How Do You Topple Bitcoin?
LEOCoin founders tell TechWeekEurope why their new exchange
will transform the way people shop online
As more and more of our daily lives go online, how we do
business and pay for items has become a very real issue for many consumers and
businesses.
Asides from using traditional credit or debit cards for our
purchases, digital currencies have enjoyed a rapid growth throughout the past
few years, particularly Bitcoin, the notorious cryptocurrency established in
2009 by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.
With more than two million merchants, including big
businesses such as Rakuten and Dell, accepting Bitcoin as a form of payments,
trying to compete will be tough, but one British firm thinks it can topple the
market leader.
Going Big
Oxfordshire-based LEOCoin, set up by Dan Anderson and Atif
Kamran, was only established in January 2015, but already boasts more than
24,000 merchants and 131,000 community members using its currency.
The company today announced the launch of LEOxChange, a
dedicated exchange for members to trade and spend LEOcoin, and a way for the
currency to go big. But how does the world’s second-largest digital currency
move to number one?
First off, LEOCoin says it has learnt from Bitcoin’s
shortcomings, and is now ready to offer a user-friendly, secure and
community-driven service.
These should all prove to be good selling points when
attracting LEOCoin’s target audience – small businesses and entrepreneurs who
are being faced with high commission charges from existing payment service
providers
“We see the opportunity as the little corner shop that would
like to get Visa or MasterCard, but can’t,” says Anderson . “We can go in and set up a simple,
easy system to accept electronic payments.”
“If we can get that adoption going, we can win in the
digital economy space.”
Come Again?
There is also the issue of awareness, as a YouGov study
commissioned by LEOCoin found 14 percent of SME senior managers hadn’t heard of
any type of digital currencies.
Security and the perception of such currencies is also an
issue, as many will have seen the controversies surrounding Bitcoin, such as
its involvement with notorious black market site The Silk Road, and assumed all
digital currencies are nefarious.
“We take our corporate responsibility very seriously,” says Anderson . “We have the
highest level of security, we make sure that we have an auditable process where
we’re not being amateurish on how we set up the exchange.”
“It’s a design choice,” adds Kamran, “it’s how we store
coins in very secure layers, protections and infrastructure.”
Anderson
notes: “Everyone is vulnerable to hacking, you just have to make sure you are
compliant with current best practice. Barclays get hacked all the time, it’s
not just (a risk) because we are doing cryptocurrency.”
“We want to go massive,” says Anderson ,
“Britain
Kamran says: “With digital currency, people will do bad
things, but it is trackable, and traceable – it’s private, we call it
anonymous, but if you really want to track down, you can.”
But for LEOCoin, it seems that the sky really is the limit
of their ambitions, as the company now looks to populate the marketplace with
systems that support their currency.
Let’s Be The Part Of Largest CryptoCurrency
