More competition is coming back to the commission-free cryptocurrency trading market. Voyager, a startup backed by an Uber co-founder also as an early investor in the ride-hailing company, disclosed plans Wednesday to offer no-fee trades of a minimum of 15 totally different cryptocurrencies, as well as Bitcoin, Ethereum and others.
The company will perform as a sort of aggregation engine for cryptocurrency prices across more than a dozen trading venues, permitting customers to buy and sell Bitcoin and different digital assets at the simplest value available among them. By waiving commission fees—the bread and butter of most cryptocurrency trading businesses—Voyager expects to compete with Robinhood, the stock trading app that also presently provides zero-free trading of 5 cryptocurrencies.
“We saw an opportunity to make a dynamic smart order router that can make the most of the marketplace and also provide customers no commissions,” voyager chief executive officer stephen ehrlich tells Fortune. In place of trading fees, voyager will form up the difference in revenue “by beating the average value of the coins at the point in time we execute the trade.”
By at the same time connecting to and showing prices from 10 cryptocurrency exchanges plus three additional market makers—including those based in the U.S. as well as abroad—Voyager believes it can consistently execute buy and sell orders at better prices than customers would usually get by simply visiting one exchange, such as Coinbase or Binance.
“Sometimes you head to trade on a certain exchange, but there’s no liquidity there,” explains Ehrlich, the former chief executive officer and founder of retail brokerage Lightspeed financial who also previously ran the professional trading arm of online stock broker E*Trade once Lightspeed acquired it. Ehrlich says he took an interest in cryptocurrency about a year ago, and currently plans to bring his expertise catering to each individual and professional investors in the traditional equity market to the crypto industry.
The startup’s different co-founders include Oscar Salazar, the founding designer and chief technology officer of Uber, who is Voyager’s main technical adviser as well as an investor in the company, which has so far raised “”significant capital” from solely friends and family, Ehrlich says. Gaspard DE Dreuzy, Voyager’s chief product officer, and board chairman Philip Eytan, an early Uber investor, are also co-founders.
Voyager is coming into beta testing later this week, and aims to release its no-commission mobile trading app to the public by the end of October. It also plans to offer additional functionality for hedge funds and different institutional investors, as well as cryptocurrency news and analysis options in its mobile app to assist regular investors build buying and selling decisions.
While the list of fifteen digital currencies voyager will trade remains being finalized, it'll include the lion’s share of the top twenty five most valuable cryptos on the market today, as listed by Coinmarketcap.com, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin cash, Ethereum Classic and others. “If you see it being traded these days by some of the most prominent players, we'll definitely have those plus some,” says Ehrlich, adding that voyager is “leaning towards” listing certain different major cryptocurrencies, such as XRP and Stellar Lumens (which aren't listed by major U.S. exchanges like Coinbase and Circle), but first must ensure that they can be keep firmly.
The rollout of Voyager’s free trading product will be gradual, as it secures the required state licenses in the U.S. It presently is approved in a few states including California, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Montana. It also has applications pending with regulators in different states such as new york (where a so-called BitLicense is needed for cryptocurrency exchanges to try and do business), with a goal of operating in at least forty U.S. states.
While Robinhood presently dominates in no-fee crypto trading, after launching the product earlier this year with ambitions to take on Coinbase as the market leader, Ehrlich believes there’s still area for voyager to flourish, partially by offering a larger choice of crypto assets as well as additional services to assist investors get comfortable trading cryptocurrencies for the first time.
“We don’t think crypto has been adopted yet by the masses in the united states,” he says. “I believe the market space itself is extraordinarily large…We think the opportunity for each retail and institutional is vast, and we wish to be a part of that, and facilitate the industry grow, and be good citizens to the industry, and facilitate people get more knowledgeable in crypto assets.”
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