After reading “Skip the Line” by James Altucher I’ve tried out some of his techniques and one stuck with me (although I don‘t practice it that regularly).

It‘s to write down a list of 10 ideas on any given topic in order to train your creative muscle. I keep most of them to myself but some lists I chose to share – who knows who might read them. So without any further ado, I present you my 10 ideas for BitPanda.

1. Staking features. Many chains operate on a Proof of Stake basis so I’d love to see an option to stake my coins through BitPanda, earning additional rewards. What must go hand in hand as well is maintaining them and being transparent and open about the staking features. The more I think about it the more problems pop up (from taxation to a dedicated infrastrucutre team maintaining pools) but maybe start with one chain and slowly transition to another?
2. Switch BEST Token from ERC20 to a more eco-friendly chain. I’m sure there are many alternatives out there already, one of them being my pet project Cardano. With native assets since March last year, having the BEST tokens run on Cardano would be a nice switch. There’s even an ERC20 converter in the works. And since Cardano is completely Proof of Stake you could even argue BEST doesn’t use high energy consuming Proof of Work chains (which is always a bit of a turn-off for me).
3. Display overall invested vs. where it is now. There’s still a lot of mistrust against exchanges and many users will pull their assets off of the exchange in order to have full custody over it. Bitpanda sadly doesn’t provide sending assets to corresponding native wallets for every asset. Therefore I’m left with a mix and match between assets which can only be held on Bitpanda as well as assets I hold on private wallets. But I’d love to see a metric which keeps track of how much money I’ve invested through BitPanda and at what level that amount now is – no matter if I still have access to those assets on BitPanda. Not enabled by default, maybe hidden away in a menu this could provide an quick glance / birds eye view to someone who doesn’t want to keep track of every single wallet of the current net worth.
4. Blogs Netflix, Slack, Shopifiy and many more publish on a more or less regular basis interesting insights and articles on their own engineering blogs. So I propose that Bitpanda should start it’s own engineering blog. I’d love to see coverage of the many challenges running nodes for the plethora of assets available as well as how they handle infrastructure and scaling challenges. For me such openness always builds trust and reliability – something I heavily look for in a financial exchange service provider.
5. One more for the devs Apart from engineering blogs another option would be to run a openly available GitHub repository. Maybe offering native SDKs to work with the BitPanda API or parts of your software you are willing to share with the open source community.
6. Multiple depots I run a small business besides my main job. Having two seperate deposits, one for my private account, one for my business account and both linked together / being easily switchable would be a lower barrier of entry for me. As I aim to operate my business more and more towards into the crypto-verse, having a seperate recieving address to be paid in cryptocurrencies would be great.
7. Steel plate credit card Ok I admit it – I really like the crypto.com credit card. While I think the BEST program is better and safer (and my personal pick) I’d really love if you’d consider offering steel plate crypto / visa cards. It’s just a better conversation starter than a plastic card.
8. More options with saving plans Bitpanda savings plan should be able to pick a more custom start date. For example if I want to start a bi-weekly savings plan in the second week next month, I still have to wait until the actual week to create this savings plan. Picking an acutal date in the month is only possible for a monthly execution. I’d love to have a feature to plan for example a new, bi-weekly plan, starting in two weeks or even in two months.
9. Becoming a payment provider What the world and other small businesses or creators like myself are really missing as of now is having a payment provider, accepting cryptocurrencies. It would be great if I could embed a “Pay with crypto” Button in my site which get’s processed by Bitpandas payment gateway / API. Just like stripe offers a convenient way of paying with fiat, BitPanda could offer a way to accept cryptocurrencies for different payment models such as subscriptions, one-time-invoices etc.
10. Better trackability with webhooks Speaking of APIs – most of the people I know who hold crypto somehow try to keep track of their transactions and assets through third party tools. The common way I see it is to do some sort of weekly, daily, hourly (depending on how actively you trade) API call against the exchange to see if new transactions occured. Why not flip the switch and offer webhooks for deposit / buy / withdrawal / trade transactions? Third party providers could easily implement an endpoint which will be called from the Bitpanda webhook, anytime a previously defined transaction is issued / completed. Which means less load on Bitpandas infrastructure, easier access to the information you really need and less overhead and computation on behalf of the third party providers. Win win for everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed those 10 ideas. I really like BitPanda as a company and wish them all the best. I know most of the ideas are very unlikely to happen, hard to implement, aren’t worth the cost and may depend on my sole personal use cases. But maybe it nudges someone into a new direction. (As a little bonus idea – scrolling through your job offers I’ve noticed none of them are 100% remote. This may be due to legal reasons but I guess the pandemic sort of transformed what people expect and what kind of jobs they are looking for. At least I would be more drawn to apply this way ;) )