Make crypto trading frictionless and free

[SophonEX]

SophonEX — a commission-free crypto to crypto exchange, for the decentralized community.

SophonEX is a group of programming geeks, previously working for Facebook, Google, KCG, JP Morgan, etc. ‘Digital natives’ could be a pretty fit description for us. The majority of our founding team members are veterans of ACM-ICPC and TopCoder competitions, with great enthusiasm in coding, data structure, algorithm and mathematics

When we first came across bitcoin’s technical paper, we were fascinated by its engineering beauty and philosophy depth. From there, we start to imagine a decentralized world where trust doesn’t comes with a charge, and trade doesn’t comes with a commission. After months of sophisticated design, it’s no longer a dream… It becomes real, in SophonEX.

Mission
Make crypto trading frictionless and free. We believe that charging per-trade commission (no matter 0.1% or a staggering 3%) is evil in the decentralized world. Decentralized services need to be commission-free; and this spreading freedom is beneficial to the human society.

Our Values — How we do things around our offices?
Focus on impact and priority
Delay gratification
Relentlessly Optimistic and Transparent
Customer first
Be Bold and Open

Why make SophonEX?
The time when the founding team came to know and started researching on bitcoin whitepaper can be dated back to the mid of 2017. At the end of that year, we initiated a quantitative fund, focusing on the bitcoin arbitrage across different exchanges worldwide. Our fund size (prop + LP invested) is about ~3000 BTC in maximum, and we traded across nearly 20 exchanges, including: BitFlyer, Coincheck, Quoinex(liquid), Zaif, Fisco, Binance, Bitfinex, GDAX(coinbase pro), Gate.io, Huobi.pro, OKEX, Poloniex, Kraken, Bithumb, Bitstamp, HitBTC.

We wrote the arbitrage and quant trading system mainly in C++, and deployed it on multiple AWS ECs to colocate with these exchange servers. Our fund trading system is highly performant and reliable, making tens of thousands of orders per day. This high performance and reliability brings us to top5 in terms of 24-hr volume in the ranking.

Despite of the success, it is also due to the 10-month trading experience, we came to realize the facts that all the de facto crypto exchanges share several similar flaws, which we concludes as below:

- Clumsy and out-of-date backend architecture with poor engineering quality. E.g. most of the existing exchanges are written in old style PHP or J2EE or other stacks, which makes it hard to ensure high performance and reliability;
- Digital Asset Security: hacking and security incidents happen every now and then;
- APIs (restful and websocket) are badly designed and lagging. Based on our own experience, some of those APIs are being updated without prior announcements, which resulted in mal-functioning of our strategy occasionally;
- Most importantly, the traditional trading commission is outrageously high. In traditional stock exchanges (e.g. Nasdaq, NYSE, etc), trading commission is ~0.02%, and the brokerage commission (e.g. Charles Schwab, Scottrade, Interactive Broker, etc) is charged at $0~6.95 flat fee. A younger stock brokerage, Robinhood launched in 2013, brands itself as commission free broker, which inspired us.


In light of this, we are dedicated to creating a brand-new crypto exchange with zero commission, high engineering quality and best security from the design. We’re still a centralized exchange with the cutting-edge and up-to-date engineering standards. Whereas the SophonEX team is conceiving a roadmap to gradually switch to a hybrid, and then fully decentralized exchange in the near future.

SophonEX project was kicked off in June 2018, and aims to officially launch in March 2019. Prelaunch registration is available now at: land.sophonex.com (copy paste this link into your browser, then you'll be there)