The Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange is looking for big money. It announced in a Medium post this past Tuesday that it is moving forward with a plan to offering support for institutional accounts that will be made available for a number of trading pairs and APIs (application programming interface).
The post reads, in part, “We are excited to announce that institutional accounts are now available on Poloniex! Institutions large and small can enjoy the benefits of our large curated selection of crypto asset trading pairs, dedicated support and robust API services. Poloniex customers also enjoy no fees on BTC/USDC trades in the month of December.”
Poloniex was acquired by Goldman Sachs-backed Circle this past February for $400 million. With the new accounts, Circle will give investors the ability to conduct over-the-counter (OTC) trades using its Circle Trade platform, provided they’re ready to make an investment of at least $250,000. In addition, Circle will offer institutional services through Poloniex, as well as trading pairs with the Circle-created USDC stablecoin.
When 2018 kicked off, everyone expected to see a lot of institutional investors joining the crypto space. The rollout has been extremely slow, with only Coinbase being the major exchange to go after the investment class this past May. Coinbase is also looking to introduce an OTC crypto desk, but that isn’t expected to be introduced until sometime next year.
Poloniex has had a rough year. It has seen the exchange shuffle around its services a number of times and announced in October that it would be removing margin trading and lending products for U.S. customers by the end of the year. This past summer, it received a lot of backlash from users who had become locked out of their accounts after the exchange introduced new verification procedures. It had to deal with mounting pressure at the end of last year as users began flocking to the platform in response to the meteoric rise of Bitcoin Core’s (BTC) price, and wasn’t able to keep up with the load.
Poloniex is still in a solid position, despite the bumps in the road. This past October, a report by DRW Holdings Inc. showed that institutional investors now make up the largest segment of crypto buyers for transactions of more than $100,000, displacing high net worth individuals at the top of the list.
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Unwriter is at it again. The prolific cryptocurrency developer announced on Yours.org yesterday a new development that has incredible possibilities. He has created a new application programming interface (API) called Bitsocket, a “powerful bitcoin push notification infrastructure for building real-time event driven bitcoin applications.”
According to unwriter, “Bitsocket lets you subscribe to any pattern of [real-time Bitcoin] transactions through Bitquery to build [real-time Bitcoin] event driven apps.” He adds that the Bitquery data can then be used to create the push notification.
Bitsocket can transform incoming transactions into a structured format in real time. It then can apply a real-time in-memory filter combined with a transform function to convert the transaction object into an application-specific event for clients. Unwriter further explains, “This content-addressed pubsub model (unlike traditional location-addressed models like a regular websockets app) is important. It means you can seamlessly switch out one bitsocket node to another and your app will function exactly the same because every bitsocket node is identical and your client is subscribed to the server-independent immutable query instead of being married to a specific server endpoint.”
The transformed event is then pushed to the corresponding application using a Server Sent Event. Any apps – mobile, web, hardware or server-side – can be the target. These apps can then trigger another app, making Bitsocket one of the most powerful and versatile APIs in the community.
Unwriter provides several real-world examples where this API can be beneficial. Real-time apps can be created that are virtually the same as “IF-THEN” statements in basic computer programming. Third-party APIs, including GitHub, text messaging or even Twitter, can be triggered through simple configurations.
It is also possible to create a trigger that sends cryptocurrency based on a certain event. Bitcoin BCH transactions themselves can be used as Inter Process Communications (IPC). Bitsocket can allow a developer to configure an app to send an event to another app directly through a transaction. “This way it becomes possible to build a group of completely independent applications from multiple parties that autonomously talk to one another using Bitcoin as the central message bus and bitcoin transactions as inter process calls,” details unwriter.
Unwriter is behind several high-profile Bitcoin BCH projects, such as Chainfeed, Read.cash and the bitdb.network. With his latest development, the entire Bitcoin BCH ecosystem just became substantially more versatile and its power much more realized.
Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.
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