Blockport Business Update
By: Sebastiaan Lichter
Tags: Fintech, Business, Blockchain, Ethereum, Exchange

As our product teams are making huge steps in the right direction, we want to provide you with a short update on what is going on behind the scenes of Blockport with regards to the compliance and business side.

Risk & Compliance

A while ago we stated in one of our product updates that: “We are basically building a bank” and this is essentially true from a security and regulatory perspective. Last weeks we have been working hard to bring even more structure to our organizational governance, and will keep doing this in the coming years. For a startup that is not even a year in existence, this may sound very counterintuitive, nevertheless extremely important in order to prepare for long-term collaborations with established organizations and regulatory agencies.

Therefore, we created an initial organizational risk assessment which encompasses risks on the level of operational and internal integrity, credit, environmental, liquidity matching, legal, outsourcing, marketing and IT. The goal of such assessments are to provide guidance and structure to our team and external parties we closely work with, as well as becoming a solid and trustworthy actor in the fintech ecosystem.

For example, credit risks are mitigated by setting up enhanced KYC (Know-your-customer) checks that are in place at Blockport when accepting credit card payments that serve to protect the organization from possible credit card fraud and the ramifications that arise from fraudulent credit card transactions. Think of costly chargebacks and potential damage to our company’s reputation.

We develop this organizational governance framework by closely working together with risk and compliance specialist Geert Blom from Enigma Consulting and Johannes de Jong from Osborne Clarke, to set up the first policies step by step, which we can then use to train and educate our team.

Blockport visiting Malta

In line with preparing the Blockport organization for long-term collaborations with financial institutions, the founders of Blockport will visit Malta next week, where they will be meeting with potential financial partners. Recently we also made first contact with Maltese officials from the Parliamentary Secretariat for Financial Services, Digital Economy & Innovation to discuss the regulatory landscape of Malta regarding cryptocurrency trading. During the week we are meeting with payment service providers, banks and e-money institutions to explore the possibilities of a collaboration.

Therefore Blockport is also exploring the possibility of incorporating Blockport in Malta so that we are ready for future collaborations with these parties. As some of you know, Malta offers a more friendly regulatory framework than most European countries, which allows us to move quicker towards our goal of becoming a globally accessible platform. We are exploring opportunities in Malta in parallel with our current financial partners in the Netherlands to optimize our chances of success.

Hilton Midtown NYC (Consensus 2018)

Attending Consensus (NYC) and TNW (Amsterdam)

Last week we attended Consensus in New York City, where the Blockport team had a lot of meetings with interesting parties ranging from liquidity providers to companies developing trading solutions. Additionally, we attended side events where we got the chance to meet with multiple crypto influencers and founders from other blockchain startups.

On the first day of Consensus our CTO Zowie Langdon took the stage in the ARK room and presented Blockport’s current status and future challenges. Although we were not on the official agenda, we had a good attendance where people were very involved. During the presentation we revealed designs of the Social Trading features that have only been tested and shared with interviewees until now. We uploaded the slides of the presentation here so that you can check them out! (download the pdf for better quality)

Blockport presentation in ARK room at Consensus (Solomon left)

At Consensus we finally met one of our most famous community members, Solomon! We had some interesting discussions with Solomon and the others that attended. Thanks to everyone who took the effort to come to our presentation and meet us.

Although we just got back from New York City, we are already hosting a Blockport booth this week at The Next Web (TNW) conference in Amsterdam on the 25th of May from 09:00–13:00!

At the booth we will be showcasing our latest concept designs, handing out promotional content and last but not least: showing people the working Beta on our private network.

Additionally, we will be meeting with teams from other exchanges that are also attending the conference. The Next Web is one of the biggest tech conferences in the world with over 15.000 people attending each day. If you are attending, look for the Blockport branded flags to find our booth and come say hello!

Beta contest results so far

A few weeks ago we kicked off our marketing with the Blockport Beta Access Contest (BBAC) and we can all agree that the response from our community on the BBAC was enormous and overwhelming! In the first weeks after the start of the contest we have received over 300.000+ new and unique visitors on our website, 14.000+ Telegram members, 20.000+ Twitter followers, 17.000+ Facebook page likes and over 850.000+ BBAC contestants.

Despite all these new followers, we noticed that some BBAC contestants have scored enormous amounts of points, and therefore the team of Blockport is currently investigating these cases for validity. Therefore, contestants that have been performing fraudulent activities will be disqualified from the contest and fake accounts will be deleted.

Although we noticed that contestants have been falsely informed by third parties as the BBAC being an airdrop, the contest created a lot of base exposure and therefore our marketing activities that are following up will have a better reach throughout the market.

Blockport’s quest for top talent

As many of you may have noticed, we are exponentially growing by the minute. We currently have eleven job openings ranging from Brand Manager to Senior Back-end Engineer. If you are highly ambitious and love a fast paced startup environment in the center of Amsterdam, feel free to apply for one of our openings, or share our careers page with your professional network!

http://jobs.blockport.io

We have also assigned more of our resources to attain more experienced tech consultants from various tech consultancy companies that bring in even more team knowledge and experience when it comes to setting up and maintaining security, testing and documentation.

This is a necessary act in order to make sure that we can sustain our immensely fast product development process, while maintaining a highly secure environment that also offers our second generation of developers the tools to quickly understand how Blockport works. Creating these guidelines and documentation in collaboration with experienced consultants will give our existing team members more structure and provides newcomers a quicker on-boarding process as well.

The next steps

Leading up to the open beta, our next update will elaborate more on our roll-out plan and includes more information on the current status of the private Beta.