Qoinify is a open source crypto bank. Qoinify lets users exchange six currencies including Canadian dollars, US dollars, gold, bitcoins, clams, and zcoins. This post will describe the evolution of Qoinify and its current functionality.
Click here to create a Qoinify account.
Qoinify is a passion project. It began in the early days of crypto currencies when friends began asking me to buy and store bitcoins for them. As the crypto markets grew, I began to keep track of my friend’s bitcoins on an excel spreadsheet and sometimes I would invest the bitcoins using bots to earn interest. I also started staking clam coins, which were an early fork of bitcoins, and recording the earnings proportionately to my friends using a simple macro on the excel sheet.
Soon enough, my spreadsheet became unwieldy, and it was impossible for my friends to see their balance without contacting me directly and even then I’d have to update the spreadsheet manually and report results back to the users. To overcome this problem, I decided to create an accounting program to record transactions to a database with web pages serving up the data to users instead. I would move the transaction history to a database and abandon my old spreadsheet.
Since part of my passion for this project come from studying the nature of money, I decided to list six currencies on the Qoinify covering an array of money types including fiat, blockchain, and physical types of money.
Once a user opens a Qoinfiy account, they will arrive on the Dashboard page. The Dashboard shows a table of the user’s balances and a pie chart of the same with Canadian dollars as the unit of account (denominator). A line chart shows the value of balances in Canadian dollar terms and a table shows the user’s transaction history. A form is included on the Dashboard page enabling users to transfer funds to other users.
Users cannot signup for Qoinify without an invitation from a friend which provides new users with a code required to open an account. This code is found on the Affiliate page, along with with a URL link that can be texted to a friend and an e-mail invitation form that can be used to invite a friend via e-mail. Users who refer their friends will receive 50% of the fee from staking clams and earning zcoins (which is 10% of those profits).
The payments page lists all the currencies on Qoinify where users can choose to deposit or withdraw Canadian dollars only. Deposits can be made with Interac e-transfers, and withdrawals can be sent directly to your bank account. In the future, I hope to add deposit and withdrawal functionality for all currencies.
The Stats page shows the global value of the entire platform, and the Exchange page lets users buy and sell currencies on the platform. To buy bitcoins, users can deposit Canadian dollars using Interac e-transfer from the Payments page and then go the Exchange page to trade those Canadian dollars for bitcoins (or any other currency).
I would love to see Qoinify grow. It could be a useful site for Canadian crypto hobbyists who want a simple way to buy and sell bitcoins with other currencies. But I’m also busy with a thriving small business, so I don’t have much spare time to invest in Qoinify other than as a hobby.
Growing Qoinify also requires commitment to regulatory compliance, consistent marketing, client service, and a reliable dev team to continuously improve the software. There are other companies in Canada doing this business including Coinberry and Shakepay so a simple platform to buy and sell bitcoins is certainly a service customers want.
I’m happy to continue funding the development of Qoinify on its current trajectory which means improving the software part-time with a team of two University comp sci undergrads. I can also continue gathering new users from my personal network. Alternatively, Qoinify could raise money from new investors and be run like a real business with ambitious plans and financial objectives.
If someone likes to nerd out over marketing, there are lot’s of opportunities to help Qoinify. Writing a basic marketing plan is a good start. This plan will inform further decisions about what types of marketing strategies should be employed and how they might be done. If Qoinify decides to find outside investors to accelerate development, then a full business plan should be drafted and a pitch deck to support a presentation should be crafted. Coinberry and Shakepay each raised a few million dollars from investors themselves this way.
I’m also keenly interested in suggestions regarding web design because this is what users care most about. I’ve found that most crypto enthusiasts don’t care about or understand the technical aspects of money, but they do enjoy being part of something exciting that could rapidly gain in value. So its important that sites like Qoinify make it easy for users to achieve their objectives. UX is critical to success.
If you try signing up for a Qoinify account by clicking here, I’d be interested to know about your experience (whether the signup process, deposit functionality, and exchange page worked at all). So please comment this page with feedback if you have it.
Qoinify is open source. Click here to view our github repos.
