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HOW TO CREATE A CRYPTOCURRENCY EXCHANGE WEBSITE

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14

Mar 2018

Cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, Stellar, Cardano, IOTA, NEO, Monero, Bitcoin Cash and other 3000) have recently shaken the world. The idea of participating in this crypto-revolution has inspired thousands of people. Someone started mining cryptocurrencies, someone began developing blockchain based apps, others joined the ICO rush, and someone thinks about how to build your cryptocurrency exchange website.

No doubts, there are hundreds of more ways to join the digital currencies rush, but bitcoin exchange website is of vital importance for the future development of cryptocurrencies.

It is believed that providing transactions with cryptocurrencies will become a ‘must’ for the financial world in the future. Just imagine: you plan to go on a vacation to a foreign country and you do not have to worry about exchange troubles and huge fees when paying with your credit card. Of course, it requires time and efforts. But a huge contribution to the development of cryptocurrency world is made by bitcoin exchange websites.

The Importance Of Cryptocurrency Exchange Website,

Cryptocurrencies started a revolution. This original concept of financial operations that cannot be regulated by third parties is something extremely new, convenient and appealing. The rise in bitcoin price is so enormous that it cannot remain unnoticed anymore. This topic is ceaselessly discussed on the Internet and in the media. Yet, cryptocurrencies remain to be something obscure to most of the people.

Nowadays, only a limited segment of people use bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies in their daily lives. Only technology innovators, startup entrepreneurs, IT enthusiasts, and geeks, people that are closely familiar with the cutting-edge tendencies have to face various cryptocurrency issues. Most people do not have the access to making transactions with Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. The rise of cryptocurrency websites has the potential to bring cryptocurrencies closer to ordinary people.

Along with that, this type of exchange platforms can solve 2 important problems:

Resistance To Innovations

People are more likely to use tools they are familiar with, or ones they know from childhood. Even though we are living in the era of unstoppable changes, it is often hard to spread the idea of something unique, even if it is able to considerably simplify people’s lives. It is believed that the mankind will resist the active implementation of cryptocurrencies in daily life. Cryptocurrencies exchanges can make this process more smooth and seamless.

Fear Of Fraud

People feel more confident when they holding their hard-earned money in their hands. That’s why cryptocurrencies seem to be unacceptable for millions of people worldwide as they have hard times believing that the money can be stored somewhere far away on the cloud server.

Cryptocurrency exchanges have a huge potential to change people’s minds and opinions concerning cryptocurrencies in general and their application in real life. Moreover, the exchanges prepare every single industry for Bitcoin expansion. And if the aim is to increase the number of bitcoin users, there should be a lot of high-quality secured user-friendly cryptocurrency exchanges developed.

What Is A Cryptocurrency Exchange?

The main aim of a cryptocurrency exchange is trading. They provide users with an opportunity to trade one cryptocurrency for another or for fiat currencies and vice versa. Additionally, they offer services for storing your cryptocurrency or sending it to your digital wallet. Exchanges usually charge fees for the services or bid/ask spreads.

Depending on the offered services, a cryptocurrency exchange can be:

a brick-and-mortar business, that includes both digital and traditional payment methods;
or an online business that enables only cryptocurrencies exchange.

In order to avoid the regulations and legal troubles, such exchanges usually operate outside the USA and Western Europe but handle the fiat currencies of the world’s leading countries.

How To Build A Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) Exchange Website

Are you itching to get your hands on how to start a cryptocurrency exchange? Before you start to develop a solution, pay a huge attention to the following.

Even though Bitcoin claims to be “a currency without a government” you must conduct an in-depth research on the cryptocurrency exchange rules and regulations in your country. Excluding this point from your to-do list may lead to future troubles or even imprisonment, so be extremely careful. What is even better, hire an experienced lawyer or at least ask for a detailed consultation.

Exchange websites are essential for our financial world renovation. But cryptocurrency exchange website development can be a challenging and hard task that needs to be fulfilled in a few steps in order to gain the best result.

Step 1. Study Your Competitors

Even though the topic of digital currency exchange is relatively new, there are more than 200 websites that already successfully do this job. In the era of the Internet there is no easier way to find about a person or an organization than visit his/her/its webpage, click around and read. Such websites usually briefly describe the stories of success and overall achievements on their About Us page.

Another significant thing on your to-do list is not only to research their successes but also find out about their fails, or at least the biggest fails. For instance, let’s take a look at a digital currency exchange that is famous for its losses.

Mt. Gox was one of the first exchanges located in Japan. Starting from 2010, they showed the amazing achievements for more than 3 years. At the end of 2013, they handled the bulk of the world’s digital currency transactions. In February 2014, the company declared bankruptcy. But what happened? Well, it still remains unclear. The reason is that 850k bitcoins just disappeared, supposedly stolen. At that time it was almost $500 million; today it would be around $10 billion!

Step 2. Define The Location

Where would you like your business to run? Is it your home country or you plan to start a global exchange? As it was mentioned above laws matter, and depending on what country you choose, you are going to have to meet their business requirements and law appears. This point may be time-consuming and expensive, but it is vital for your idea implementation.

Step 3. Target Your Audience

This point seems pretty easy but has a considerable impact on the future of your business. Why? Well, by defining your target audience you will understand how the product marketing should look like and what website interface would be attractive and convenient for the potential users.

Step 4. Find Your Development Team

There are tons of tips on how to start the exchange business. Some entrepreneurs advise to go to Github, download someone’s existing code, customize it and run a business. The other opinion suggests using white label solutions which do not cost a fortune, yet, they are often unable to satisfy experienced entrepreneurs’ needs.

Success requires developing a high-quality solution from scratch. How much do you have to spend? How much are you willing to spend? Pricing may vary according to the selected team and your wishes.

To make your idea come true, you can hire an in-house team. It is a rather time-consuming and hard process that includes posting vacancies, looking for resumes, interviewing, rejecting unsuitable candidates etc. Additionally, the in-house team hired in the USA or Western Europe may cost you a fortune.

There is another option. You can outsource your idea to an Eastern European company. Eastern Europe is famous for its powerful, reliable and cheap software development services. What is crucial, these specialists show amazing performance and build solutions of the finest quality. So the outsourcing option needs to be seriously considered in order to save your time, money and reputation.

A Few Tips For Cryptocurrency Exchange Success

The web solution for a cryptocurrency exchange has to satisfy a number of requirements:

Security

The website needs to be perfectly secured. Get rid of any weaknesses, protect the data and make sure everything is safe by yourself. Hackers attacks are nothing new, so be ready that they would target you, sooner or later. Be prepared and stay safe.

Speed

Slow page loading is a way to a knockout. People that trade their cryptocurrency expect to get the seamless experience of going from one page to another, so pay attention to this momentous thing.

User Interface

Create an attractive front-end design and engage users with a clear user-friendly interface. Provide them with convenience and aesthetic pleasure when they are trading cryptocurrencies.

Cutting-Edge Approaches

If you launch a cryptocurrency exchange, you enter a new world with its own rules. And the main rule is to keep your hand on a pulse. You need to be aware of all of the news and tendencies to keep your and your users’ heads and shoulders above the water.

Marketing

A successful launch is not enough. People need to find out about your business and services. So plan a marketing campaign thoroughly: use web advertising, blogs, and social media to let them know about new opportunities, draw their attention and urge potential users to visit your website.

How to Ensure Best Security

Client-side security

Projects based on a cryptocurrency exchange concept must, above all, be secure. The first layer of protection is a well-secured authorization. In order to achieve the sufficient level of security, in our projects we use the following protection methods:

Two-factor authentication, which is implemented with the help of:
- Email (a code is sent to user email);
- SMS (a code is sent to user phone);
- Google Authenticator (authentication via an app previously connected to a user account in a web-app).
Employment of additional ‘pin code’ passwords (one-time codes which can be reset only through tech support) on occasions when somebody tries to customize personal data or other equally important data;
Logging of user authorizations followed by IP addresses comparison for tracking suspicious activity;
Complex user verification system for the confirmation of identity-based on the gathering and confirmation of a certain set of data (contact, passport data, etc.);
Suspicious activity and users tracking mechanism – this is very important as the discussed projects can be employed for illegal purposes (money laundry and others);
User session Time to Live (TTL) management – user wallets often hold big sums of money and it would be pretty displeasing if when you leave your computer desk to get some water for 5 minutes someone could sit behind it and conduct a certain operation on your behalf; in order to avoid such situations, when the system remains idle for 5 minutes or more, the user session ends and repeated authorization is required to resume it (this is an unnecessary feature which can be turned on in the user account settings);

Server-Side Security

Client-side security is a way to protect users from ordinary types of hacks when somebody acquires your account passes or you forget to log out. Such protection is crucial. However, the biggest danger lies in server attacks because the result of financially-focused apps hacks can cause losses comprising many zeros, which means that hacking costs can also be significant. In order to protect yourself as much as possible (there are no 100% guarantees, unfortunately), we’d recommend keeping up with the basic rules, namely:

Implement project architecture in such a way so that each service is responsible for certain (limited) functionality and doesn’t have an access to all the other parts of the system. All interactions between services must be realized through protected APIs and the services must have limited access rights in relation to each other; thus, when one service is harmed (during a hack attack, for instance), the data loss risks are minimized and the whole affair doesn’t affect the work of other services in the slightest;
Backup all the data – for the security purposes, backups of all the data on users, transactions, and other actions must be created in a couple of copies and on different servers. An access to these servers is strictly restricted to the employees responsible for according functionality/project. Only in such a way you get a chance to protect all your important data during the serious cyber-attack. Also, constant checks of copies validity and emergency data recovery training can help minimize the system downtime;
System flexibility – if we are talking about the cryptocurrency market, then you must understand that it is a very dynamic field with a respective customer-base. If the time is right, your project might as well be flooded with a huge number of users who will submit as huge a number of requests. What’s important – they want to see everything happen in real time, so you must be ready to take on such a load if you don’t want to lose customers. In order to meet this situation with a smile instead of crossed fingers (in hopes to slide), your system must have such architecture and infrastructure, that it is able to automatically clone services or delete the obsolete ones (saving all the security configurations to exclude any weak points) during high loads;
Last but not least, never forget about the standard methods of protection against DDoS attacks, XSS, SQL Injection, CORS, and others – employment of CSRF tokens for the ‘proper’ request identification.

Using the graphical module

Discussing the projects related to crypto exchangers, we can’t but pay attention to their graphical part. Of course, there’s nothing to focus on when talking about an ordinary cryptocurrency exchanger – there’s simply no necessity in over saturating the project with graphics and analysis tools because for respective users it’d be enough to see the rate growth tendency by week, month and year. But, if the subject is a cryptocurrency exchange market, everything becomes a bit more interesting.

Basically, this digital type of exchange market isn’t completely unlike an ordinary Bitcoin exchange market where shares, gold, and other currency is sold. Requirements for the technical part there are the same, meaning that your users must also be provided with:

Dynamic graphs that react to the tiniest variations in rates in real time;
A set of tools for various graph manipulations, which allows a trader to make their graph into a real piece of art (in their understanding and specifics);
A set of market indicators, which an experienced trader who is able to read the respective data, can use to predict further rates change dynamics;
Other, so important for the fast trader’s interface small things, such as depth of market panel, economic calendar, marketing tools list, trading terminal, etc.;

We, as always, have two options how to solve all the above-mentioned tasks, namely: the development of your own solution or employment of one of the publicly available solutions online. But, if the previously discussed case (how to properly manage the storage of cryptocurrency wallets) had a single proper solution for achieving the set goal, in this case, everything is a bit different.

Naturally, the development of one’s personal solution adds more individuality to the project. But, the disadvantage of such an approach has always been and always will be the price. Building a solution from scratch (and so that it meets all the requirements) requires respective terms and costs. That’s why this approach is overall less preferable. However, fortunately, a great way out of the situation has been found online, namely – a graphical library from ‘Tradingview’ company, which was highly praised by the Bitcoin exchange market community while being absolutely free.

You must realize now why the decision has been made to employ this particular library in our project. It allowed us to implement all the required features and even customize the library individually a bit to make the project more unique.

Crypto wallets management realization options

The important moment during the cryptocurrency exchange market-type of projects development is the way the user cryptocurrency storage is organized. How to organize a constant, fail-proof management over the user wallets created in the project. Currently, there are two ways to solve the given task, namely: to use a third-party API (it can be an API of another exchange market/exchanger) or to build one’s own (node).

Having had encountered this question for the first time ever, we preferred to use a third-party, specialized service, which, at the first glance, provided all the required basic functionality. However, when we started increasing the number of users and, respectively, their requests, we met the nemesis of any developer employing a third-party API – limitations! It tied our hands and we analyzed the situation and came to a decision that in order to meet the project goals, we’ll have to move in a different direction. We decided to establish our own server for the storage of wallets (node).

Basically, a personal server (node) is the prevailing and the most proper solution for the projects of such nature. Why? Because the third-party, specialized service itself uses the same approach and only then develops an API and enriches it with limitations, with which you’ll have to either bear or fight involving various restriction-hacking ways. But, sooner or later, the service will become not enough and you’ll have to go by the ‘establishing one’s personal server’ way.

Or, you can use paid third-party services which solve all the problems but cost more than making and supporting your own server (node).

Crypto exchangers formats

As we have already mentioned before, the most vivid representatives of the crypto field are exchangers and exchange markets. What’s the difference between these seemingly similar projects?

The first difference is the parties involved in the deal-making. In the case of an exchanger, the service itself serves as a party – it buys or sells an N amount of currency/cryptocurrency to users. In the case of an exchange market, the service is an intermediary platform where the interested users can find one another and make a deal being the only parties to the deal involved.

The next important difference is the platform’s system of awards. This is caused by the earlier described reason – different parties of the deal. When we’re talking about an exchanger, due to the fact that one of the parties is the service, its awards are based on the certain currency buy/sell rates differences, not on the commissions from successful deals, as it happens on exchange markets (except for the seldom cases when the exchange market doesn’t draw a commission for the deal made but draws significant commissions during the replenishments and drawdowns).

Margin trading is a tool from the exchange market arsenal, which represents the general difference from the exchanger. This kind of trading allows a trader (a Bitcoin exchange market participant) to make deals with sums exceeding their own balance on the project tenfold. That, in turn, brings income, which is impossible to get using only one’s own capital.

Accompanying services

When developing a cryptocurrency exchange market, one must simultaneously dedicate time and finances to the parallel development of an additional project (a certain CRM) which would be helpful with the following things:

Serve as a tool for user requests processing with different access levels for building an efficient hierarchical quality assurance system;
Gather statistical data and analyze it to establish the proper project development strategy as well as a clear and distinct assessment of the current situation;
Track the user suspicious activity for timely detecting hackers and prevent the forbidden behavior;
Monitor and track all the financial flows with the possibility to block the further inspection of any transaction or responsible user account.

Simultaneous development of such a system and an exchange market is one of the key success factors. Using this system, the project will be able to provide users with high-quality service, fast reaction to various types of issues/questions, as well as be able to analyze the current project state to form a proper project development direction strategy.

The Final Thoughts

Cryptocurrency exchange website is a way to expand your business into cryptocurrencies market. This is your chance to join the financial breakthrough and make your own contribution to it. With the help of a skilled software development team, you can get the one-of-a-lifetime opportunity to succeed in the world of digital finances.