3. Behind The Scenes: Raakhee Millers is the co-founder and CEO of bitsian. Inside: What made you devote your professional life to cryptocurrency? My professional career, prior to starting bitsian, was focused on traditional capital markets. It was a career I started in my early 20s and like most people, I enjoyed being good at what I do. I read the bitcoin whitepaper in 2010 - the elegance and implications of what I was reading stuck with me. I subsequently followed bitcoin, much like a guilty pleasure that you don't talk about with your "serious" friends and was amazed at the adoption and community that was being built around it. When the opportunity came to work on a crypto exchange with my now co-founder, I jumped at the opportunity and the rest, as they say, is history. Inside: What is bitsian and what makes it special? Bitsian is a liquidity aggregator, but it is also a unique liquidity venue. Liquidity aggregator because we connect to multiple exchanges and aggregate the books of their native trading pairs. Liquidity venue because we then subsequently create a secondary book of all combinations of the tokens supported by these exchanges - giving clients on our platform over 180,000 trading pairs. We do all this with pre-trade, preview pricing - giving our clients the ability to know what their trade will cost them on all of the markets (with fees & slippage) before they trade. Clients can also use our smart order routers & various algos to get best pricing for their trades which could mean spreading executions across markets and/or time. Inside: Outside of bitsian, what is your favorite cryptocurrency project and why? I am enamored with blockchain projects with a purpose, trying to do interesting and innovative things to challenge the status quo and redefine how we perceive things we take for granted. As such, some projects I follow are DeCred which addresses governance and voting. Coda, a lightweight blockchain with the ability to run a node on your phone and Cosmos for interoperability. Inside: What is the hardest part of working in crypto? The most rewarding? I come from traditional Wall Street -- this means at every dinner party I have to deal with people looking at me like I am crazy and in the business of selling tulips. The most rewarding is that I come from traditional Wall Street - this means at every dinner party, I get to talk about how much progress we have made at bitsian and how much progress the industry is making while my friends are still working on projects they started three years ago. Inside: What do you make of this latest cryptocurrency bull market? It reinforces for me what crypto, especially bitcoin has come to represent - A store of value that is not correlated with the traditional markets and one that acts as a borderless, nationless currency. It might be a coincidence that the bull run comes while geopolitical issues are affecting traditional equities markets, but I suspect not. Inside: Is the price of bitcoin higher or lower on Jan.1, 2020 than it is today? Higher. Inside: What coins do you own? Bitcoin, it's the catalyst that started it all for me and many more. *Nothing in this interview is to be considered investment advice. Please do your own research before purchasing cryptocurrencies. |