From Vienna with love
‘At Bitpanda we are firm believers in the innovative power of cryptocurrencies, digitized assets and blockchain technology. Our mission is to tear down the barriers to personal finance and bring traditional financial products into the 21st century.’ It states in the about section on the Bitpanda page.
Based in Vienna, Bitpanda is an exchange that has over 1 million users. With a PSD2 payment service provider license, users can trade over 30 digital assets. How and when did it become so big?
The story starts in 2014 when Eric Demuth, Christian Trummer and Paul Klanschek founded Bitpanda. Their main goal was simple, to make buying and selling Bitcoin and other digital assets as fast, easy and secure as possible.
“We were super focused on this mission and I would dare to say we’re pretty successful with it. Several milestones marked the way to the European market leader: In April 2019, Bitpanda received a PSD2 payment service provider license from the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA). Bitpandas’ first Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) for its new ecosystem token BEST has successfully raised €43.6 million – making it the top European IEO to date. Today, Bitpanda has more than 1 million users and has grown to 160+ team members from 40 nations.” Says Ivis Buric the PR and communications manager to Kryptografen.
“In Europe, Bitpanda is a clear forerunner, but we aim to make Bitpanda popular on a global scale.” So what distinguishes Bitpanda from the rest? “As Viennese Blockchain company, Bitpanda holds an excellent reputation with years of regulatory experience and is fully regulated and compliant under EU law due to its location. Accordingly, Bitpanda’s customers continuously praise our trust and safety standards. In order to ensure the best possible security of the cryptocurrencies, Bitpanda stores almost all customer funds and cryptocurrencies offline.”
New consumer
Everyone who is willing to invest in the future, but especially Millennials. “While this new generation of investors wants to invest and save money, they don’t want their parent’s investment advisors and outdated products anymore. They want to reach their financial goals in a more transparent, self-determined way. They also want to invest where and whenever they are. Almost 90% of them check their smartphones within the first 15 minutes of waking up. Now it’s up to us to give them the right tools and products.”
In general, Bitcoin is a young digital asset. The first wave of crypto exchanges and brokers was defined by unprofessional companies like Mt. Gox, who unsurprisingly went out of business eventually. Then it got more professional, entrepreneurs got more aware of the fact that they are operating as a financial company and that they need to act accordingly to survive in the long run. Bitpanda is part of this second wave of professional businesses, which had regulation and security on their radar from the beginning.
“Right now we still see businesses that move to jurisdictions where it’s easier and more frictionless for them to operate. This was never an option for us. We’re an Austrian company and play by the rules. We believe that clever and innovation-friendly regulation should be achieved together with institutions and regulators and not by avoiding them.” She continues
Bitpanda community
This approach is visible in their strategy for both the Bitpanda broker service and their exchange. The Bitpanda Global Exchange, a digital asset exchange designed to serve experienced traders, professionals, and institutions, was launched back in August 2019. It is Bitpanda’s first worldwide product that allows crypto-to-crypto trading around the world and fiat-to-crypto trading in more than 54 countries. It has been developed 100% in-house over the past two years.
There is a sense of community around Bitpanda, “it is no secret that we value our passionate, knowledgeable and supportive community. Bitpanda has developed a strong reputation for being an easy-to-use, highly secure and trustworthy platform. The same accounts for the exchange. That’s because we have a very strong community that not only gives us the best organic product feedback we could think of such as ideas on new products, areas we can improve but also in our community users can help each other with a referral so it can grow faster.”
When you want to make an investment, especially in digital assets, it is important to trust your exchange. Bitpanda makes it easy and simple.