Hello qTraders, we hope you've had a great 2019! Thanks to you it has been a huge year for us at qTrade and we want to share some of the highlights of our journey and and some of the things you can look forward in 2020. 

New office space

Made possible by strong growth in 2018 qTrade was able to start off 2019 strong, with new office space at the BTBC:

Previously we'd been operating out of our living space and operating as a lean startup trying to bootstrap ourselves as much as possible. Since moving in we've seen a huge productivity boost due to being able to grow our team and improve our development infrastructure, and perks like 10Gb internet speed up workflow.

Growing user base

In Februrary we launched our NYZO market and qTraders made it one of our most active and successful listings. March and May were also particularly active for us with the launch of our Referral program, the addition of CryptoNote support, and the closing of Cryptopia introducing many Bismuth users to qTrade.

Due to the success of markets like Nyzo and Bismuth, we wanted to double down providing interesting markets and coins that, due to the cost and complexity, other exchanges were hesitant to add. This resulted in the launch of our Early Access program, which allowed us to add currencies where automated deposits and withdraws were more challenging.

UI improvements & Team growth

During this time we also made sweeping changes to our Markets page which have been met with very positive feedback

In October, after participating in KU's Engineering Career Fair, we hired our first intern, who has helped us greatly expand our API docs, tweak some pain points there, and test out our python native API client

November saw improvements to our user settings page, and a much delayed ETH listing in December.

Looking forward: Goals for 2020

While all of the above represents a great deal of progress to qTrade's platform, user base, and team, there is still a ton of room for improvement and we're excited to be working on rolling it out.

Node integration improvements

While not directly visible to our end users, we've begun deploying and iterating upon a greatly improved version of our software that interfaces with third party node software we run. The new version makes extensive use of webSocket, so the multistep processes involved in processing deposits and withdraws now execute in milliseconds.

Besides the cool factor, we've designed this upgrade to allow better monitoring and introspection into node, allowing us to run a lot more nodes without expanding our team. Another main goal of this upgrade is to allow easier integration of node software into qTrade, which will in turn allow faster listings, and move the needle towards allowing developers to write their own integrations.

Volume rebate program

Volume and liquidity are challenges for all exchanges, regardless of size - but it is a particular challenge for crypto exchanges operating primarily in more speculative markets that are fairly illiquid to begin with.

To help improve this, we're nearing release of a rebate program that includes steep discounts to high volume users. We haven't selected all of the final numbers, and they will be subject to change, but you can expect that to launch Q1 2020, potentially in early February.

webSocket and trading platform improvements

We recognize that for more sophisticated traders our lack ofwebSocket support makes life challenging, as the need for the latest information makes polling and rate limits via our REST API a challenge to be worked around. We're aiming for a late Q1 or early Q2 release of a webSocket trading API. 

Additionally we are evaluating many other trading platform improvements, such as advanced order types, tick size adjustments, notifications for deposits/withdraws/trade executions/etc, special market types for larger traders, historical account balance tracking, and a lot more. Let us know if there is a feature you'd like to see us add!

We also have some ideas related to lowering the barrier for simple algorithmic trading and order execution strategies which we think may represent a significant step forward in the industry, but at the moment we can't share many details on that. We hope to discuss more on that late 2020.

We're hiring!

We're looking for interns who are passionate about crypto, want an opportunity to learn and be more involved in the space, and have a skillset that can provide value to a lean startup. If you think that is you and you live within commuting distance of our HQ in Lawrence, KS drop us a line!