It is no secret that the crypto market is booming these days. Over a decade since its inception, more people are dealing in cryptocurrency than ever before and the plethora of offerings available for crypto lovers only continues to expand.
For a crypto-entrepreneur who wants to get their digital asset to the masses, the first step is usually trying to get the token listed on exchanges, whether centralized or decentralized. After all, exchanges are the main way that most crypto lovers buy and sell tokens and can be the bridge to accessing millions of customers.
There are several benefits to owning your own crypto exchange as an entrepreneur in the space. First, it means you have more control over your token distribution, marketing, and brand. Getting your token listed on an external crypto exchange will typically require an intense vetting process and once it is listed, you are fairly beholden to the whims of the exchange’s management and will have little control over the token. By having your own exchange, you enjoy fine-grained control over its interactions with the public.
By having your own exchange, you get to skip the often expensive and lengthy bureaucratic process and have more time to focus on your actual project.
Becoming an Exchange Owner
When most people think of owning and running their own crypto exchange, they imagine the complicated process of hiring a whole team of developers and creating an exchange from scratch. To them, creating an exchange would be a costly and difficult task they’d rather not undertake.
However, this is far from the current reality. The same way most of us can create a website with tools like Wix or WordPress without needing web development skills, you can now create a crypto exchange using white label tools like HollaEx, ChainUp, and AlphaPoint.
Compared to the costly affair of actually building an exchange from scratch, most of these allow an entrepreneur to do this at a lower cost. Take HollaEx, which offers what it calls ‘an open-source crypto kit’ through which you can set up every aspect of your exchange yourself, including its fee structure, its listing mechanism, and so on. Once this is done, your exchange can be hosted either on the cloud or locally, also known as a DIY exchange. All this can be done for free until you are ready to launch your exchange through its platform.
Then there’s AlphaPoint, which operates in a similar way but as a closed-source white-label platform for launching exchanges, brokerages, and for tokenizing assets. AlphaPoint has been featured heavily in mainstream media and in publications like Forbes, Bloomberg, and Fortune. For those interested in launching an exchange through AlphaPoint, a demo has to be requested and then a quote for the cost is given to the customer before the building of the exchange itself can commence.
Another market offering is ChainUp, a Chinese-made white label crypto exchange software platform that allows users to create their own crypto exchanges with a number of features including OTC, derivatives, and even some types of ETFs. Having launched over 4 years ago, this Chinese company is considered a go-to for creating exchanges with a wide roster of features.
In terms of the process behind setting up these exchanges, it is usually similar to the process of creating a website using tools like WordPress or Wix in the removal of the technical know-how barrier. In terms of costs, market studies estimate that it usually closes around $20,000, though this figure could go higher depending on tech labor costs needed to run the exchange once launched. There are options like HollaEx, however, that allow the creation of a free exchange until the user is ready for it to launch.
When choosing a white-label service to launch an exchange, however, ensure that it is one that offers features that tap into the latest blockchain-based offerings such as DeFi. For example, HollaEx’s ecosystem works around its native $XHT token and this allows for staking as well as discounts to activate certain features on the HollaEx software such as adding/activating new coins which is a very DeFi way of doing business and are unique in this regard.
The future of Crypto Exchanges
With the crypto market evolving at its current pace, there will be even more options for entrepreneurs, including running their own crypto exchanges. From the reduced cost of launching a token to the control of their token distribution, there is a world of benefits for those who choose this route.
Thanks to white-label services like HollaEx and AlphaPoint, you can create your own crypto exchange without the need for technical know-how and with even more ease than ever before. For crypto entrepreneurs, this means more control and more access to their customer base and for the wider crypto world, it means easier access to quality crypto products and more options.