Altcoin.io raises close to $1 million to grow decentralized exchange

Altcoin.io, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in San Diego, has come to the end of its WeFunder campaign, raising nearly $1 million. The startup raised around $950,000 from over 1,100 contributors. Altcoin.io aims to create a peer-to-peer, trustless, and decentralized exchange that ensures users stay in control of their tokens, without ever relinquishing them to a third party.

Billions of dollars of digital assets, or tokens, are exchanged every day. The bulk of this volume is through centralized exchanges, which generally hold traders’ funds inside centralized repositories that attract hackers. Trading on Altcoin.io is near-instant, scalable, and a fraction of the cost of centralized exchanges, while still offering an intuitive user experience.

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder of Bizness Apps, an app development company recently acquired by Think3. At its peak, Bizness Apps was behind 5 percent of all the apps on the App Store, having helped grow thousands of businesses through affordable yet effective app development. A seasoned cryptocurrency trader himself, Andrew now wants to fix the broken exchange market.

Andrew started Altcoin.io with Co-Founder Sulejman Sarajlija in 2017, and the team has already made headlines with several technological accomplishments. The first of which was an exchange of Bitcoin for Ethereum using atomic swap technology – the first successful swap of its kind in history. The release of an atomic swap wallet soon followed and will form part of an upcoming Software Development Kit (SDK) that will help other decentralized projects get off the ground.

Since then, the team has been developing a Plasma-like sidechain model for the decentralized exchange. First proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon, Plasma is a blueprint for a scalable, hierarchical blockchain where transactions are underwritten by smart contracts. In the event of system failure or a security breach, users can trigger a mass exit event to release their funds from the smart contract.

Altcoin.io plans to use the successful WeFunder campaign to take their decentralized exchange out of beta, and to continue developing the underlying technology and user experience. They will also invest in customer support and marketing teams.