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. As we approach the holiday season and end of year 2019, I would like to touch upon not only the most recent events, but also provide a broader review of this whole year.

Disregarding where BTC and other main crypto prices will be on December 31st, 2019 can be considered a very positive year for Bitcoin and the whole crypto industry. After the largely depressing 2018, which was spent in crisis mode for majority of the industry participants, this year brought us more adoption, more hashpower, more creative new projects, more professionalism, more regulation and more credibility for the whole industry. Despite the price swings, we see less people calling Bitcoin dead, we see crypto on the top agendas for multinational corporations, governments and societies. Another important trend for 2019, was the divergence between Bitcoin and altcoins. BTC dominance has risen from 50% to around 70% during this year. While almost 5 years in this industry have definitely taught me that it is foolish to expect trends to continue and make short to medium term predictions, this divergence between BTC and altcoins I can find a strong explanation for. Over the years and different attempted applications, Bitcoin has established itself as the reliable “Asset” of the crypto industry. The reasoning might be diversifying your portfolio or hedging against the current world financial and political order, but the value proposition is clear – the more people buy and hold BTC, the higher its value should be in the future. With the altcoins the value proposition is a lot less clear. Ethereum lost its main use case with the end of the ICO and others never truly found their value. A bit different situation is with exchange tokens, which as the Binance example proves, can have quite significant value if they enable services that are in demand. That is one of the reasons why I believe in the bright future of the Globitex token – as the usage of our services constantly grows, with it grows the demand for our token, because more and more people realize that massive value can be captured if GBX tokens are used to cover our service fees. 2020 is the year of the Halvening, which is the most anticipated event in the industry for quite a while. Let us see how events unravel, but the sentiment is very positive!

For us, 2019 was the year of the EURO Wallet. We launched our landmark EUR accounts and payments product in February and have been working tirelessly to provide the best financial infrastructure possible for the crypto industry businesses and traders. It is highly rewarding to see many successful companies build their product using our solutions and also improving their practices to meet our standards for compliance. We have seen substantial growth in both accounts opened and payments volume processed since we upgraded our product positioning at the end of the summer and have had a long pipeline of clients for onboarding since. We are investing both resources and creativity to make the onboarding process faster and clearer and expect our capacity to onboard new clients substantially expand in 2020. Some other notable milestones included launching of the new trading interface, introducing GBX payments for EURO Wallet fees, publishing a new public website based on the 2018 upgraded visual identity, starting the Globitex agent program for corporate clients, substantially increasing the available liquidity on the BTC/EUR and ETH/EUR orderbooks, introducing the Salt Edge Authenticator app, getting listed on Coinmarketcap, making GBX tokens more accessible by listing a GBX/EUR pair, introducing Basic and Premium price plans for EURO Wallet, taking part in the Mastercard lighthouse development program and many other smaller upgrades, features, events and initiatives. We visited 10 different industry events in 2019 and sponsored the AIBC conference in Malta as well as the Baltic Honeybadger in Riga.

For 2020, our focus remains on serving the crypto business industry and that includes improving our onboarding and overall customer journey, providing more payment options and currencies, introducing cards and card acquiring as well as increasing the availability of our services to customers’ customers. We will continue increasing our presence in different industry events in different countries, first of which we have already agreed to sponsor (more info will follow soon).

We are living and working in exciting times. Let us make the most of it together!

Merry GBX-mas,

Uldis Teraudkalns
Globitex CEO