Hodl Hodl, a P2P cryptocurrency exchange, today announced that WhalePanda, Ambroid, Marsmensch, and two more undisclosed persons became the first investors in Hodl Hodl.
Come 2019, Hodl Hodl plans on using the funds to improve the P2P exchange platform, launch a P2P prediction contracts market, and release a number of other stealth features that will “hopefully be incredibly useful to the Bitcoin economy.”
The Hodl Hodl team also informed today they will lower the exchange commission to 0.4% starting in December 2018, until the end of the year.
Hodl Hodl is a P2P cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to trade directly with each other and it doesn’t hold user’s funds — locking it in multisig escrow instead — which minimizes the possibilities of crypto assets theft and reduces trading time.
Since Hodl Hodl does not hold any money (neither cryptocurrencies, nor fiat) it is not subject to complex compliance procedures. As a result, trades happen directly between users’ wallets and you do not open your identity to the exchange.
“For a long time, Hodl Hodl remained self-funded. It was our own money that paid for the development and the team. This year we realized we needed to grow and move forward faster so we decided to start looking for external funding. We initially talked to a number of VCs and after months of negotiations, it became obvious this wouldn’t work. Some declined us, some were constantly putting us on hold. In retrospect, we don’t really think VC funding would’ve been the right fit for a Bitcoin-company like ours. We don’t do KYC/AML and we’re not bending and selling our customers (and not because we’re so good and honest, but because that’s part of the value we provide and, thus, part of our business model) — and, if we took that VC money, our feeling was, we’d start bending. Instead, we were very lucky to be approached by a number of bitcoiners who attended our “Baltic Honeybadger” conference, know us personally and decided that they wanted to invest in Hodl Hodl. And so they did.”