INTRODUCTION
Like a train without brakes, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have continued to advance un-impaired in their quest to revolutionize the financial sector and other industries at large. We can’t deny the fact that since its inception, the blockchain technology has not only challenged the operation and relevance of current archaic methods of financial operations, but has also provided highly efficient solutions that have taken financial transactions to the future. The most popular and pronounced of these solutions are cryptocurrencies.
In its infant years, due to a lack of proper understanding of the operation of cryptocurrencies, a cloak of scare and suspicion clouded the concept, leading to people avoiding it. However, as in every new concept, improved awareness and understanding led to mass adoption of cryptocurrencies, such that in 2018, the cryptocurrency market was pushing towards a trillion-dollar market cap – a feat achieved in less than 10 years of its existence. This level of growth is considered as one of the most mind boggling growth experienced in the financial sector, ranking with the likes of the internet boom of the 1990’s – 2000’s.
Despite these mind-boggling achievements made by the cryptocurrency industry, speculations and forecasts have shown that it is still at its early stage, with the atmosphere set for a myriad of milestones to be achieve in the nearest future. For example, in 2017, the largest number of ICOs were experienced, while the first half of 2018 matched and exceeded the value in the whole of 2017. However, this mouth-watering bright future possessed by cryptocurrencies comes with some challenges.
Exchanges are the market place of the cryptocurrency space. It is through these mechanisms that investors can exchange one cryptocurrency for another, or for fiat such as USD & EUR. Because of this, investors have to depend on them to partake of the cryptocurrency space. It is so unfortunate that many years after the birth of bitcoin - the first cryptocurrency, the regulation and compliance of exchanges remain unclear and a mirage of what it should be. This has put investors in a state of quagmire, investing with their hearts in their mouths, not knowing the next exchange that will be shut down.
In addition to this, another major challenge is security. Hackers are well aware of the difficulty in hacking cryptocurrencies directly. This is mainly because of the security and privacy that blockchain technology provides them. Hence they direct their attention towards the exchanges upon which these cryptocurrencies are traded. To hackers, these exchanges are the weakest link in the cryptocurrency transaction process. They know that if the king is well guarded, just get hold of his promiscuous son, and the king will be forced to come out. This implies that cryptocurrency investors are at the mercy of the resistance of exchanges to hacker, irrespective of how secure the cryptocurrencies themselves are.
Finally, to crown these challenges is the lack of efficient user trading interfaces to provide investors with seamless and successful user trading experience. Truth be told, people generally did not expect the exponential level of growth especially in such short time that took place in the cryptocurrency space, and neither did crypto exchange developers. Majority of these exchanges were not built to handle the high surge of investors scrambling to partake of the cryptocurrency space. With a demand far above their maximum capacity to handle, the operation of these exchanges have been hampered, causing delays and poor scalability. This inability of exchanges to scale properly has led to unforeseen and unfortunate circumstance such as delay of customer registration for as long as some weeks, frequent crashing of exchange platforms, and sometimes outright shutdown of exchanges due to overload.
These are just a few of the challenges that have impaired the successful activities of both individual and corporate investors in the crypto space, thereby hindering the entrance of other investors into the space, and hence retarding the growth of the crypto industry at large. Unless a quick and lasting solution is made available to these challenges, the sky will not be the limit to the cryptocurrency industry but rather a mirage of the heights it could have achieved.
Gladly, a solution to these challenges exist. That solution is ONAM.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. No matter how secure the other parts of a process are, as long as there is part that’s vulnerable, every other part in the chain is vulnerable. What I am trying to say is that cryptocurrency creators can go the extra mile to make sure that their coins are highly secured by taking advantage of the security measures that blockchain provides, but as long as the exchanges upon which these cryptocurrencies are traded are vulnerable, the whole crypto industry will be considered as vulnerable. Knowing full well that hackers are aware of this weak link, ONAM has come into the cryptocurrency space to salvage the industry.
ONAM is a fully certified regulatory and compliance exchange platform. In specific terms as described on the ONAM website,
ONAM is a high-performing, regulatory compliant, trading platform that features robust risk-management, trade surveillance, advanced trading tools and state-of-the-art security system powered by machine learning.
From statistics readily available on the internet, it can be observed that majority of the cryptocurrency thefts and hacks occurred on exchanges. You can rarely find situations where protocols associated with cryptocurrencies themselves were hacked. Hackers focus primarily on the weak link in the chain – exchanges.
ONAM is about to re-write the rules of the game. ONMA intends to achieve this by being an exchange with a high level of security and transparency, providing services that are highly scalable, making available rich and transparent order books to boost liquidity, possessing a customer service support that is available 24/7/365, and finally legally satisfying all regulations and compliances required by SEC.
In its quest to achieve the exchange status described above, ONMA possesses some features which act as pillars upon which the ONMA exchange is built.
Advanced orders types: Cryptocurrency trading is a venture that requires a great deal of precision. Some traders can reason that they can just enter and exit a trade by pressing the buy and sell button, but this is a risky way of trading. Trading without protective orders like stop loss orders puts the trader at risk of losing investments.
ONAM takes this quest to protect the investor to the next level, by not only providing ordinary order types like stop loss orders, but making more advanced order types available to traders on its platform. This order types include Trailing stops, Take profits, Fill or Kill, and so on.Margin Trading: In order to make more money on a potential trade, traders require higher capital. This means, the higher the capital, the higher the potential profit. This is where margin trading comes into play. In order to amplify the trading capacity of traders to trade, this feature acts as a borrowing mechanism, where traders can be loaned funds on the ONAM platform, while the investor pays a small percentage fee in return.
Margin Lending: The loaned funds discussed in margin trading above come from other ONAM users referred to as Margin lenders. Those who lend their funds to margin traders earn an interest on the funds they had loaned out. To give margin lenders more control over their funds, they get to choose how much they want as interest on their funds, as well as the time their funds get refunded.
Composite Index Fund: There is a saying which goes “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” In order to eliminate the risk associated with investing funds in just one cryptocurrency, ONAM gives users a smart and secure way of diversifying their crypto assets, hence minimizing chances of losing investments.
Paper Trading: Being an exchange concerned about the productivity of all levels of traders, be it amateur, intermediate, or professional, ONAM has a simulated market environment that duplicates a live trading environment. Through this means, traders especially amateurs, can practice trading cryptocurrency markets without any financial risks since only imaginary funds are being traded. This gives amateur traders the opportunity to build insights and improve their skill sets at every step in their trading journey.
Modular User Interface: When we talk about a modular design, we are referring to a design that has been broken down into smaller bits which have been created independently, and then brought together to form the whole design. This method of design produces a system that is highly flexible, scalable, and customizable. This is the kind of design upon which the ONAM user interface is built. It gives users the opportunity to customize their trading page as they please, to meet their trading needs.
Trade Assistants providing Trade Alerts and Signals: One of the advantages machines have over humans is their lack of emotions. Emotional trades frequently lead to losses. Trade assistants are not to replace human judgment, but rather help provide traders with greater peace of mind while trading. Powered by machine learning, ONAM trade assistants will supplement trader experience and expertise, by providing them with fact based advice rather than emotion based ones.
Auto-Trading: Auto-Trading is similar to Trade Assistants discussed above. The difference is that while trade assistants provide traders with emotionless advice while they are currently on the platform, auto-trading involves automated trading systems built upon precise entry, exit and money management rules, aimed at enabling bots execute and monitor trades. With auto-trading, traders don’t have to currently be on the platform, they can just program the bot and it continues to execute whether or not they are online.
Social media and market sentiment analysis tool: Shifts in sentiments on social media have been shown to correlate with shifts in the financial markets. Being a product of demand and supply, the prices of cryptocurrencies are greatly influenced by the perception of the public. Through the machine learning powered sentiment analysis tools on the ONAM platform, users can gain an overview of the wider public opinion on crypto-related issues, which have an indirect impact on the price movements of cryptocurrencies. Through the data provided by these tools, ONAM traders are given a head start beyond traders on other platforms.
Market scanning: This feature is tailored to meet the needs of majorly day traders. Because day traders only have a few hours to trade per day, they have to focus on a limited number of markets and trade them well. To do this effectively, traders have to be able to search based on volatility related criteria such as highest trading volume, chart patterns, and breakouts. ONAM provides traders with machine learning based means of scanning for these trade indicators based on the inputs the trader provides the system.
Advanced Charting: The most popular form of financial analysis is the study of charts of past price movements. This is a form of technical analysis. Through the technical analysis tools that ONAM provides, traders will be able to identify trading opportunities by analyzing charts and patterns gathered from historical trading activities. Through the ONAM platform, traders will not need to leave the platform to conduct chart analysis, but will be equipped with advanced charting tools to conduct comprehensive technical analysis.
Trading experts coaching: In its quest to stay ahead of the pack, ONAM has decided to empower novice and intermediate traders, by creating an avenue through which they can be mentored by expert traders on the fundamentals of technical analysis and trading on the ONAM platform as a whole. This has been organized in such a way that through videos and write-ups, traders can be groomed on best practices in relation to cryptocurrency trading.
News and Announcement feed: News can have a huge impact on the direction of price movement. The sentiments around a major news announcement can swiftly push price in a certain direction. To give traders an edge, ONAM provides them with a current and regular flow of major news updates in the cryptocurrency space. Hence when a major news is announced, traders will be well positioned to cash in on any swift price movements.
Push notifications: You can’t talk about a seamless user experience without talking about push notifications. Push notifications are considered as an automated customer service, where users are given regular notifications on activities related to their accounts such as, logging attempts, coins just added to portfolio, and so on. Other forms of notifications include new coin listings, new features on the exchange, and so on.
*OTC (Over-the-counter) Trading: OTC trading is a form of trade done directly between two parties. Through smart contracts, the ONAM exchange can act as an escrow where cryptocurrencies of sellers are held in place until they have confirmed reception of funds from buyers, then the escrow held cryptocurrencies are released.
Multi language user interface and 24/7 live chat support: With a vision to become a global player in the crypto space, ONAM’s multi-language user interface will enable users from other regions of the world benefit from the qualities ONAM exchange makes available. Also, since these users in these regions will need exceptional customer service, ONAM will also provide a 24/7 live chat support, where users in all countries of the world will be able to lodge complaints in languages they are conversant with.
Affiliate program: Through the affiliate program, current traders on the ONAM platform will earn commissions by inviting others to the ONAM platform through their affiliate links. These commissions are independent of the performance of traders on their trading accounts.
FIX server for Institutional Traders
Advanced and Custom APIs.
Giving a detailed description of the features of ONAM without discussion about how they aid in solving some of the challenges faced in the current exchange market will be a journey in futility, hence the need to discuss about some challenges the current cryptocurrency exchanges face, and how ONAM will go about proffering solutions to them.
An ICO (Initial coin offering) is a form of crowdfunding a new venture through the issuance of digital coins by the new venture. Despite the fact that ICOs want to mimic IPOs, yet unlike public offerings, the exchanges are not being monitored. This has led to unfortunate circumstances of ICO and exchange frauds where coin issuers and exchange operators abscond with funds of investors, and the creation of pump-and-dump schemes whose cryptocurrency projects have no true mission or vision but to cash out without investors getting their returns.
Based on these circumstances, we can safely come to the conclusion that with regards to cryptocurrency exchanges, the question is not whether regulation is necessary or not, because regulation of the exchange industry is paramount, so as to protect investors from being scammed by fraudsters, which will in turn lead to the influx of more investors, and the general development and mass adoption of the crypto industry at large. As larger market makers, miners and volume traders join the platform, the liquidity of the platform increases tremendously with the increase in the amount of market players.
The question that should be on our lips should be how quickly regulation will take place and how prepared exchanges are for it. The U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have announced their intention to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges and ICOs so as to clamp down on crypto fraud. Despite the fact that other exchanges have taken this announcement for granted, ONAM rather see this as an advantage. ONAM believes that by being fully regulatory compliant, individual and institutional investors will be attracted to the platform, knowing full well that full compliance will mean that ONAM is a trustworthy platform where investors are rest assured of the safety of their funds.
Finally, in line with being fully compliant and making sure that operations of the SEC are within legal bounds, ONAM has retained one of the top legal firms in the United States to handle all legal hurdles the company will face. This will prevent any form of harsh treatment, as every procedure will be within the confines of the law.
If most people had expected that the cryptocurrency market would have grown at such an exponential level, we probably would have had much more bitcoin millionaires. The truth is that no one expected the market to grow this fast, and neither did exchange operators. Because of this, these other exchanges did not put into consideration the huge amount of traders that will be accessing their platforms, hence making these platforms perform beyond maximum capacity.
In a quest to perform beyond capacity, the exchanges began to experience laggings and delays in transaction execution and user registration. Following the law of demand and supply, the higher the demand, the higher the price. Hence as the demand for exchange computing power increased, the fees associated with these exchanges began to increase also.
ONAM understands that by solving the scalability issue and ensuring that traders have all the tools they need, the fees associated with trading will reduce. To embark on this task, the ONAM team made the enquiry-backed decision of utilizing the Google designed GoLang programming language, which was created specifically for computational intense server applicationsSource.
Through this revolutionary idea, the ONAM matching engine is able to easily outperform other ones, with a capacity of processing an excess of 10 million transactions per second, with latencies as low as 40 nanoseconds, as opposed to other matching engines which cannot handle more than 1 or 2 million transactions per second.
The more options you make available to a trader, the better user experience you are providing him. The financial market is one of high precision, and hence would produce maximum benefits if some form of computing program and data is made available and accessible to the trader. To increase the chances of trader making maximum profits from their investments, ONAM avails the trader a myriad of tools, strategically positioned on a user's interface that can be customized to satisfy any needs of the trader. These tools which have been explained in details in the features section above include but are not limited to the following: Advanced charting, Auto-trading, Margin trading, and so on.
These tools which have been well positioned on the ONAM customizable user interface, give traders an impressive user experience, empowering them to make maximum profits from their investments.
In a highly time-based industry like the cryptocurrency exchange market, time as little as nanoseconds is of utmost importance. With the cryptocurrency market being a highly volatile market, traders who have the advantage of quick processing time are obviously better positioned to take advantage of price spikes, making quick profits from sharp price movements.
With this new development, both individual and institutional traders will be attracted to join the fastest transaction processing exchange, while also attracting other non-crypto investors to join the crypto industry, hence leading to the advancement of the crypto industry at large. With all these influx of new participants on the exchange, an automatic increase in liquidity becomes a consequence.
Research has it that people perceive their problems as half-solved the moment they are given a listening ear. It is in line with this thinking that ONAM aims to dedicate a 24/7/365 live chat customer support to handle complaints of traders. Also, being a company that hopes to go global, ONAM’s customer service will be a multi-lingual one, so that customers from all around the world can be attended to.
With such consistent customer service in place, traders will have absolute peace of mind and confidence in ONAM’s ability to cater for their funds as well as their complaints. This will in-turn improve usability of the platform, as users all around the world in whatever country will be encouraged to use the platform, knowing full well that ONAM got their back.
In addition to the generally implemented security standards such as DDoS mitigation, anti-phishing, and 2FA solutions, ONAM has developed its own security systems. Let’s take a look at these security systems.
ONAM Enterprise-Grade Security: This system is a machine learning powered system. To protect user data and passwords, it never stores any password while also encrypting all sensitive user data before storing in the database. This system also includes Advanced Threat Prevention, and Intrusion Detection Tools.
ONAM Anti-Market Manipulation System (AMM): Also a machine learning powered system, it operates on real-time basis. This is majorly because market manipulations majorly occur in real-time. These manipulations can be in the form of unusually large trades and wash trades. To solve these problems, the AMM system continuously monitors market conditions for suspicious trading activities, flagging offending accounts for investigation.
ONAM Institutional grade Anit-Money Laundering system (AML): Also powered by machine learning technology, this system anticipates illicit money laundering attempts by cross checking customer data with international databases, flagging suspicious ones.
Quarterly third-party audit of security protocols, to ensure transparency and high security standards.
BitGo partnership: BitGo is the market leader in institutional-grade cryptocurrency investment services. By partnering with BitGo, ONAM will be able to offer custodian services (such as institutional-grade policy controls and multi-signature 100% cold storageSource) to big institutional investors, providing them with safe and compliant ways to store their funds.
Finally, all ONAM employees undergo background check before being allowed to have direct contact with the ONAM platform, hence ensuring security of customer funds and the ONAM system at large.
Having spoken about all the benefits that the ONAM exchange makes available to traders, my audience may want to know how to purchase ONAM tokens to be a stakeholder of this movement.
The ONAM token is called ONAM, an ERC-20 token based on the Ethereum network. ONAM ICO began on October 1st 2018, and will end on December 21st 2018. The total number of tokens are 300,000,000, but if the 195,000,000 tokens which have been allocated for crowdsale are sold before this deadline, the ICO will end. The ICO Crowdsale will be conducted in BTC and ETH.
It is also important to state that Crowdsale participants must pass AML and KYC verification processes to be able to claim their tokens.
For further information on the token sale, you can visit the whitepaper, and you’ll get more detailed information there.
Having talked about ONAM token distribution, let’s talk about some use cases for the ONAM exchange.
China is the most populous country in the world and also has the highest internet users in the world. With this huge internet population and hence huge amount of cryptocurrency traders, China has a huge impact on the cryptocurrency market. Chao Mao happens to be one of these Chinese speaking crypto traders. Living in China, he has access to a myriad of crypto exchanges offering exchanges services for various cryptocurrencies. These exchanges were programmed in Chinese language, enabling Chao understand and trade successfully. Through the local online news websites in China, Chao got regular access to trending crypto news. Also, he followed those online news websites on their Chinese versions of twitter and Facebook. Chao felt he had all he needed for a successful cryptocurrency trading experience.
With these tools, Chao traded for months and made some profits. He was satisfied with the success he had achieved until one faithful day things turned sour. The exchange which Chao had been using to trade and on which he had most of his cryptocurrency portfolio was shut down for lack of compliance with Government regulations. China, being strict about operation of internet activities within its borders realized that the exchange had faulted on its regulations, and hence shut down the exchange. Chao was devastated. He lost a lot of money. Along with losing money, he lost faith in cryptocurrency trading since he had no way of knowing the right exchange to trade with.
On attending a crypto conference, he meets Paul, an ONAM trader and affiliate who introduces Chao to ONAM. At first Chao is not interested, but as Paul begins to outline the benefits of ONAM Chao gets interested. Paul explains that Chao no longer had to visit other websites to get news updates since he could get them right on the ONAM exchange. He also explains that ONAM has a Chinese version so he could easily use the platform. Paul keeps listing more of ONAM’s benefits, and when he gets to the part that ONAM is very particular about regulation compliance, Chao’s eyes lit up. At the end of the day, Chao registeres on the Chinese version of ONAM through Paul's affiliate link and starts trading.
After some time on ONAM, Chao is so excited, especially with the customer support and all the features of ONAM. He starts making profits and starts introducing other of his Chinese friends to join the platform through his affiliate link, and the Chinese ONAM community grows.
MY VIDEO ON ONAM
CONCLUSION
The blockchain technology is one that has revolutionized various sectors of which finance is the most popular. Through cryptocurrencies, people have been empowered as never before to possess more control over their funds. These cryptocurrencies are traded in a market called exchanges. It is unfortunate that these exchanges are the weak links through which hackers steal cryptocurrencies, thereby sabotaging the cryptocurrency transaction process.
However, ONAM exchange has come with a ray of hope to salvage the exchange market. Through ONAM, investors can now be rest assured that their funds will be well secured, in addition to a customer support service that will surely put the needs of investors first.
It is only a company that knows where its journey began from, that can know where it is going. Below is a road map of ONAM, showing where they have been, where they currently are, and where they are going.
The ONAM team is made up of experienced entrepreneurs who are highly vast in the field of cryptocurrency and exchanges. With a team such as this, you can’t expect anything but the best.
ONAM has a strong advisory board, consisting of cryptocurrency veterans.
If you need further clarification on any issue with regards to ONAM, just do well to drop your questions in the comment section, and I will promptly attend to it.
For more information on ONAM, you can visit any of the following channels:
. ONAM Website
• ONAM WhitePaper
• ONAM Telegram
• ONAM Reddit
• ONAM Medium
• ONAM LinkedIn
• ONAM Instagram
• ONAM Twitter
• ONAM Bitcointalk
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