As prices plummet across the entire crypto market, it’s easy to forget about the problems that occurred in late 2017 while nearing the end of the bull market: terrible liquidity, exchanges unable to onboard new users fast enough, Bitcoin and Ethereum memepools getting filled up as fees climbed to unprecedented heights.
Those issues all feel like a distant memory now.
The reality, though, is that those problems will rear their ugly heads once again in the next bull market if they aren’t addressed while the market is down. Fortunately, there are more builders in the blockchain industry now than ever before, and infrastructure is advancing everywhere you look.
Perhaps the greatest area of growth is in exchange infrastructure, where we’ve gone from just a few major players dominating the space a couple years ago to now seeing dozens of big platforms as well as hundreds more small ones emerging as legitimate options for traders and investors.
In this article, we’ll focus in on ProBit, a particularly promising crypto exchange with a strong vision and a team ready to make it a reality.
ProBit Mission
ProBit wants to play a major role in supporting the cryptocurrency market into the early stages of mainstream adoption and beyond. To do so, they must distinguish themselves from the hundreds of other exchanges that have popped up in the past year or two.
Their plan to stand out from the pack? Simple. ProBit will win on the fundamentals by prioritizing security, user experience, and global expansion. If ProBit can thrive in those 3 areas, they can quickly set themselves apart from the competition that have been built hastily on rocky foundations.
Exchange Features
The 2 biggest factors that contribute to making an exchange successful are security and user experience. Exchanges need to have a top-performing trading engine that users can rely on to give them an edge in the market, and exchange users also need to know that their wallets aren’t going to be emptied by some hacker who finds a security weakness.
ProBit will have one of the best trading engines on the market, capable of processing more than 1.5 million transactions per second. Various order types will be supported, including:
- Market Trades
- Stop Limit Trades
- Immediate or Cancel (IOC) Limit Trades
- Fill or Kill (FOK) Limit Trades
- Good ‘Til Cancelled (GTC) Limit Trades
- Post-Only Limit Orders
The platform will also come equipped with a fully customizable dashboard that’s easy and intuitive to use for traders of all levels. Rather than having a rigid default layout like the majority of exchanges, ProBit’s layout will be highly customizable, allowing traders to select the most relevant information to display based on their personal trading process.
Not to be forgotten is the important matter of security. ProBit has made this their top priority, with 3 key features in place to reduce the prevalent security risks that are present with all crypto exchanges:
- At least 95% of digital assets held by ProBit will be kept in offline “cold” storage, which is far less vulnerable than online “hot” storage.
- Exchange data will be encrypted several times with the strongest available encryption algorithms.
- ProBit supports FIDO U2F (the latest generation of the Universal 2-Factor Authentication standard for security, privacy, and ease of use), as well as 2FA apps such as Google Authenticator.
Finally, no exchange can become a major player without giving traders an abundance of coins and tokens to trade.
ProBit will begin with support for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, EOS, and the ProBit Token as base currencies on the exchange. In total, ProBit plans to list at least 150 different cryptocurrencies with several hundred trading pairs available.
The PROB Utility Token
Binance and the platform’s native token, BNB, have been a huge success story as they’ve grown from 0 to 10 million users in 1 year and currently sit atop the Ethereum token rankings.
No doubt one of the biggest factors contributing to Binance’s success is the their fee discount program that incentivizes traders to use BNB. It would be plain foolish to disregard the example Binance has laid out, and ProBit has certainly been paying close attention.
Like Binance, ProBit will have a native utility token: PROB. The main utility provided by PROB will be trading fee discounts, with the exact discount rate being determined by the user’s membership level according to the breakdown below.
These membership levels provide a unique mechanism to incentivize holding of PROB by the platform’s users, as the more they hold the greater the discount they’ll receive on trading fees.
But that’s not the only incentive mechanism. ProBit will also have a referral program that rewards users who bring others into the ProBit ecosystem in 4 ways, shown below.
Last but not least, anybody with a premium membership (500+ PROB) will also have voting rights for the listing of new tokens.
Apart from standardized tokens such as ERC-20s, listing new coins typically requires a non-negligible amount of development work, meaning that there is a limit on how quickly new cryptocurrencies can be added to the platform. These voting rights will ensure that ProBit’s users have a say in which additions are prioritized by the development team.
ProBit’s Trade Mining and Token Buyback Programs
Another exciting feature of ProBit is that they will be implementing a “Trade Mining” period after the exchange launch.
This means that for all qualifying transactions (transactions where the fee is not paid with PROB), an amount of PROB equal to 80% of the trading fee will be mined and issued to the trader as a bonus for using ProBit. This will continue until 100,000,000 PROB have been mined, exactly half of the total token supply of 200 million.
As a result of Trade Mining, traders who join ProBit after the Pre-Sale and Initial Exchange Offering (see details below) will have an easy way of earning PROB that they can then use to get discounts on future trading fees.
On top of that, ProBit will institute a repurchase program of PROB following the platform launch. 20% of exchange profits will be used to repurchase the tokens at the exchange to be held as insurance and removed from the circulating supply. This functions to increase demand and reduce supply, putting upward pressure on the price of PROB and rewarding holders similarly to how blue-chip stocks pay dividends to equity owners.
The buyback initiative will continue until 50% of the total PROB have gone through the program.
Exchange Revenue Model
If you’re unfamiliar with how exchanges work, one important thing to understand is the exchange revenue model.
While having a native token is useful for helping grow the ProBit ecosystem and reward traders, it’s not how the project generates revenue. Rather, that comes from trading fees. This means that exchanges generate revenue in both bull and bear markets, making them more stable than the majority of other projects.
ProBit will charge a 0.10% taker fee and a 0.05% maker fee, with discounts of up to 50% available to PROB token holders, as described earlier. 0.05% is one of the lowest maker fees of any exchange on the market, which should encourage liquidity.
ProBit can also generate revenue from listing fees should they choose to charge them (currently ProBit has NO listing fees), as well as withdrawal fees and fees associated with future product development as described in the project roadmap.
ProBit’s History and Future Plans
Development began on ProBit in July 2017, with the primary focus of building a functional and secure exchange prior to doing any marketing or major crowdfunding campaigns.
A platform alpha was launched internally in March 2018, with a demo exchange being launched to the public a few months later in September along with a private token sale.
ProBit is currently preparing to officially launch the exchange in November and is also holding a public token pre-sale event, which you can learn more about below.
Q1 2019 figures to be a critical time period, as ProBit plans to implement margin trading functionality to the exchange, as well as expand into their first local market, South Korea.
Expanding into local markets and adding fiat-to-crypto pairs is an important part of ProBit’s vision to integrate new users and grow the cryptocurrency ecosystem. After South Korea, the ProBit team will continue working to expand internationally, targeting markets such as Japan, Australia, the EU, and the US.
Public Token Sale and Registration Event
The PROB Token presale is currently live and open to investors around the world, excluding countries where there are legal restrictions on participation in token sales.
To check if you are eligible to participate, simply visit the presale page and check the list of ineligible countries below the Terms of Sale. There is a 10% bonus for all investors who participate in the presale.
Additionally, you can earn 4 USDT by participating in ProBit’s Registration Event and depositing $50+ worth of cryptocurrencies into your ProBit wallet. Note that the promotion (and all other giveaways) will be done with cryptocurrencies other than the PROB token. This is because airdrops and other giveaways are often sold immediately by recipients, so not using PROB in those cases protects investors from sell offs causing price drops.
As always, we recommend that you conduct thorough research before investing, so make sure to check out the ProBit whitepaper. You can also learn more by engaging with the community on Telegram, with English, Korean, and Chinese channels.
