The journey of a blockchain pioneer

Jack Yeu, Switcheo Network’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, got his first crypto coin after having drinks with a friend sometime last year.

“The bill was a couple of hundred dollars and he told me, ‘I’m going to pay my share to you in bitcoin,’” recalls Yeu.

Switcheo Network co-founder and chief commercial officer Jack Yeu / Photo credit: Switcheo Network

Yeu was initially frustrated as this forced him to “sign up for different exchanges to try and get rid of it.”

But looking up ways to convert his bitcoin into cash got him interested in the inner workings of the crypto trading scene. “When you’re in possession of it, you need to learn how to keep it, how to store it, and you need to make sure it doesn’t get lost.”

From enthusiasts to founders

Switcheo’s journey began in 2017, when Yeu met his co-founders, Ivan Poon and Henry Chua. The trio were investing heavily in Neo, which was being coined as the “Ethereum of China” at the time. Neo was formerly known as AntShares.

“We were active in the [Neo] community because we thought it was one of the more promising projects,” Yeu recounts. “We bought into anything that Neo supported.”

When Red Pulse, Neo’s first initial coin offering (ICO), launched late last year, they noticed that centralized exchanges like Binance “took really long to list the token” and charged millions of dollars for it.

“It hinders the progress of the entire blockchain industry if you’re going to charge millions every time a project wants to list on your exchange,” warns Yeu. “People shouldn’t have that large percent of a cut out of their initial raised amounts.”

If you don’t own the private keys to the wallets, you don’t own the funds.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXes), on the other hand, are able to list any unlocked token and don’t charge for listing. They also don’t have a centralized point of failure because they give users complete control of their own digital wallets that can only be accessed with a private key. This means that DEX users are not as vulnerable to hacks as users of centralized exchanges are.

“If you don’t own the private keys to the wallets, you don’t own the funds,” Yeu adds.

This, he says, is what inspired the launch of Switcheo – the first DEX built on Neo’s platform.

Challenges

Because it was the first of its kind to be built on the Neo blockchain, Switcheo’s team had a difficult time finding “any kind of reference” that had a working proof of concept.

“There weren’t many pioneers we could refer to or look up to when building the system,” says Yeu.

On top of that, the Neo code base at the time was “raw and rudimentary and not documented,” so the team needed to “make educated guesses and look at other DEXes on different blockchains, like the more popular ones on Ethereum.”

Photo credit: welcomia / 123RF

But despite the challenges the team faced in building the platform, Switcheo garnered strong support from the Neo community at its launch.

“A lot of our community members were really excited that they now didn’t have to wait so long to list their tokens or pay hefty fees to list their projects,” says Yeu.

“It was a really exciting time,” he shares. “At some point, we had 35 percent of all of Neo tokens transacted.”

Building its own blockchain

Switcheo’s innovations don’t end with being the first decentralized app on the Neo blockchain. Earlier this month, the exchange rolled out an ERC20 trading platform, opening the pathway for cross-chain trading between Ethereum and Neo tokens.

“This will allow our users to transact Ethereum’s tokens on our DEX,” Yeu explains. “We’re also launching a new user interface, which addresses some of our users’ concerns over the past few months and make our exchange much easier to use.”

However, Yeu expressed concerns over the inability for cross-chain transfers to operate in a trustless manner. To address this, Switcheo is building its own blockchain to “facilitate the interoperability issues with other blockchains.” This will also allow projects on other popular blockchains to be listed on Switcheo’s exchange.

Photo credit: Dzmitry Kliapitski

“It’s something that hasn’t really been done before in a fully decentralized way, and that’s kind of what we’re most excited about,” says Yeu.

This will not only put Switcheo’s DEX head-to-head with larger centralized exchanges, which host an equally wide range of tokens, but it can also potentially challenge conventional investment processes.

“By listing as many projects as possible and by having as many blockchains connected to us, blockchain projects and ICOs will be in a position to disrupt the venture capital space by providing an immediate avenue of liquidity right when they unlock their tokens,” concludes Yeu.

Switcheo Network is the first non-custodian exchange based on the Neo blockchain which now allows the trading of both Ethereum and Neo tokens.

Visit Switcheo’s website to start trading.