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FokLog spoke to Konstantin Gladych, CEO and co-founder of Changelly, during BlockShow Europe 2018<\/span><\/a> in Berlin, where he took the stage to talk about centralized and decentralized exchanges.<\/p>\n Changelly<\/span><\/a> is an instant digital currency exchange that rapidly drew attention of the community and, despite some heavy criticism<\/span><\/a> for their KYC policy and allegedly hostaging some of the clients’ funds, already boasts, according to the company, over 1.5m users.<\/p>\n Calling himself a blockchain maximalist, Konstantin is also acting as an advisor for Cindicator, hybrid Intelligence for financial markets, and Genesis Vision, the platform for the private trust management market. Apart from that, he is also CBDO at Atomic Wallet, and at some point in the past Konstantin advised for MinerGate mining pool.<\/p>\n ForkLog: Hello Kostantin, let\u2019s first talk about Changelly project itself. How did you come to the idea of creating a platform like this, specifically that by that time ShapeShift, which offers pretty much the same functionality, had already been around?<\/strong><\/p>\n Konstantin Gladych:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s true. Shapeshift started about two years before us, and when we actually entered the market, which happened about three years ago, we saw that ShapeShift was the only company and we understood that we could build the competition.<\/p>\n Also at that time I was advising for MinerGate mining pool, which was a huge mining pool focused on Monero and other CryptoNight currencies like Bytecoin, and we saw that people still needed an option to exchange their mined coins to Bitcoin. So we got our first customers from MinerGate and after that we decided to open the service to a lot more customers. We also partnered with CoinMarketCap<\/span><\/a>, it\u2019s our biggest affiliate partner, and we also offer exchange option via a few wallets.<\/p>\n I have full respect to ShapeShift and for what they are doing, but what we actually realized that even if you use ShapeShift it\u2019s not a so smooth process. Maybe we are doing pretty similar exchange product now with similar customers, but what we also understand is that only market competition can drive services so that they become better for customers.<\/p>\n So what we have today on Changelly is that there are no amount restrictions, you can exchange huge volumes. Our biggest transaction ever was 500 BTC and we processed it really smoothly, in half an hour or so, and that\u2019s the main competitive advantage for us.<\/p>\n ForkLog: What are the weak points of platforms like yours?<\/strong><\/p>\n Konstantin Gladych:<\/strong> In comparison to classic exchanges like Binance is that there you can do a deposit and after that you can trade using different algorithms. Maybe the weak points are the slippage and the rates as you don\u2019t have fixed rates, like people are buying Ethereum or Litecoin and they should wait for confirmations and the currency price is going up.<\/p>\n So maybe I can assume that\u2019s not even a weak point but rather a functionality we offer.<\/p>\n ForkLog: You have mentioned exchange option in some wallets. As it was reported earlier, there are such partnerships with Freewallet, Jaxx, and Breadwallet to name a few. Do you actually have any plans regarding any hardware wallets\u00a0 integrations like Ledger or Trezor?<\/strong><\/p>\n Konstantin Gladych:<\/strong> Recently I\u2019ve spent a week at Consensus 2018 and at the breakfast with Ledger president [Pascal Gauthier – ForkLog] we discussed possible integrations, so let\u2019s say yes, at some point Changelly will be integrated with Ledger.<\/p>\n Also we have partnership with Trezor guys, but unfortunately Trezor is much smaller than Ledger.<\/p>\n ?Decentralized exchanges vs Centralized exchanges \u2014 BlockShow (@BlockShowcom) 28 \u043c\u0430\u044f 2018 \u0433.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
\nKonstantin Gladich from @Changelly_team<\/a> explaining pic.twitter.com\/i3WtUfO14q<\/a><\/p>\n