Sebastiaan Lichter is the Founder and Chief Product of Blockport. Blockport is an abbreviation for “Blockchain portal”, providing everyone access to the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain.
AT: Blockport connects ‘social’ with ‘trading’. For our investors who are not familiar with Blockport, can you share with us the trading and social features that Blockport offers?
SL: Our core vision is to bridge the traditional world with this new digital economy of cryptocurrencies by focussing on user-friendliness, safety, transparency and liquidity. However, change in society cannot be forced. Therefore, we need to educate people by creating streams of entertaining and compelling content.
By combining the worlds of social media and trading, we offer our users a new and unique social trading experience that intuitively facilitates a knowledge-sharing community.
Blockport’s unique social trading features allow people to follow and copy each other directly on the platform. This way beginners can learn from experienced traders and experienced traders are incentivised to share their knowledge with beginners, because they can earn Blockport tokens (BPT) as a reward.
Experienced traders can create a public ‘lead-trader’ profile on Blockport, just like influencers do on Instagram or Facebook, and share their portfolio, trading activities and insights with followers. If you want to follow an experienced trader, you’ll compensate him by paying BPT.
The general idea of this model is to incentivise both beginners and experienced traders to use Blockport as their main cryptocurrency trading platform and stimulate them to engage and share knowledge with each other.
AT: How many countries do you support, and where do most of your users originate from?
SL: We currently support 39 European countries and 16 countries outside the EU, but most of our users come from the western European countries such as the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Scandinavian countries, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, etc.
However, starting in February 2019, we will open our doors to a total of 150 additional supported countries outside the EU.
AT: What’s your timeline for onboarding United States customers?
SL: We aim to open our doors to the first US states in Q2 this year. This month we’ve secured a new banking partner that allows us to accept and process USD currency.
AT: You currently have a utility token, the Blockport Tokens (BPT). What’s the utility behind this token?
SL: The BPT has two core utilities. The first is that it is used for accessing and using the social trading features. The follower has to pay the lead trader a certain amount of BPT to follow or copy his trading activities.
The second utility is that it grants users a certain amount of discount on trading fees.
AT: When it comes to listing new tokens on Blockport, how is this decided? Is this based on a voting system?
SL: We process both normal listing applications through our future listing application, as well as accommodating to the demands of our user base and community. We recently launched a voting campaign in which Electroneum (ETN) came out on top, and we’ve got Stellar Lumens (XLM) up next on our list.
In general we base our decisions on several factors, which also includes a due diligence process on the token and team behind the project.
AT: Blockport is launching an STO in March, 2019. Could you tell us both the soft cap and hard cap?
AL: For the first round in March 2019 the soft- and hard cap are planned tobe 1M Euro and 5M Euro respectively.
AT: What will the funds from the STO raise be used for?
SL: Mainly for but not limited to: Marketing, Global expansion (US market focus), Product development & Licensing.
AT: Participants in the STO will receive Blockport Securities (BPS). Each security token represents a ‘depositary receipt’ or ‘certificate’. What benefits do these tokens offer investors?
SL: BPS represent an indirect ownership stake in the Blockport company. The BPS token grants owners no voting rights, as these vest with the intermediary issuing the BPS’s, but will enable the token holder to profit from dividends payments paid-out by Blockport to its shareholders and to profit from the increase in value of the business of Blockport overtime.
AT: On January 24th, 2019 you officially moved out of Beta. How has the market reacted?
SL: Very positive! We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from our users and the community. People really love to finally use our platform and are happy about the seamless experience when trading their favorite cryptocurrencies. The next step besides the new Bitcoin (BTC) deposits, is to also support Ethereum (ETH) and Blockport token (BPT) deposits, which is high on the wish list of our users.
AT: Is there anything else that you would like to share about Blockport?
SL: Very exciting times ahead of us! We’ve put a lot of time and resources to build the core Blockport platform from scratch within a year, and that’s a big milestone for the team, we are very proud of that.
The coming year will allow us to expand our platform’s usage and global accessibility by adding a lot of exciting new features such as social trading, advanced trader tools, additional fiat currency support and new listings.
Next to that, we’re also working to expand our business relationships with credible projects in the ecosystem that can reinforce our vision and mission to create a win-win scenario.
For anyone who wishes to learn more please visit Blockport.
The post Interview Series – Sebastiaan Lichter, Founder and Chief Product of Blockport appeared first on Securities.io.
