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Blockchain, the company launched in 2011—not to be confused with blockchain, the technology—was one of the earliest bitcoin startups and is best known for its public blockchain explorer page and its free bitcoin wallet software. The company says it has more than 40 million bitcoin wallets in use.
Now it’s launching a high-speed crypto exchange called The PIT, which will make Blockchain a direct competitor to Coinbase, Binance, Gemini, Kraken, and many more.
So, why get into the crowded business of bitcoin exchanges?
“There are a lot of players in this space,” acknowledges Blockchain’s head of retail products Nicole Sherrod. “But our perspective is, they kind of all look the same. If you look at the front-end trading technology, features, layouts, everything kind of looks the same.”
Indeed, Blockchain cofounder and CEO Peter Smith, in the company’s press release, frames it more aggressively: “The current crypto exchange market is outdated, broken, and skewed against users,” he says.
In an additional blog post announcing The PIT, Smith writes: “I’ve personally been using exchanges since 2011 and haven’t seen much improvement. They are unreliable, illiquid, and often unfair... On top of all this they are overly complex.”
The exchange is a clear effort to keep Blockchain wallet customers in the Blockchain ecosystem. Smith writes that he was tired of watching millions of users transfer their crypto from Blockchain wallets to external exchanges.
Blockchain says it has been working on The PIT for over a year and it has been in stealth mode. Sherrod, a former managing director of trading at TD Ameritrade, joined Blockchain in July 2018 without publicly announcing her job move until now. She says The PIT will “redefine the category” of crypto exchanges by solving three key problems: “speed, liquidity, and reliability.”
Speed in particular is the clear thrust of Blockchain’s pitch here: Its press release promises that The PIT is “the fastest crypto exchange in the world” and “the first microsecond-latency crypto exchange.” It will launch with support for 23 cryptocurrencies, and fiat-to-crypto trading for U.S. dollars, euros, British pounds.
“Where others are measuring speed in terms of milliseconds, we are defining the category in terms of microseconds,” Sherrod says.
To market the launch of The PIT, Blockchain even released a TV ad with celebrity William Shatner, a known bitcoin enthusiast. In the ad spot, Shatner tries to rob a bank, and complains, “We tried trading crypto, but our exchange was so slow.”
Of course, everything happening in the cryptocurrency industry this summer is happening against the backdrop of Facebook’s announcement of Libra, and the instantaneous government scrutiny and backlash to its plans.