WandX’s vision is to create decentralised infrastructure for creation, trade, and settlement of any instrument built on ERC20 tokens

Almost everywhere in the world, cryptocurrency is still looked at with great consternation and it is yet to make its presence felt, not just in developing markets but in the developed markets, too. Even people with a great deal of knowledge of the industry are reluctant to invest in virtual currency because of the high risks involved.

Given the recent trends in the industry and the spiralling prices, cryptocurrencies should actually make people exciting but what is happening is just the opposite: people are still nervous about this.

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But Abhinav Ramesh is not worried. This blockchain entrepreneur is bullish about the growth of all kinds of virtual currencies especially in India, and is banking on the growing awareness of the industry to take his startup, WandX, to the next level. And he feels that once regulations become clear, India can pave the way for innovation in blockchain.

Lack of awareness

“The bitcoin trading industry is growing rapidly with more people inquisitive about investing. The private blockchain industry is growing in terms of development of proof of concepts mainly in the Hyperledger (an umbrella project of open source blockchains and related tools) fabric. However, there are very few public blockchain apps coming out of India; there isn’t innovation at the blockchain protocol level coming out of India. WandX is on a mission to change this,” he said.

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Abhinav is, however, slightly worried about the lack of regulations in India. “India is potentially a huge market because of the large, young population and increasing awareness into saving money. India is innovating in AI and Machine Learning which can make various processes more efficient, but there is no innovation happening in blockchain, which can change the way transactions are done and processed. This is what we aim to change,” he added.

The startup enables peer to peer trade of Ethereum-based blockchain tokens through smart contracts. Incorporated in Singapore, the WandX app, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, enables users to create and trade baskets of ERC20 Tokens (a token standard) with a single transaction. It enables users to create a basket of Tokens and trade them through Ethereum smart contracts developed by WandX.

“Simply put, we enable peer to peer trade of Ethereum-based blockchain tokens through our smart contracts. This trade can be either for a single token or for multiple tokens,” he tells e27.

WandX Founder and CEO Abhinav Ramesh

The idea occurred to Ramesh during a blockchain conference. This was when he was trading stocks on the side while working at Ernst & Young in the Supply chain division looking at taking “Blockchain for Supply chain” as a solution for a client. He decided to conflate his expertise in stock trading and knowledge of blockchain to launch WandX.

WandX’s vision is to create decentralised infrastructure for creation, trade, and settlement of any instrument built on ERC20 tokens. “In the real world, you have various instruments on currency and commodities such as futures, options, securitisation of income streams, and debt instruments. With the rapidly growing crypto-asset space, we’re building the same infrastructure for cryptocurrencies. We’ve started with Ethereum based Tokens where users can create and trade a basket of Ethereum Tokens through a single transaction, entirely peer to peer. This is deployed already on the Ethereum Testnet and can be seen on our website.” he explained.

“The target market is divided into two — the first side is the creators of these baskets; they would create these token baskets because it would enable them to sell the basket at a markup, as well as transfer multiple tokens with a single transaction. The buyers are the second side. They would have the convenience of owning a Token basket that has shown good returns over the past. All the trades would happen through our smart contracts and APIs, which brings in another potential business model – partnering with fiat-BTC/ETH exchanges. Exchanges could potentially use our APIs to enable their customers to trade in a variety of ERC20 tokens as well,” Abhinav elaborated.

Currently, the transactions done on WandX platform is in Beta, but Abhinav hopes to achieve 100 transactions per day over the next three months.

Addressing the trust deficit

What is bothering crypto users (sellers and buyers) the most is the trust deficit. But Abhinav says WandX is addressing the trust factor effectively. “Our smart contract code is open source. Since the contracts are designed such that the ERC20 token basket either transfers completely or the entire transaction would fail, there is little room for error. WandX is targeting a mainnet release in four weeks”

Like any other typical online trading platform, WandX takes a cut of the percentage of the trades. The company plans to grow by partnering with liquidity providers who would be willing to trade on its application, pilot real world use cases of its platform, and fast track to become one of the first such platform on Ethereum.

“With the number of users trading cryptocurrencies increasing withe each passing day, we believe that we’re well poised to capture a reasonable chunk of the altcoin trading market,” Ramesh concluded.

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