KubitX is a global hybrid digital asset exchange with a focus on the emerging markets. Its built to be a one-stop platform for the users. Many countries and citizens have been left behind in the blockchain revolution especially from Africa and the project aims to make Africa as their first roll-out continent. The project plans to leverage on the technology behind the Blockchain to solve prevalent problems within Africa around payments (local and international), Trade Financing and Remittances. The KuBitX Ecosystem will support digital currency to fiat handshake to get transactions done. Coinedict recently had an interview with Victor Akoma, co-founder of the project.
Coinedict: An overview of what KuBitX is and what you plan to achieve with this ICO project?
Victor: KubitX is a global hybrid digital asset exchange with focus on the emerging markets. It’s built to be a one-stop platform for users who buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Many countries and citizens have been left behind in the blockchain revolution especially from Africa and hence we decided to make Africa as our first roll-out continent. We are hybrid as we plan to leverage on the technology behind the Blockchain to solve prevalent problems within Africa around payments (local and international), Trade Financing and Remittances. The KuBitX Ecosystem will support digital currency to fiat handshake to get transactions done using the TRANSPARENCY, SPEED, SECURITY AND IMMUTABILITY of the underlying technology.
We want to use the exchange as an entry point to reach out and solve other problems facing our continent.
We also want to set up KuBitX as a pan African exchange to bridge the gaps between African countries and use the exchange as an entry point to reach out and solve other problems facing our continent such as
- Lack of Education around blockchain technology and cryptocurrency
- Lack of seamless crypto-fiat conversion to multiples African currencies based on.
- Lack of support from exchanges of their customers using their local languages
- Lack of a top company that can be referred to as the leading companies in the world
- Lack of participation in the technological advancement space as key players and not consumer.
Coinedict: With a particular motive comes a vision and is achieved through inevitable effort, please share one of yours? How is this vision crafted and who are involved in doing this?
Victor: We created an exchange because of purpose. Our purpose to start was the people and the economy in the emerging markets.
We decided to create an exchange because exchanges will be the principal impetus for the transformation and significant change the Blockchain technology seeks to accomplish, especially in the emerging markets.
It is anticipated that, in the coming years, all the sectors of the economy will have their own tokens hence the demand on exchange to give Transparent, Smart, Fast, Secure, Reliable and most straightforward methods for drawing in the groups will be high, our choice to be early adopters and push for mass appropriation with our one of a kind brand of gaining mass adoption through education on the most proficient method to trade utilizing our platform.
KuBitX team is a multi-diverse team with one purpose of collaboration and partnership to bring to the world, the fastest, transparent all-inclusive exchange. An all-Star team from global fortune 500 companies ranging from E- Commerce, IT, Infrastructure, Oil & Gas. (Google, Amazon, Dell, PWC, Huawei, ABB, MTN, etc). A significant part of founders and team members are based out of Africa which is viewed as the greatest asset given that African continent is unexplored, untouched and unexploited as far as crypto or Blockchain innovation is concern.
Coinedict: Give details of what you plan to do with this exchange platform? What challenges did you overcome to turn your vision into a reality?
Victor: The exchange is just one part of our ecosystem. In addition to being a quality platform for traders around the world who seek dependable support, security and ease of use, the exchange will provide an avenue for noteworthy African technology projects to get global exposure and liquidity. It will open up the opportunity for global investors to fund African projects they believe in but previously would not have had access to. It will not only open up the world to Africa (like many exchanges currently do), it will open up Africa to the world. Our payment services platform that will work in tandem with the exchange will also improve the state of cross-border remittances back to Africa while providing job opportunities as we open up Africa to the world via our platform.
Challenges faced can be summarised into:
People – Everything starts with people. Getting the right team from a skill set perspective and also from an ability to work with the core medium and long term goals of the vision.
Stereotype. People are generally wary of things coming from Africa, and this is a global project conceived and executed by a Pan African team. Some people do not get past the skin colour and other stereotypes to see the level of exposure and experience of the team. As a result, a lot of bootstrapping had to be done to get the project up to this level to demonstrate our ability and capacity to go head on with some of the best projects in the global space. Now we hope people are convinced and can back the project up financially to help it blossom into the vision and idea we have for expanding the adoption of crypto and blockchain and all the attending benefits to Africa.
Funds – As mentioned previously, a lot of bootstrapping and some seed funding helped get us up to this stage. Frankly put, we need more funding. We’ve got an exciting journey ahead of us in terms of product development and implementation, but money is an important catalyst for this.
Coinedict: The crypto world has several exchanges at the moment? What according to you they miss in them and how is KuBitX differs from them?
Victor: The distinction between us and others will be our humane way to deal with the business. We will in addition to other things give, transparency to exchanging, speed of transaction, security, responsive client support and a really worldwide trade regardless of geographic areas.
Also our exchange will be a way to open up the emerging market economy which will help everyday people, the unbanked and under banked. To do this we started with having the traditional financial services integrated from our start
Some of the Advantages of our exchange are:
Performance:
- Our exchange processes up to 12+ million transactions per second.
- Our exchange matches up to 12+ million orders per second.
- The latency of transactions on our exchange is as low as 40 nanoseconds.
Technology:
- Most advanced technology in trade engine development implemented.
- Our exchange is powerful, robust, and secure.
- Our exchange is carefully built with regulatory compliance as key priority. KuBitX exchange is the most future ready and the most regulation ready exchange.
- Our exchange is powered by Modulus.
Features:
- First Crypto Exchange with an in-built Financial Services Provision natively designed from scratch. We are already in productive talks with some top banks in Africa and are currently laying the groundwork for some banks in Europe. Our goal is to make sure that crypto-fiat conversion issues are a thing of the past for our customers. This entity will provide all of the traditional banking services and more:
– Funds transfer (wire and peer-to-peer)
– Payment processing
– Merchant servicing
– Debit cards
– Bill payment
– Checking
– Savings
– Issuing credit
- Our exchange features trade surveillance based on machine learning.
- Our exchange monitors for market manipulation using machine learning.
- First Crypto Exchange with a unique product and Initiative to keep the exchange close to the people by having a strong channel system to drive education and adoption for the emerging markets
Education:
- Driving literacy levels of cryptocurrency is key to increasing levels of adoption.
- Our focus is to infiltrate markets by increasing literacy levels through a global channel ambassador program that will have representatives in communities across the world.
- This will also give opportunity for crypto education to be spread across various dialects across the world reaching grassroot levels.
Coinedict: How do you intend to affect the nation with this innovation?
Victor: It has been proven that technology brings about positive change in any nation, if you look at other nations that hav advanced in development like Israel, USA, Japan, etc, it is technology that is at the heart of this development, also if you look at the companies that rank among the top companies in the world, they are tech companies as well.
We would want to build from Africa an exchange that will rank among the top exchanges in the world, such that it will project Africa to the world and attract more investments to the continent.
We also plan to use KuBitX as an incubation platform for other upcoming tech businesses in Africa.
Our global channel ambassador initiative is a program that will largely help us to go into the local areas and educate people about blockchain and cryptocurrency, thereby bringing about mass literacy on this technology and financial inclusion of the rural people.
Coinedict: How is your business model supposed to work? How would you sustain in the crypto verse?
Victor: Africa as a 1.2 billion population continent is a huge market for our business; knowing that more than 60% of this population is unbanked while an increased percentage of this population has access to mobile telephony. We intend to have a legally registered subsidiary in every African country we are rolling out some of the country specific financial services in.
African countries also rank among the top adopters of cryptocurrencies and country lie Nigeria ranks among top 10 for crypto trading countries.
As at 2016, US$ 442 billion was sent to developing countries by Africans in diaspora through remittances alone. We are going to provide faster and cheaper services for doing remittances, intra Africa payments and payment for other merchant services.
We believe that with our business model, synergies and partnerships, we will be able to capture a major size of this market.
Coinedict: Innovation is proportional to execution, where do you consider yourself with in terms of high-performance infrastructure solution with the maximum number of TPS, support of dApps and smart contracts?
Victor: At launch we will be ahead of the pack as far as speed and latency is concerned, thanks to our partnership with Modulus Global who have remarkable experience in the business of developing high performance platforms. As we stabilise our operations and consistently deliver on our promise of top notch support, ease of use and education, we will extend with purpose and careful consideration into supporting dApps, not just because it’s in vogue to do that but because we see real and scalable value in our supported applications..
Coinedict: What is your strategy to attract traders to your exchange platform?
Victor: There are several strategies we have to attract traders to our exchange. We are offering the lowest of fees, which is not offered by any of the existing counterparts, Our exchange is very fast in processing trades, We offer incentive by way of more discount if payment of fees is done using our KBX token.
Our customer service solution is going to be the best in the space as we have support personnel who are going to attend to our users in their native languages to ensure they are left very satisfied.
Our user interface will be very user friendly as we want to make it very easy for people who are not very technically inclined to be able to use our exchange without difficulty.
Users will find it easy to convert crypto to multiple local currencies on our platform, thereby making the first choice for users in the market we are targeting.
There are numerous other reasons why we believe we will attract users to our exchange
Coinedict: ICO contributors always seek for an MVP? Do you have one? On what parameters have you audited it and how your product stood out in the process?
Victor: Our exchange has been built already, we are just getting ready to start the beta test of the trading platform. We have already selected from our community the users that will carry out test on our beta exchange and all the test procedure has been defined. Our product will stand out from others because we want to make it as simple as possible for even non expert trader to quickly understand how it works and start trading within the shortest time.
Coinedict: Tokens are considered essential for ICO’s. What are the credibility of your specified
token?
Victor: The KBX token is an ERC-20 compatible token on Ethereum blockchain, hence; it can be stored either on our platform or any other ERC-20 compatible wallet where you have control of the private keys. The Ethereum blockchain is very flexible compared to other smart contract platforms plus it offers a good usability for new users to interact with ERC-20 compatible tokens.
The KBX token as a utility token will primarily be used to pay the trading fees in the KuBitX exchange platform, execute other financial services product offering like payments, remittance and use cases stated in our whitepaper based on the roadmap
Trading fee on KuBitX exchange is 0.05%, however, the users opting to use KuBitcoin(KBX) tokens as a method of payment of trading fee will get a discount of 25% compared to the original trading charges.
– Trading fee = 0.05%
– Trading fee using KBX token= 0.0375%
KBX is also used for payment processing fee – KuBitX will offer direct withdrawal to the bank account of a user requesting liquidity in fiat by enabling them to exchange KBX tokens for Fiat, so these bring utility and more credibility to the token.
Coinedict: What is KuBitX investment fund referred to in token allocation?
Victor: KuBitX as a pan African exchange will also use this company as a means of investing in other areas that will enable us build successful businesses in Africa, this allocation will be used to actualize these other areas. For example, we have an offer to purchase a bank which we will add to our ecosystem to enable us enhance our relationship with the mainstream.
KuBitX will be a platform for incubation of Innovators from Africa and will invest in these innovators to ensure that their projects are promoted to the globe.
Coinedict: Do you require any kind of KYC and how is it processed?
Victor: User on our exchange will be required to carry out KYC, our exchange is regulation ready and will be ensure that we are regulatory compliant in every way. The process of KYC will not be a cumbersome one, the necessary information required for us to know our customer will be required.
Coinedict: What happens to the tokens if you fail to achieve the hard cap?
Victor: We believe we will achieve our hard cap, however if we do not achieve the hard cap, unsold tokens will be burned as mentioned on our website and whitepaper.
Coinedict: Could you tell us about the background of the advisors associated with you in this ICO project?
Victor: We have top notch advisors from different fields to ensure we are well rounded when it comes to getting professional advice. Many of their profiles are shared in our white paper and landing page but we will mention a few notable ones here:
Richard Gardner (CEO of Modulus Global) – Exchange and Security Advisor
Highly respected veteran in the space of building compliant financial applications in the US. His company has built for the likes of NASDAQ, NASA, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Microsoft, and Shell to mention but a few. He has a reputation for ensuring that technology solutions are not only top notch in quality terms but also that they meet regulatory standards. He is working with us to include anti market manipulation tools on our exchange to get us primed and ready for increasing regulation in this space.
Grant Gulovsen – Legal Advisor, Americas
Grant is an Illinois-licensed attorney with over 15 years’ experience in entertainment, employment, contract, corporate and intellectual property law. A Member of International Blockchain Consulting Group’s Blockchain Leadership Team, he advises our projects about U.S. securities laws to ensure we are as compliant as possible.
Alakanani Itireleng (founder of Satoshicenter.tech) – Blockchain Awareness and Education Advisor
She is also a well known bitcoin evangelist who since 2013 has been involved in teaching people in her country about bitcoin and blockchain, and has spoken about bitcoin and blockchain in various tech conferences. She has a strong network in the Bitcoin/Blockchain space and will help provide platforms where we can pursue our education agenda in Africa
Coinedict: You intend to have own exchange. Do you plan to get your token enlisted over other existing exchange platforms?
Victor: We will list our token primarily on our exchange, however it may be possible to list on other selected exchanges, but the choice of exchange we are going to be listing on will have to depend on the potential partnership benefits and proven sustained liquidity. This information will be made known to our community if such action will be taken by the team.
