1) First of all, please give a brief introduction of yourself. Next, tell us more about your teammates too.
Good Evening, everyone, my name is Neville Divecha and I am the President & Co-Founder of Steam Exchange. In terms of professional background – I am a former Senior IT Infrastructure and Security consultant. I’ve had experience working with multiple Fortune 500 organizations such as DHL Express and leading teams across varying initiatives.
My brothers in arms at Steam Exchange are Gary Bard and Chris Beckford. Gary is the CEO and Founder of Steam Exchange – he’s been an entrepreneur for all his life and is a staunch cryptocurrency advocate, enthusiast and an active ETH miner. Fun fact – back in the day, Gary ran one of the largest AION mining pools in the world, right from his basement.
Chris Beckford is our Head of Infrastructure and the Co-Founder of Steam Exchange. A seasoned IT Project Manager, Chris has strong experience in Data Center Consolidation and Network Infrastructure Security. Chris has worked with multiple Fortune 500 organizations such as IBM and is atop of managing our developmental journey.
2) Can you tell us about Steam Exchange? Who are you? What do you do?
Steam Exchange is a Global, Hybrid Digital Asset Trading Platform being developed in Canada. We are a centralized platform with decentralized functions and features. Our core mission is to bring a platform to life that not only delivers the best of the best experience but also bring learning to the forefront of investing. We are building out intuitive, interactive, and exciting learning mechanics that will not only allow you to learn but tie into regulatory concerns surrounding eligible and credited investors. By completing our education modules, you will be classified as an eligible or credited investor which will give you the confidence in yourself to make the most educated investment choices.
Aside from this, we are also going to pioneer physical locations where you can walk into and opt to take your learning in person, kind of like a school, but for Crypto! You will learn the same fundamentals you would online, but through a different, in-person learning experience. Our first location will be our Toronto, Canada location as this is where we are from and would like to set our roots here first, but we will quickly expand throughout the world. After all, Steam Exchange is a global initiative, with a Canadian Core!
Think of a one-stop-shop solution. Once you step inside the Steam Exchange Ecosystem, you will never have to leave for any of your digital asset needs.
3) ‘Steam Exchange is an upcoming Centralized and Decentralized Cryptocurrency Exchange.’ Can you explain how this hybrid role will work?
We are a centralized platform with decentralized functions and features. There is also a third exchange element – that allows one to trade without the need to ever connect your wallet. The way this works is, you simply tell Steam Exchange through a simple portal what currency you will be trading, and what currency you would like to receive. Steam Exchange then creates a private wallet to accommodate this transaction and presents you with a QR code to send your currency to. Once it is validated, it will release the currency of choice to the wallet that sent the trading currency.
4) I could imagine to get registered in Canada took some time, can you tell us some of the steps you have taken to be registered properly in Canada?
Steam Exchange has been in development for over 7 months. We began our journey with our business registrations. We have:
– Successfully registered as a corporation in Ontario, Canada
– Registered our business as a Money Services Business dealing in Virtual Currencies
– Registered our business with FINTRAC – The anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist funding agency in Canada
All of these efforts most definitely took time and had a high level of scrutiny towards our operations and backgrounds. The entire core team had to go through various rounds of Government related checks and audits, business plan inquiries, operations, finance, and legal checks prior to even beginning engaging us in any form of a discussion.
We did all this before we even opened our Telegram for the first time! The main reason for this was to bring transparency, and legitimacy back into the space. Having our business fully registered was important to us as a starting point for this project.
5) Were you able to roll out Tokenomics onto your exchange already, or is it something in the works? Can you tell us more about it?
This is something that is currently in development and part of our Stage 3 Roadmap. I would like to take a step back and share some aspects of our journey prior to hopping into this differentiating feature.
As mentioned, we’ve been hard at work for more than 7 months.
Stage 3 is the part of our roadmap we have looked forward to the most. Within Stage 3, we will be developing all the functions and features that make Steam Exchange unique in the space.
During Stage 1: We developed a base platform that had a fully functioning trading platform, KYC validators in North America, and a very basic user interface for testing.
During Stage 2: We further developed our platform to begin integration into a Mobile Application. We expanded our KYC reach to Canada, US, UK, Europe, Australia, and Japan. We optimized our user interface and began working on the user experience.
Stage 3 is where we work on:
– Tokenomics integration: REAL tokenomics. We accomplish this by integrating smart chains into our exchange infrastructure. Any token listed on Steam Exchange that calls for tokenomics will have 100% support with live tokenomics.
– Decentralized integration into our Centralized Platform: This is where the magic happens. We are developing functions and features that change the way you trade, and changes the way you experience trading. As shared earlier, we have announced one major function that I am proud to say – You can trade on our platform without ever connecting your wallet. A truly trustless feature with your security in mind!
– Development of our Native Coin and Smart Chain: We are developing a native coin and smart chain from the ground up. Learning from the mistakes of those around us, we have created a strategy that will not only optimize speed and cost, but also provide safety, confidence, and convenience!
6) Where will your marketing activities target at?
We have a dual-pronged approach with our marketing efforts. These are focused across our BSC SteamX token and our real-world exchange platform. We have some exciting initiatives lined up – we actually had a few meetings this week and secured 3 major media commercial slots – 2 being Radio and 1 TV – some of these are associated with teams in the NBA and NHL – this will be a pilot campaign starting in Canada. We most definitely look forward to having similar campaigns structured across the world. We are also expanding on our Youtuber influencer relations – Youtube is a great platform that appeals to the cryptosavvy and non-cryptosavvy audience as well, we will continue to push our content out there in varying languages optimizations. Merchandising is another exciting element that we are gearing towards, we are working on a separate front-facing storefront that ties into our Steam Exchange Family. An interesting point to highlight is that we are one of 15 global enterprises that are allowed to have Cryptocurrency focused advertising on Google – we have a few campaigns live and will continue to scale these nearer to our exchange and ecosystem launch in Q1 2022. Twitter has been a great platform for us as well, our community is a great source of inspiration and each time we tweet we tend to typically get trending across the #tags – we target specific communities to share our Steam Exchange vision with those groups of investors. We also understand the significance of our Global communities and will be having marketing efforts focused around this. We have been also expanding our various Steam Exchange community groups and trust that we will have newfound family from our interactions here.
Communication is key to tie into investors outside of Telegram, Discord, etc. – we have a chatbot integrated into our website, a toll-free SteamX phone number and a support email address – think about this for a second, draw a comparison to some of the other large competitors out there. We’re setting the gold standard when it comes to customer service, transparency, accountability. We always maintain an open line of communication with our community, if any of you have any ideas, comments, or suggestions please dm @enkibell, our Head of PR for a conversation.
7) Being in the exchange business is not easy, the security and tech development have to be top-notch. Can you share your views on this and how you are coping with that?
Great question! We are building out everything from the ground up – no forks of existing code, no resemblances anywhere. We will be going through multiple audits from companies like Deloitte. Go through multiple penetration tests and whitehat hacking exercises. These measures will ensure that our platform is safe, confident, and fully ready to accept investors.
8) A lot of partners are needed to make the exchange sustainable. What are some of the partnerships that you have forged?
Love this one! So we reached out to multiple universities in Toronto. Our top pick was always going to be the University of Waterloo for two reasons:
1) It is the top tech school in Canada that breeds some of the brightest minds in the tech world
2) It was the home of Vitalik Buterin (one of the founders of Ethereum)
When they got back to us about working together, it was a clear choice to move forward with them.
At the moment, our collaboration ties into their Co-Op program which is essentially like an internship. Their students would come work at Steam Exchange for an entire semester of their program to develop with our lead developers. They would learn on the job and advance their skills while gaining real-world experience. These students are paid by Steam Exchange and are graded by Steam Exchange. The quality of their work and the grading of what they learned with us will be their final mark for the semester they spent with us. This engagement allows us to always have access to fresh, innovative minds looking at things from varying perspectives and enables Steam Exchange to remain at the forefront of this crypto movement. As we scale and grow, we look forward to leveraging this relationship towards the buildout of our educational modules and certifications as well.
The future plans for our partnerships have not yet been announced, so definitely stay tuned for that!
9) What is your action plans for Asia?
Asia definitely acts as a pivotal notion to our Global vision. In the near future, we anticipate Steam Exchange physical locations and learning centres emerging across Asia. We are conscious of varying cultures and language optimizations and will be creating an all-inclusive environment. Asia is typically at the forefront of technology adoption. We have already incorporated KYC features for Japan. This means we are paying special attention to Asia and markets like Asia around the world who currently gave scrutiny surrounding digital assets.
10) Share an inspiring quote for our community members, please.
Sure, here’s one that resonates with our ethos – “We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.” – Cesar Chavez
I usually like mentioning that this journey is not just for us… This journey is for our community too. Whether you are an investor, or not, joining our community, following along, and being a part of all the milestones we reach is so exciting! It’s not often you get to be part of a journey like ours, it’s not often you get to openly ask questions in our community, and get answers directly from the core team. It’s all around an experience like no other in this space. We do live demos of our platform often, even to the degree of dropping the link to our Stage 2 platform before we took it down to allow the community to actually sign up and click around to get an idea of the look and feel. We don’t need to say we are transparent because we believe actions speak louder than words. Anyone in our community will tell you: Actions are speaking volumes!