Today we would like to tell all crypto enthusiasts about a prospective business: launching your own crypto exchangerSPOILER: How much money do you need to open a cryptocurrency exchanger?
26K dollars is the minimum capital for a confident start from scratch
The total costs are made up of:
● Expenses for setting up the site itself: ready-made script $7990 to buy or $275 per month and hosting from $200 per month.
● Creating the necessary stock of cryptocurrencies and fiat for exchange. From hundreds to tens of millions of dollars. But the total reserve for listing in BestChange must be at least $10,000.
● Advertising expenses. From several hundreds of dollars a month for successful work.
Can you spend less? You can start with almost any amount, but you will need at least 10.5K dollars in order to at least "squeak" into the ranks of serious players and start expanding your business with an increase in the number of customers. With smaller amounts, it will take a long time to grow to the required level, but it is also possible.
Website
The first thing you need is the website itself. This includes buying or developing a script, ensuring security, anonymity, automating the exchange process, developing a pleasant design, fine-tuning protection against fraud, spam, hacking and DDoS attacks.
There are two main ways to create an exchange site. The first way is to write the exchanger code from scratch. For these purposes, you will need a qualified programmer who understands how the cryptocurrency market functions. Such a development will cost from several tens of thousands of dollars and will take several months. Although at the end you will have an absolutely original design of the exchanger and a system built for your own needs. But do not forget that you will have to constantly maintain and improve your software from the technical side, so you will have to pay for the work of the developer throughout the existence of such a project.
The second way is to buy a ready-made template of an exchange office. It will cost from $8000. The second way is simpler and shorter, and the functionality of the exchange office will be supported by the script developer, which will save on site support in the long run.
From the experience of our partners, we can recommend the engine from the developer "PremiumExchanger". The software from this developer uses more than 2/3 of the total number of exchangers listed on our BestChange monitor.
► Hosting and domain
We recommend choosing a dedicated server rather than virtual VPS/VDS hosting, and the data center should also have protection against all known DDoS attacks at the network and transport levels of information exchange. Your hosting provider must have activity tracking enabled in the root folder of the site with a notification about downloading or changing files.
Data centers with a questionable reputation should be avoided.
The domain should also be chosen in an area where unilateral division is impossible, and the registrar himself should have a good reputation and be located outside politically biased jurisdictions. In other words, we recommend buying a domain and hosting outside the CIS and only from large, trusted companies.
► Wallets
The next part is setting up wallets for payment systems, bank cards, accounts, registering accounts on exchanges, developing a scheme for storing reserves and general mathematics of the project.
Recommendations: you should not use custodial services (centralized exchanges and payment systems) when working with cryptocurrencies, and if this cannot be avoided, then you should carefully study the sanctions policy of the service used. If you are using an exchange that often freezes transfers for political reasons, you should avoid working with citizens of a country that is at high risk of audits.
Legal part
► Registration
The legal entity does not have to match your location, registration of exchangers in "crypto friendly" countries is a common practice.
The list of such countries is quite wide, for example, Estonia, Malta, Japan, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Mauritius, the United Arab Emirates (namely Dubai), Puerto Rico, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland (namely Zug), Poland, Finland and even Belarus with Slovenia.
Estonia has traditionally been the most popular option for those on a tight budget.
► Trademark
The next item is not mandatory, but it will be a good bonus in possible legal disputes, including with cybersquatters or support in advertising networks. It is worth registering the site name and logo as your own trademark.
► Staff
When hiring staff, special attention should be paid to signing agreements that establish the level of responsibility of employees, including a confidentiality agreement (the so-called NDA). Be sure to instruct the staff that if it is necessary to accept any files from users, these files are uploaded and viewed on devices not related to the workflow of the exchanger, except for bitmap images, this usually happens using the appropriate hosting.
It is worth conducting regular security audits, including an assessment of the financial condition of employees. It may not be superfluous even to conduct tests using a polygraph.
► Marketing part
Contrary to popular belief, marketing is primarily not about traffic, but about the quality of services. The most important link in this aspect of the business is the staff.
The first thing to do is the preparation of instructions for operators, as well as a streamlined process of training and certification of personnel. The instructions should ideally be comprehensive and written for each payment system so that the staff is familiar with all the nuances and can quickly understand the essence of the work of each stage of the transaction, even if everything is automated.
Also important will be the development of "soft skills" of operators, primarily empathy, emotional intelligence (EQ) and good manners. It seems such an obvious banality, but it seems to be neglected by half of all market participants. The staff is the face of your business.
► Reputation
From here, the narrative flows smoothly into securing an excellent reputation. Constant scandals and disputes are "a road to nowhere." An attempt to cash in on mistakes or create cunning schemes will eventually lead to the exclusion of the service from most monitors, that is, traffic will become more expensive for you and there will be less of it.
In general, one of the most important requirements from our monitor for exchangers is an impeccable reputation. We value our own reputation, which we have been developing for more than 15 years, therefore we refuse to work with services that can negatively affect it.
Lack of reputation (a trace on the internet) is also a bad signal for us, most often it indicates a lack of real experience in the activity. Therefore, as part of working with reputation, it is important to have accounts and pages in all popular review sites, monitors and thematic forums. Collecting truthful feedback from real customers should be one of the most important tasks at the initial stage of the work of the exchanger.
► Monitoring competitors
All owners of exchangers monitor the exchange rates in the market and try to set competitive commissions. To do this, many people set up parsing of rates from monitors in order to receive up-to-date rates automatically and be able to keep their rates in certain positions relative to competitors.
But we will warn you in advance that parsing of the pages of our site is prohibited, your script will quickly get banned if it is not previously blocked by DDoS protection. If you need rates from our site, please contact support to request access to a special API designed for this very purpose. In the request, you will need to specify what the rates will be used for, as well as a link to your project.
► Traffic
In order to monetize your by-now finished product, you need effective promotion. There is a fierce struggle for the attention of users in the market and a lot of efforts will have to be made to make your exchanger recognizable and popular.
You will need an experienced marketing team to promote yourself on social networks, telegram channels, YouTube and blogs. To increase indexing in search engines, you will need excellent SEO optimization and organization of interaction with the media, "influencers" and the purchase of advertising space. You cannot neglect the placement of the project on industry forums. You should also consider a referral program. And launching targeted traffic by setting up targeted and contextual advertising is one of the most important tasks until it gets into the BestChange listing.
To increase demand, on the one hand, you need to have the necessary and popular currencies for exchange. But in fact, it is very easy to solve, just open the "Popular exchange directions" tab on our monitoring. On the other hand, expanding the range of exchanged assets is an important competitive advantage. You can make very good money on the exchange of rare destinations that are not represented by competitors. This is access to more profitable commissions, and customers in such areas become permanent.
What's next?
For many, the end point of the process of launching a crypto exchange is getting into the BestChange listing. This does not guarantee success, but on the one hand, it is a sign of involvement in the "elite club" of the largest services with an excellent reputation, and on the other hand, it allows you to get access to our traffic.
We will not describe in detail the conditions for including an exchanger in BestChange, they are described in detail on a special page.
We will only briefly mention a couple of the most important points: we include in the rating only well-known and experienced exchangers that have worked in active mode for at least 6 months; the name, domain and design of the exchanger must be unique, including the same in sound and spelling as other exchangers; and the total currency reserve must be at least $10,000.
But even if all the parameters are met, due to the large number of applications and thorough checks by the integration department, the waiting period for adding can take about a month, in rare cases even more. Therefore, it is important to apply immediately, being completely ready for integration, so that you do not have to finalize some important points for inclusion for many weeks.
If you use our tips, you will definitely succeed in this business!
