Hello qTraders, we hope you've had a great 2020! qTrade has had tremendous growth over the last year and it has only been possible through your support. It means a lot to us and we appreciate it.

As we did last year, we want to share some of the highlights of our journey and and some of the things you can look forward in 2021.

New Features in 2020

We won't go through them all, but some major highlights include:

• The launch of our Volume Rebate program to reduce fees for high volume traders
• Subaccount support, which is very handy for trying out different strategies with bots, tracking portfolio performance of specific assets, etc etc
• API improvements related to caching mostly static data (such as currency, market, and OHLCV responses), and improved flags, allowing granular iteration over things like OHLCV data

New integrations

We've been added on CCXT, a unified API for trading on many exchanges. This integration allows users the ability to get setup with our API faster, as well as take advantage of other tools that use CCXT to automate trading strategies.

We've also been added to CoinMarketCap, a long time request from our users, and a tool used by many to track the performance of tokens and exchanges.

Continued Coin integration improvements

Although it is probably not obvious, we've continued our work on a complete re-write of our software used to integrate with third party node/wallet software. Although most integrations haven't been converted yet, the improvements to reliability, testing, monitoring, and updating allow us to get more done in fewer work hours.

Growth

August was a particularly large month for us with KLP smashing all previous volume records, and currencies like HTR and NYZO have been solid performers and brough a lot of new eyes to qTrade.

Overall, qTrade has seen over ~3.5x growth in trading volume and over 2.5x growth in DAU

Looking forward: Goals for 2021

We're extremely happy with the above progress, but the increased traffic and trading has helped to expose some weak points in our architecture that should be resolved before scaling further. We also recognize there is still a ton of room for improvement in the tooling and platform, and we're excited to work on rolling out those improvements.

Continued node integration improvements

We have a lot of varied goals in the category, but you could summarize our efforts as 'trying to build fully autonomous integrations, and simultaneously simplify integration difficulty'. This includes everything from pre-written tooling for standard actions (transactions for possible deposits) and automated repair attempts (restart, rescan, re-sync, bootstrap, etc), to an integration flow that includes building in standardized monitoring, metrics, and failover.

Its quick and easy to describe some of the above goals, but executing these correctly likely represents thousands of hours of skilled engineering work, and represents a significant focus of our effort for the coming year.

Trading platform improvements

One of the goals from 2019's year end review that we didn't make much progress on is trading feature improvements, such as WebSocket APIs and advanced order types. These are still in the plans. As a stretch goal we've added advanced metrics and data exporting tools for things like tax reporting and historical account balance charts.

Improved user security features

As we've grown our users have become more of a target for malicious hacking attempts. To help combat this and keep our focus on security high, we intend to introduce more options for securing your account. Some of these options include things like WebAuthn (U2F/yubikey), as well as more intelligent login challenges, such as requiring email authentication when logging in from a new device.

Compliance improvements

As we've grown our in-house KYC/AML procedure, we added shortly before launching, has started to become a substantial time spend for our staff. Additionally, some users need additional verification options to withdraw more than our standard maximum of $50k/day. To resolve this we're looking into third party providers who we can trust with user data and also have the tooling and experience in this area to simplfy this process for us.