Blockport: The First Social Crypto Exchange

Blockport Key Details
What is Blockport?
Blockport Token (BPT)
Competition
Blockport Team
Blockport Pros
Blockport Cons
Final Thoughts
Additional Blockport Resources

Blockport is an Amsterdam-based exchange focusing on opening up crypto trading to all users no matter their experience level.

The current investing landscape is filled with high barriers-to-entry which often discourage beginner investors from taking the plunge. To trade most coins, you need to have at least 2 accounts on separate exchanges in which the interfaces can be confusing and poorly designed. On top of that, long approval processes and having to constantly move funds between accounts causes further headaches.

The Blockport team is attempting to solve this by adding liquidity, security, transparency, usability, and education to the current landscape.

Blockport Key Details

Ticker: BPT

Token Type: ERC20

ICO Token Price: 1 ETH = 2880 BPT

Fundraising Goal: 16666 ETH

Total Tokens: 69,440,000

Available for Token Sale: 49,600,000 (71.4%)

Know Your Customer (KYC): No

Accepts: ETH

What is Blockport?

Blockport is the first of its kind as a social-based, hybrid decentralized exchange. The platform includes several aspects of social trading and sharing to help investors feel more comfortable in the confusing world of crypto.

Social Design

Using Blockport, you can connect with other traders, talk about investment strategies, and even copy another person’s trading portfolio. This enables new investors to learn from the pros and gives them a set of training wheels when starting to trade.

It’s not hard to see portfolio copying becoming popular. Forums on Facebook and Reddit are constantly flooded with new traders asking about which coins to invest in – Blockport’s portfolio copying eliminates the guesswork.

The team is also building out a knowledge base, robust customer service, and community page to further improve your user experience.

Hybrid Centralized Architecture

Blockport uniquely uses technology architecture from both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

On the decentralized side, your funds remain in a wallet in which you hold the private keys. This helps to prevent hacking attacks on the platform – a common problem of centralized exchanges.

On the centralized side, each trade you make is through a third-party exchange and is completed off-chain. This removes the problem of liquidity that decentralized exchanges can sometimes have.

Through this hybrid structure, you get the best of both worlds.

Blockport Token (BPT)

BPT is an ERC20 token that you use to purchase premium content, pay discounted trading fees, and exchange for social trading features.

Outside of the ICO, you can purchase BPT in the Token Shop on the Blockport platform. You can also get BPT by sharing your portfolio with other traders. Each trader that copies your portfolio must pay a fee in which you receive 90% and Blockport gets the other 10%.

Token Sale

Blockport is raising a maximum of 16,666 ETH through pre-sale and crowdsale rounds. Only 69,440,000 BPT will ever be created, and 71.4% of that is allocated to ICO participants. The remaining tokens are split amongst the team and early investors, the Token Store, and the community.

Competition

There’s no shortage of crypto exchanges competing with Blockport. The big name in the space right now is, of course, Coinbase. Both platforms specialize in easy-to-use interfaces that any investor can be comfortable using.

Decentralized exchanges are slowly becoming the norm, though, with several notable crypto projects creating their own including:

EtherDelta is another popular decentralized exchange, but its unintuitive design causes investors to easily make mistakes.

Blockport Team

The Blockport team works out of TQ, a tech hub backed by Google and KPMG in Amsterdam.

Sebastiaan Lichter (Chief Product) and Kai Bennink (Chief Strategy) founded the team. Both founders have years of experience in technology and Bennink specialized in blockchain at the Delft University of Technology.

Most notably, the team recently partnered with Ark, a project that’s creating an ecosystem of interconnected blockchains. With Ark’s focus on design and ease-of-use, it makes sense that these two companies would pair up. Lars Rensing, the CFO of Ark, was also brought on as a Blockport Advisor.

Blockport Pros

Large problem space. The exchange market is gigantic and there’s room for several successful companies. Top exchanges are facilitating well over $1B worth of trades a day.
Partnership with Ark. Ark is a well-established blockchain company with a strong community. Blockport will be able to tap into the community and is most likely utilizing their technology as well.
Beautiful design. Blockport’s design blows the majority of other exchanges out of the water. They shouldn’t have a hard time getting user adoption with their sleek designs.

Blockport Cons

Unproven product. The exchange is still in development, and the team will be releasing a beta soon. Without a working product, there’s still a lot of risks.
No profit sharing. Kucoin and Binance, two other exchanges who’ve held ICOs, have built profit sharing into their tokens. Blockport is missing this.

Final Thoughts

Blockport is attempting to lower the barriers-of-entry of crypto investing through straightforward user interfaces and social trading. This is a much-needed product in an industry that’s riddled with poor experiences and confusing processes.

The team takes advantage of the inherently social nature of investing by building a platform where new investors can learn from and trade alongside more experienced traders. Even better, investing veterans will be paid for sharing their knowledge and bettering the community.

The pre-sale for the token has already occurred, but you can still participate in the crowdsale on January 24. Make sure you apply for whitelisting before then, though.

You can find more information about Blockport in their whitepaper here.