- Custodial crypto exchanges carry added risks for crypto traders, risks that often scare those new to the crypto space away from active trading.
- “For beginners, changeangel can be a real help, and we thoroughly believe that non-custodial solutions could be the way forward – especially with all the hackings that we’ve seen lately,” said Dean Preston – changeangel co-founder – in an exclusive interview with BitStarz News
- changeangel is the swap exchange that’s not only simplifying the crypto space, but is also giving back to projects that both deserve and need additional investment.
As mass adoption begins to grow, more people are looking for quick, easy and reliable platforms to swap their cryptocurrencies to tokens with increased value. Until now, these swap exchanges have primarily been custodial platforms, meaning that they could vanish overnight and take your funds with them, but that could all be about to change.
changeangel is shaking up the market with its non-custodial swap exchange platform and its evangelism policies. A portion of the fees from every trade will be pumped back into the non-ICO coins it’s listing, meaning the related projects can continue to grow and develop.
To get the inside scoop and find out exactly how changeangel works, Alex Meears spoke with Dean Preston – changeangel co-founder.
AM: Could you tell our readers a little bit about changeangel?
DP: changeangel is a non-custodial swap exchange – non-custodial meaning that we don’t hold any of the actual cryptocurrency. We have a range of service providers connected to the back end of the platform, so when a user submits a transaction through changeangel we basically pluck the best trade from the system and then our system then spits that cryptocurrency out into whichever wallet that has been chosen. For beginners, changeangel can be a real help, and we thoroughly believe that non-custodial solutions could be the way forward – especially with all the hackings that we’ve seen lately. For newcomers to the crypto space, using a non-custodial swap exchange will certainly help to reduce the stress and worry of using these big exchanges that are getting hacked or disappearing with the user’s funds.
I have a huge amount of respect for our developers. They’ve worked very hard to make our platform as smooth and as fast as possible. They believe in our vision and are working tirelessly to make it happen. We’ve got a lot of exciting things coming in the future, as well as projects they’ve just started working on. One of these new features is a unique payment system that will be designed for use by charities and organizations like that.
Being a startup company in the crypto space, we’ve been applying for a lot of events. We went to the CoinFest event in Manchester this year, we sponsored the DigiByte exhibition and the Malta AI & Blockchain Summit. As well as these, we’re actually planning to go to the CryptoCompare event in London on June 12th. During all these events what we do is promote the coins on our platform by organizing flyers, stickers, and t-shirts. So, we don’t just donate back to the coins, we also promote them at all the events that changeangel goes to. Whatever we make in revenue from our platform goes towards paying for these stickers, flyers, and various things for these communities – that’s our social good aspect of changeangel swap exchange.
AM: How did you come up with the concept for changeangel?
DP: It all started when I got involved with an awareness team with the DigiByte coin. We were a group of volunteers that got together to try and raise awareness for DigiByte and we met a lot of great guys within that team. After a while, me and another guy from the team decided to get together and try and come up with an idea of how to bring revenue back into these non-ICO coins. We put our minds together and discussed a number of different ideas, with the final outcome being a swap exchange where we donate a portion of the trade fees back to non-ICO coins.
For example, if you swap Litecoin into Ravencoin, we will donate a portion of the fees back to the projects. All of the coins that we list at the minute are non-ICO. We may list ICO coins in the future, but we will only ever donate to the non-ICO coins. To us, these are the coins that matter and are the coins that really need the help financially – that’s the vision anyway.
AM: How do you get liquidity to fill the various swap pairings on changeangel?
DP: We work with a number of different exchanges and platforms who are all integrated on the back end of changeangel, allowing users to submit their trades through changeangel. The platform will then automatically go to the providers, look for the best trade in terms of pricing, the platform then executes the order and sends the crypto to the wallet address the user specified before the trade was placed. This all happens in a fraction of a second, the developers have done a great job on creating this. Obviously, receiving the crypto can take up to an hour, but that’s just like any exchange. If you want to get Bitcoin, it can sometimes take up to an hour to come through depending on the bid that’s been placed with network fees. Meanwhile, some of the other coins can come through within a couple of minutes which is absolutely fantastic.
AM: Do you have a time frame for launching buying and selling crypto to fiat?
DP: This is certainly something that’s on our mind, that is the goal and it’s on our mental roadmap. However, we’ve got a unique payment system to develop first, and when we’re done with that we’re going to look to create our own API, so that anyone can use our code and our system – a bit like a white label. For example, with our API you could create your own swap exchange or swap exchange widget and use our API to fill the swap trades. So, there are a couple of things that we’re working on at the moment, but fiat is going to appear down the line.
AM: Do you have your own liquidity pools, or do users have to wait for both transactions to be confirmed by the respective blockchains?
DP: We haven’t got any liquidity pools at the moment, so your transaction goes to the exchanges through the back end and then the transaction will have to go through the various networks and then you’ll receive your coins. But that takes us to another point – we’re working with people and companies to try and create our own liquidity pools. If we manage to develop these pools, we will be able to push the transaction through a little bit quicker and then go to the exchanges ourselves and trade to refill the pools manually. These liquidity pools will create a quicker process for the user, but we’re only three months old, so this could take some time for us to get live and working.
AM: How do projects go about listing their tokens on changeangel?
DP: Firstly, at the minute we only list non-ICO and decentralized tokens. However, in the future – because of the market and because of the way things are going – we may start to list some ICO coins and tokens. But the criteria as it stands is non-ICO – which is key – and decentralized open source projects. That being said, one of the biggest things we look at is the community – we’re all about the community. Our aim is to be the community of communities and bring all these communities together for mass adoption. So, the community is very important to us. In fact, I put a Tweet out the other day and basically said changeangel has no listing fees, is non-ICO friendly, as well as a few other bits, and the number of people that started listing various different coins was incredible. That means a lot to us – it shows us that the community is passionate.
Changeangel is the swap exchange that’s giving back to the crypto community and not being greedy. If you’re looking to start using a quick and simple swap exchange, changeangel is well worth checking out. The team is rock solid and is doing a fantastic job – not to mention how well they’re looking after the coins that need the help the most.
Stay tuned to BitStarz News for more interviews with the brains behind the biggest names in the crypto industry.
