Disclaimer: I am not an official spokesperson for COSS. I work for them on a part time, contract basis. I have never been to their headquarters in Singapore (though I’d love to go one day!) and I have never met the team in person. I am speaking purely from my own experience and my intention is not to “pump” its token or hype the site. I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t see into the future of the market, nor am I offering financial advice or making any suggestions as to where to invest your money. As always, do your own research, don’t invest money that you can’t afford to lose, and keep a healthy skepticism of random strangers on the internet. If you would like an official statement from the COSS.IO team, please contact support@coss.io.
The one and only time that I ever truly hit the crypto jackpot was with Kucoin’s native token KCS. I knew that Kucoin was about to list the super hyped cryptocurrency XRB (formerly Raiblocks, now NANO), freeing all of us from Bitgrail in all of its shadiness. I woke up in the middle of the night to max out my daily limit on Coinbase and bought their dividend token at $1 on a hunch (which could have gone horribly wrong—I do not endorse such a move). Within a week, it hit its all time high of $20. I only cashed out a small amount before it quickly declined significantly, but I still made a fair amount of money off of it. Kucoin had abruptly terminated its referral bonus program without warning, and the token took a hit. I never regained my trust in the exchange, though I still use it occasionally. I just don’t keep my coins on there. (Of course, I don’t really trust any exchange, except for COSS, and only because I’m close enough to it that I can see how they operate.)
I had heard about a KCS equivalent called COSS; another token native to another small exchange which split fees with its users, and it was still at a mere 30 cents. It was deja vu. After some due diligence, I put some of my KCS profits into COSS, and I held. At the crypto market’s all time high, it was around $3; hardly anywhere near the $20 miracle that had been my experience with KCS. But I believed in their mission of facilitating the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency through Fiat pairings, merchant portals, and user friendly products more than I had ever believed in another project, so when the price declined with the rest of the market, it did not shake my faith at all.
It was around that time that I decided that I wanted to move into crypto as more than a hobby, but as a career. I did some research into COSS and realized that their teams were based in Singapore, Romania, and Amsterdam, but they didn’t have any employees in the US despite it being the majority of their user base. I took a chance and cold called them (well, cold Telegrammed) and made a pitch for myself as an operations specialist. At first they were reluctant, but I found ways to add value to the project by contributing a few hours a week.
Through talking directly with members of their team and seeing how they operate, I’ve come to know them as an extraordinarily hard working, small group who have every intention of going through with their mission. I have no idea when Rune finds the time to sleep. I see people on Reddit complaining that they’re taking too long relative to the pace of other exchanges, but I see how deliberate and cautious they are being with respect to ensuring their own longevity by doing things the right way—they’re careful not to launch products before they’re ready, they work closely with regulators, and they don’t jump in head first before they know that their technical infrastructure can handle it. When a glitch in the exchange caused limit orders to execute at market price for a few hours, they rolled back any trades from before the glitch and compensated users with two weeks of a 100% fee share, remedying what was probably a pretty small loss for users at an extraordinarily high cost to themselves—two weeks of the company’s gross revenue. I can only imagine how that went over with their CFO. It was an incredibly bold move, but it was the right one.
This past month has been incredibly exciting for the COSS team. They just launched the Fiat gateway and the new KYC system to go with it, and the new UI is coming out (and it looks great!). In a way it's been fortunate for them that the market has been down in these past few months, as it's given COSS the time and space to work with regulators and make sure everything is in place to handle what will likely be a big influx of new users. I hope that in the future I can get more deeply involved as the scope of their project grows, and I’m confident that it will, as long as the crypto market is around.