CEO Statement

Dear Globitex community!

Welcome to the monthly community report of Globitex! This is the place where you can hear first-hand about our progress, our plans and reflections on events in the crypto scene.

Last month has been relatively calm on the crypto markets, with the exception of one weekend. That weekend on Friday morning the price of bitcoin was around $7000. On Saturday morning, the price was near $10 000. A 24h price increase of more than 30%. In my 5 years in the bitcoin world, I had never seen anything like it. The first thing I did was try to find out what could have caused it. And the only noteworthy event in the past 24h was a speech by Chinese president Xi Jinping, where he emphasized that digital currencies and blockchain technology have a significant role in China’s future. One speech and +30%. The next Monday China announced its national digital currency which sent shockwaves throughout the crypto and legacy finance industries. It appears that the race for centrally controlled global digital currencies is on. In the meantime, Libra keeps hitting new roadblocks with continuing Congressional hearings as well as the departure of some of its reputable founding members, including Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and eBay. Still bitcoin rumbles onwards and upwards.

The focus of our daily business remains attracting corporate customers. We are working extra hard to service all applications, which have picked up significantly due to a combination of activities and circumstances, including our new pricing policy, direct sales efforts as well as regulatory issues that our competitors are facing. A few days ago, we launched a new authentication method on our platform – the Salt Edge Authenticator app. A fully PSD2 compliant solution, the Salt Edge app ensures dynamic linking of payment details on a push notification on your phone. This solution will initially be available only for EURO Wallet customers, but subject to successful adoption in operations, could become the main 2-factor authentication method on the whole platform. A new market maker has recently started operations and has significantly improved the competitiveness of our exchange on our two main pairs – BTC/EUR and ETH/EUR. Now you can buy/sell 10BTC or 50ETH with a 0.3% spread, which makes us competitive with the larger EUR-based exchanges like Kraken and Bitstamp. Our service gains more traction, quality and value each day, and our customers are the main benefactors.

The Mastercard Lighthouse development program has concluded and we are very content with our experience there. While the Scandinavian banks have a clear no-crypto policy and there is not much business we can offer to them, Mastercard has been very supportive of our ideas and plans. Both sides will continue pursuing partnership in cards issuing. Participation in the program has not only yielded great relationship with Mastercard, it has also inspired us to come up with an innovative account funding mechanism based on Open banking. Stay tuned for updates on this and other development projects.

To conclude, we spent a full week in Singapore during the Singapore Blockchain week and attended countless events, where we forged new business relationships and measured the demand for our products in Asia. The overall mood was a bit pessimistic due to lack of trading volume on the markets, however the companies maintain strong determinations to conquer European markets and widen their product offering with EUR based products.

Yours faithfully,

Uldis Teraudkalns
Globitex CEO