Managing Director at Boerse Stuttgart Digital Ventures, Dr Ulli Spankowski, believes that other major exchanges will follow the Stuttgart Stock Exchange’s lead after it released the world’s first regulated app to trade crypto.

Coin Rivet reported on the Stuttgart Stock Exchange’s decision to launch a zero-fee crypto exchange regulated by BaFin and Bundesbank in December.

Blockchain vs crypto

Five months later, the Bison app, which is powered by the Stuttgart Stock Exchange, has been seeing positive growth, with an expansion to Austria being confirmed in April.

Dr Ulli Spankowski spoke exclusively to Coin Rivet during April’s Paris Blockchain Week Summit. He revealed that he first got involved in crypto in 2015, and while he sees value in the Bitcoin protocol and the potential of Ethereum, he feels like “the underlying technology [blockchain] is most important”.

He continued: “I don’t know which coins will survive in the long term, but what we feel is really important is the blockchain protocols as blockchain enables us to do a couple of things that we weren’t able to do before. We don’t need intermediaries anymore, we don’t even need ourselves anymore. From a technical point of view, everybody can create marketplaces. For us, this is really interesting to set up a new business model.”

Spankowski went on to reveal that while regulatory frameworks make it difficult for some projects to prevail, Bison is built from a regulated environment and can use its licenses to bring crypto to the mainstream.

“We live in a regulated environment,” Spankowski continued. “Here we come from a world where everything is regulated. We have a new technology that enables us to do something new without intermediaries. We have all of the licenses that can still trigger everything in the old world and the new world.”

‘Other exchanges will follow’

The Stuttgart Stock Exchange was the first global exchange to endorse a cryptocurrency trading product. Spankowski believes that this is only the beginning and that more exchanges will eventually follow its lead.

“I think other exchanges will follow,” he said. “For now, in terms of financial institutions, we are pretty big in Germany and Europe. But of course there are much bigger institutions. From what I’ve heard other companies are all looking into the crypto space. A lot of asset managers like Fidelity, they are all starting to adopt and heavily invest in this area.”

According to Spankowski, the Bison app is designed for retail traders, but the company will launch an exchange this summer that will appeal to institutions.

“We launched Bison as a mass marketable product for crypto trading. The idea is to get everybody who is interested in crypto and doesn’t have the technical background,” he continued.

“This summer we will be launching a regulated digital asset exchange. This is meant for institutional investors. Bison is for retailers and the exchange is for pro trading.”

Bison plans to list more coins and open crypto deposits

The Bison app currently allows users to deposit fiat and trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Litecoin. In the second half of this year, the firm will “add four to ten more coins” and open up “crypto deposits”.

The stumbling block when it comes to crypto deposits is from a regulatory standpoint, as it will require manual checking to forensically analyse the source of deposits.

“We will be launching in ten more European countries,” he added. “There will also be a really cool feature that will give crypto a sense and a use case, but I cannot talk about this yet. All I can say is that it will be brilliant.”

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