A letter from our CEOs: thoughts on the BEST launch

Hello Bitpanda community,

After the successful fundraiser for the BEST IEO, we launched our Global Exchange last Wednesday, with this we also opened trading for the BEST token.

As you well know, the price of BEST took a nosedive at the start. We know many people expected a fantastic start and a quick rise of the price. As this didn’t happen immediately, some sold their BEST and many others followed.

This resulted in the price dropping further and the fear taking over. Consequently, many just started selling without any other reason than the price dropping. Here at Bitpanda we are very sad to see people’s trust in this project with an immense potential shaken. With this post we want to help you guys understand why we are so confident in the future.

The Exchange was launched five days ago with market makers for BTC/EUR and BTC/USDT and the general volume was around 0.5–2M€ per day. Agreed, this is relatively low in comparison to existing exchanges, but absolutely expected. In fact we are very happy with the launch, especially from the tech perspective.

An exchange needs to be established over time. We are working very hard to increase the exchange activity. Our business development team is currently working intensively to onboard as many professional traders (arbitrage traders, marketmakers, funds, family offices, etc) in the next few weeks and last week we started with our marketing activities. The exchange project was always meant to be a long term one.

Our current user base is very beginner heavy. It was fascinating to see that very few users switched to the Exchange on day one. This will be more of a gradual process. Our users need to get more comfortable with trading cryptocurrencies and digital assets and then try out and learn how to use the more professional trading solution — namely the Bitpanda Global Exchange.

Unfortunately, on day one we already had a few users who didn’t quite understand how an exchange worked and lost money solely by lack of knowledge. We urge you to be extremely cautious when using professional trading tools. The Exchange is for professional and experienced traders.

Nonetheless, we lead the European market as a crypto broker and will continue to improve the Bitpanda platform for all users. Bitpanda should continue to be your home for digital assets, despite your background or experience.

The important part is that BEST is not just a tool for the Global Exchange. The volume we process on the broker is continuing to grow and posting record volumes. All broker users (Bitpanda Platform) will be able to pay their fees with BEST, creating a great amount of BEST which will be burned.

This will be a very quick process, especially if the price is below 0.12€ . It seems as if this bit of information has not made the rounds yet and people assume that only the exchange volume will be used to burn BEST. Every existing and upcoming fee-based Bitpanda product will be able to be paid in BEST. To give an indication, at current BEST price, there would be a monthly burn of >7.5M BEST if all fees are paid in BEST. That is a monthly deflation of 1.5%.

One point brought up by the community was the big reserve that we have as a company and the missing lockup. We plan to use this consistently for promotions, but there is no plan to sell this to the market. Right now there are 519M BEST outstanding (500M IEO and 19M BEST from affiliate payments, employee bonus, 1M user-promotion), tomorrow 20M BEST will be distributed with the 2 airdrops. So tomorrow the supply will be 539M BEST.

We will put a soft lockup on 400M BEST in our reserve, as in, we will not touch them without notifying you guys. The 61M BEST should be enough to last for many promotions to come in the next few months.

Right now we are more motivated than ever and our roadmap is full of exciting projects and great partnerships. Nothing has changed in our plans and the price of BEST will follow our successful journey. We always deliver what we promise and will do so with BEST and the Exchange too!

Thank you very much for your trust in us and as mentioned, we will keep our promises!

Eric & Paul