Distributing Finance For Everyone: An Interview with Fabio Canesin, Chief Business Officer of Nash

Q: What can you tell us about your company?

Nash is a fintech company that uses blockchain as infrastructure for financial services. Decentralized technology offers major opportunities for improving security, efficiency and regulation. For that reason, we believe that over the next decade the financial services industry will adopt blockchain for everything from banking to trading stocks and securities. Nash aims to provide the leading platform for decentralized financial services.

Q: What types of services do you offer?

Nash aims to offer all core financial services, such as funds management, trading and payments, but with the advantage of remaining non-custodial. This is one of the most important properties that blockchain provides: users are in control of their own assets at all times, without ever having to give custody to another party. Ironically, custodial exchanges are a huge problem within the digital asset space. A performant, non-custodial solution is desperately required.

At launch, Nash will offer funds management tools for a number of digital assets, an exchange for trading these assets and so-called “fiat ramps” that will let customers buy and sell digital assets using national currencies. In the near future, we will also be releasing a mobile application to access these services and Nash Pay, our payments solution. This connects directly to users’ Nash accounts and will make it easy for merchants to accept digital currencies. 

Q: Are you targeting the consumer or business market? How does the business model work?

We are targeting both markets. At first, we will be focussed on digital asset trading, which has both a dedicated consumer market and a significant institutional market. Our payments solution also targets both markets: it forms a bridge between customers and merchants.

In terms of our business model, Nash has a single source of revenue: fees charged on trades that pass through our exchange’s matching engine. However, the payments service connects to the matching engine to allow automatic currency conversions – for example, if a merchant wants to receive one asset, but a customer wishes to pay with another.

Q: What can you tell us about what you have in the pipeline?

Our platform will go live on 23 August. It’s a major priority for us to integrate Bitcoin trading as soon as possible, since the majority of volume in digital asset markets exists on Bitcoin pairings. There are technical challenges involved in integrating Bitcoin into a non-custodial exchange. However, Nash has already developed an innovative protocol that will allow genuine, non-custodial Bitcoin trading. Our engineers will be implementing this protocol as soon as they can, which will also let us support related assets like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

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We will continue to improve and expand our product lineup, both with the mobile and payments solutions I mentioned, but also with other innovations. For instance, we are working on a new protocol for providing cryptographic signatures to the blockchain that will give users more flexibility than current “private key” models. 

Q: What differentiates your company from the competition?

Within the digital asset space, we are offering something genuinely new: a non-custodial exchange that can compete with the performance and user experience of major centralized exchanges. This is achieved thanks to our state-of-the-art off-chain matching engine, as well as the exceptional work of our design team. If your readers have time, I’d encourage them to read this article

(​https://blog.nash.io/cryptocurrency-trading-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/​), which contrasts centralized and decentralized technologies.

Legal compliance is another important point. Regulations regarding digital assets are relatively immature, which creates problems for both consumers and businesses. In September, some large exchanges will be forced to end their operations in the United States. By contrast, Nash strives to be maximally compliant. We will already be supporting roughly half the United States population at launch.

Q: Could you tell us more about your company’s achievements so far?

Besides the technology we’re developing, I have to talk about our legal innovation. Nash raised approximately 37 million USD by selling a blockchain-based asset, the Nash Exchange token (NEX), to public and private investors. This token entitles holders to a portion of our exchange revenue – up to a 75% proportionate share if they stake their tokens for two years. Since profit-sharing would make NEX a security under existing laws, we have been fortunate to have been able to register our token with the FMA in Liechtenstein. NEX is the first public digital security in Europe, and possibly the world!

Q: Could you tell us more about where you see your company in the future?

In the near future, we hope to become one of the major digital asset exchanges and to drive the general adoption of digital assets. We aim to expand our user base from existing cryptocurrency enthusiasts to a wider public. Our products are designed to break down the barriers that prevent everyday customers from using digital assets.

Further in the future, we believe that much of traditional finance will move onto the blockchain. At that point, we hope Nash will be a global player for both payments and trading. If our vision becomes reality, then Nash will also be a major exchange for many different digital assets.

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Q: What are the key elements you want readers to take away from this interview?

While most players have the perspective that blockchain is disruptive, Nash is introducing innovation to disrupt blockchain itself. Our technology offers a performant, non-custodial exchange. Our legal innovations lay the foundations for digital securities trading and make blockchain a practical solution for businesses. And our user experience will make this novel technology as simple and accessible as email. We are doing everything we can to make the benefits of blockchain an everyday reality.

Official Website: https://nash.io