Written in December 1, 2021
Introduction
As the crypto space market grows larger daily, so does the demand of exchanges to
transact cryptocurrencies. Most beginners, enthusiasts, and investors alike usually trade in a Centralized Exchange (CEX) environment. This presents several challenges for the CEX, since the environment is a go-to-place for conducting transactions, such as liquidity, fees, accessibility, quantity of product (cryptocurrencies), and most important of all – customer protection.
Voyager is founded to solve these challenges. The exchange offers a next generation Dynamic Smart Order Router and Custody to provide liquidity for the users. Furthermore, Voyager operates in a commission-free trading service, enticing both small cap investors and whale investors. Customers are able to trade with peace of mind knowing that they are getting the best possible execution without extraneous fees. Most exchanges’ interface may be intimidating at first, bombarding beginners with excessive information, and experienced traders are unable to find the best price across exchanges. To tackle this challenge, the Voyager team has considerable experience building consumer-centric companies such as Uber, Apple, and E*Trade, while maintaining trust by prioritizing security and accessible self-custody options for customers. Additionally, being a public traded equity, Voyager supports transparency. This paper is going to cover Voyager in-depth and compare it to existing projects.
The Rise of Exchange Tokens
As of early December 2021, the cryptocurrency CEXs market cap has reached $140 billion USD. This indicates that CEXs arguably holds an essential role in the crypto ecosystem. These platforms provide invaluable services such as cryptocurrencies trading and accurate price action. To power the ecosystem, exchange tokens are created with means of being a utility. The usage of exchange tokens varies across exchanges, with some having a governance mechanism to decide the exchange’s future development, however it is generally used to pay transaction fees, provide liquidity in the trading pairs, or to participate in Airdrops and Initial Exchange Offerings (IEO).
Figure 1. Total Cryptocurrency Market Cap vs. CEXs
Despite numerous promising projects in the crypto space itself, exchange tokens saw an immense growth. Almost all of the top 5 Centralized Exchange by market cap has a higher growth rate than the total cryptocurrency market cap itself. KuCoin (KCS) leads the rise as much as 1864% YTD, followed by Binance (BNB) as high as 1228% YTD, the third is Crypto.com (CRO) 673% YTD, continued with FTX (FTT) 372% YTD, and finally Coinbase with a surprisingly negative growth -25% YTD. This begs the question of whether exchange tokens are a worthy investment after all.
Voyager Exchange
Voyager exchange is a synergy between two different projects that are founded relatively around the same time. Voyager focuses on the financial and trading aspects of crypto by providing liquidity, consumer-oriented fee schedule, and an Order Management System (OMS). Whereas, Ethos specializes in blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrency through their secure self-custodial wallet – Universal Wallet application – and integrating the blockchain underlying protocols with the Bedrock Architecture. Though initially the projects were taking two different paths, in 2019 Voyager and Ethos agreed to bring the technology together with a shared vision of building crypto markets that are accessible, open, and safe for everyone. To realize the goal of being transparent, Voyager did an Initial Public Offering in the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) with a ticker symbol ($VOYG) on September 23, 2019.
Voyager is co-founded by FinTech industry veterans with experiences in world-leading organizations, such as E*TRADE, Uber, Tradelt, Lightspeed Financial. Stephen Ehrlich, brokerage and market structure veteran, as the CEO and Director. Shingo Lavine, personally mentored by a distributing computing expert and Gödel and Dijkstra award winner, as the Founder of Ethos and Chief Innovation Officer. G.Philip Eytan, Telecom M&A Analyst and debt portfolio manager, as the Chairman. Gaspard de Dreuzy, founded numerous companies in the FinTech sector and experience in the brokerage industry, as a Director. Oscar Salazar, built consumer-driven mobile applications, as the advisor.
Voyager is co-founded by veterans from the FinTech industry with experiences in several world-leading organizations.
- Stephen Ehrlich – CEO and Director
Stephen has several years of profound experience as a brokerage and market structure veteran. Prior to being CEO of Tradier, he was a founder and CEO of Lightspeed Financial LLC, which in 2019 executed on average $450k trades per day raising the brokerage to be the top 3 in the United States. Lightspeed Financial disrupted the active trading industry by delivering a product that prioritizes the active segment of traders – day traders. Early on his career, he was the CEO of E*TRADE, the professional trading arm of E*TRADE FINANCIAL.
- Shingo Lavine – Founder of Ethos, Chief Innovation Officer, and Director
Shingo is a well-known expert and thought leader in blockchain technology. Studied at Brown University under Maurice Herlihy, a distributing computing expert and Gödel and Dijkstra award winner. He founded Ethos.io at age 19 and wrote a whitepaper “Democratizing Cryptocurrency” (access here). He then led the team that created Ethos Universal Wallet, a BIP32/39/44 compatible wallet that is powered by Ethos Bedrock.
- Oscar Salazar – Advisor
Oscar is a global leader in building consumer-driven mobile applications. He is involved in contributing as a co-founder of Uber as its Architect and CTO. Oscar is an active investor and also the co-founder and CTO of pager, a VC-backed digital healthcare.
- Gaspard De Dreuzy – Director
Gaspard started his career as an advisor to warner music and proceeded on collaborating with several game developers such as Atari, THQ and Mattel, Ready 2 Rumble, etc. Later in his career, he served as CEO of Kapitall, the first online brokerage that focuses on millenials.
- Phillip Eytan – Chairman and Director
Phillip started his career as an Telecom Merger & Acquisition analyst at Morgan Stanley. Later, he helped manage a large distressed debt book at Cerberus Capital Management. Phillip started his own hedge fund afterwards.
- Jarrett Lilien – Director
Jarrett is a long-term Equity market Executive, currently the President and COO of Wisdom Tree Investments (NASDAQ:WETF). He was also the managing partner at Bendigo partners, private financial service provider, and board of the Barton Group.
Voyager has already partnered with multiple crypto leading companies, such as Coinbase, Cumberland, Silvergate Bank. Most important of all, Voyager also partnered with several custodial companies: Fireblocks, Ledger, and Bitgo. Other companies that Voyager collaborates with are from cloud computing platforms, payment systems, digital banks, and financial technologies. Companies include Socure, Google, Galaxy Digital, AWS, BMO, Plaid, Circle, Metropolitan Commercial Bank, and Usio.
Products
Voyager has two main products in hand to serve their customers:
- Exchange
Voyager’s main business is on the Centralized Exchange side of the crypto industry. The company focuses on maximizing output on four aspects of trading: price, speed, liquidity, and reliability. Voyager implements a Dynamic Smart Order Router that analyzes across multiple exchanges to determine the best possible price for a token. Depending on the size of the transaction, the customer’s order may be routed to multiple exchanges or liquidity providers to achieve swift execution.
- Wallet
Institutional capital has stayed on the sidelines in the cryptocurrency market due to the lack of an institutional custody solution that can offer liquidity, speed, and security. Voyager is blending hardware-secured treasury with self-custody options, giving customers full control of their own funds through Ethos Bedrock technology.
Voyager also has several products such as debit cards and reward systems. Similar to its counterpart from Crypto.com, using the Voyager Debit Card would allow the customer to spend in USD Coin (USDC) in the same manner as fiat and earn 9% in rewards by just holding USDC. Holding several qualified tokens in the customer’s Voyager exchange account would earn the customer several percent of that token.
Voyager also provides the platform for institutional-grade customers.
Voyager Token
Read from whitepaper v2.0 and v1.0 there is burn in the loyalty program read data from coinmarketcap see dispersion of market. Emphasis on token use cases
The current Voyager Token ($VGX) is an update token swap to the previous token. Customers could swap the old VGX with the new one on a 1:1 ratio, additionally customers could also swap LGO token with the new VGX on a 6.5356340619:1. With this new token, VGX will introduce a 25% token burn on all withdrawal fees on the Voyager app to reduce the inflation effect via staking.
VGX is an ERC-20 token that went through multiple changes, from ICO to merger with LGO token. Currently, the token has a circulating supply of 295,491,293 VGX — leading to a market cap of $1.1 Billion as of December 5, 2021. Though the max supply would be likely to be added from the growth pool with details as such: 40 million VGX year 1, 20 million VGX year 2, and 10 million VGX year 3-8.
VGX is mainly a utility token for the exchange itself, currently the use cases are:
- Staking
Customers could stake VGX and earn 7% annually on rewards through MetaMask wallet. More information here. After the first year, the community would be able to vote on the future staking APY via governance voting proposal.
- Loyalty Program
With the second whitepaper, Voyager introduces a loyalty system with benefits based on the quantity of VGX held in the account.
Figure 2. Loyalty Program Schedule (whitepaper v2.0)
- Governance
The community will have the ability to participate in voting for the future of both Voyager and its Loyalty Program by holding VGX.
Future implementations of the token and its roadmap include:
- Auto-staking
- Crypto payments through e-commerce, sports, ticketing, and real-world applications
- DeFi
- International Expansion
- Financial Services
Voyager is the only Centralized Exchange platform that offers 0% fee for both maker and taker while earning money for the exchange. This is possible due to the Smart Routing Order technology that executes customers’ orders through multiple exchanges.
Voyager Market Comparison
The comparison will be between Voyager, Coinbase, Binance, and FTX.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4398448-voyager-digital-growth-is-accelerating