Moving to a multi-currency world

More this way

In November 2017 we stated our belief that eventually we would all be living in a multi-cryptocurrency world. We explained that since our founding we have been cryptocurrency agnostic and that, while we believe that certain cryptocurrencies or instruments were likely to be more dominant than others, there would likely be a whole range of coins for specific use cases.

More this way

At the same time, we warned of the risks that many of these new instruments pose, especially during the ICO craze of late 2017. Above anything else, we value building a platform that our customers can trust, and that means both ensuring their crypto is secure, and that we don’t offer them something that is unscrupulous. This is one of the main reasons we’ve only had Bitcoin and Ethereum on our platform until now: While that position might appear to be overly conservative, we’d rather be conservative and ensure our customers are happy than the opposite way around.

Since then a lot has changed. The ICO craze is over. Many other cryptocurrencies have proven themselves to outlast the ones that were potentially dubious, now often with large market caps that will potentially rival Bitcoin or Ethereum. The crypto market is starting to reach a state of maturity way beyond what we experienced at the time, which is an extremely positive sign for our industry.

At the time we also listed our criteria for how we assess new coins or assets, including factors like the team and tech behind them, their security, utility, market traction, customer demand and so on. Over the past two years, the Luno team has been monitoring the crypto ecosystem very carefully, taking various currencies through these criteria, with internal presentations from thought leaders and debating sessions around them. We’ve also been asking our Luno customers from all over the world what they would like to see on our platform.

Through all of this, we have concluded that there are other safe, interesting and valuable crypto instruments that we currently don’t offer on our platform, and as of today we’re going to change that: We will be adding more cryptocurrencies in the coming months.

This doesn’t mean a free-for-all approach. We continue to be very careful around what we add, using the same criteria and level of caution. We’re looking at a broad range of assets, including other popular decentralised cryptocurrencies, privacy coins, some ERC-20 type tokens and various types of stablecoins. We’ve already shortlisted a few that we will be launching this year, and we’re going to disclose these in advance to ensure we don’t encounter the issues around perceived front-running that have struck other exchanges adding new coins.

Our platform was built to add as many coins as are safe and useful, so rest assured that we will work hard to bring you, our customers, exactly what you need, as quickly as possible. The order in which we introduce them, and the types of coins we introduce, will depend on various factors including customer demand, how high a coin scores in our internal assessments, as well as the resources required to implement them.

We’re very excited for this next phase of our journey with our loyal customers, and of course all the new people who will hopefully join us on this mission. In addition to making more coins available, we will also be making Luno available to customers in more countries, so that we can fuel this evolution and make cryptocurrencies available for everyone, everywhere.

To the moon!

Marcus

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