoaster, there are some highs and some lows. The industry is constantly changing, and we’ll continue to adapt ourselves to it with our long-term mindset.
Thank you to all of our valued users and community members for embarking with us in this journey.
Feel free to follow our progress through these channels:
