I always have been fascinated by the Steemit community. Finally, I found the time to sit down and write something that I hope will worth something for the community.

This is the first of a series of posts that I wrote for introducing myself to the Steemit community and share my experience with starting up a cryptocurrency business from scratch and without much funds available.

Who is the intended audience?

If you are a crypto trader, you will probably find my story of your interest and you can skip the next paragraph. If you have never used a digital exchange you will find my thoughts difficult to understand, so I decided to put together some key information about trading with digital assets as an intro to my story.

A bit of crypto-trading background.

The cryptocurrency market can be difficult to understand and become familiar with, especially for people who have little experience in trading or are only acquainted with traditional currencies.

The never-sleeping market is the first problem which traders need to face, as they struggle to follow it 24/7. Additionally, raising and falling prices of different currencies are difficult to follow.

My name is Mario, nice to meet you!

I am actively involved in crypto trading for a few years. What we currently call GDAX was coinbase.exchange and was listing BTC, USD, GBP, and EUR only. It was the first digital exchange I joined.

During this time (not that long ago though!), one of the main aims of the crypto community was to get rid of the third parties from transactions and to promote the acceptance of the cryptocurrencies as a form of payment.

In the East London (Hackney, Poplar, Docklands, Shoreditch...), but also in more central areas such as Totthenam court road, you could have seen the first Bitcoin ATMs in the UK. My first purchase at an ATM was in a CeX store in Tottenham court road! Was pretty cool, even though many people looked at me like a weirdo.

March 2015, BTC = $245.00

With the time, I became more skilled and also interested in getting the most from my investment with Bitcoin. I realized that my long-term goal should have been finalized to increase my Bitcoins and not my Sterlings. Therefore, I moved part of my funds to Bittrex and Poloniex that were already listing Altcoins.

Once I was on these exchanges, I started a deeper analysis of the altcoins and of the different kind of blockchains behind these. I was amazed by the technologies and by the fact that many blockchains could solve many problems. From the unbanked people to the glitches within the insurance industry, the majority of the financial and regulatory issues could have been solved by a mass adoption of the new, disruptive technologies.

My first investment (after Bitcoin) was Litecoin because of its smarter payment system. Then I started trading with Vertcoin, Ethereum Classic, Monacoin, and many others (currently, the complete list is too long). Unfortunately, big drops in price were around the corners all times and, to stay on top of my investment, I had to pay attention to many trends at the same time.

April 2015, LTC = $1.40

That was the most frustrating time of my crypto life. My portfolio was too diversified and needed my full attention, but I was working on a full-time job and studying for my third master degree (in finance) so I had no much time for this. Therefore, I decided to study the REST API infrastructures offered by the exchanges.

If you are not familiar with this technology, APIs stands for application programming interfaces and are a tool for programmers to make one piece of software talk to another piece of software.

What I understood is that I could use the APIs from exchanges for automating my trading sessions whilst I was far from my laptop. Amazing! But I am not a programmer and, as I didn't have time to trade, I didn't have time to learn how to make a trading code.

Here is when my life as a crypto investor changed.

After I started pitching my idea to many persons that could have been interested in joining me with the development of an automated trading tool, I got the interest of Jonathan, my lecturer of merger & acquisition. The next step was to find a developer interested in the idea.

May 2015, BTC = $215.00

The summer arrived in London and, unexpectedly, it was very hot. The grey sky of the City became blue and the parks were full of people having a sunbath. The hunt for skills started and it has not been that easy. Most of the programmers were reluctant in joining a project that was involving a so risky industry, and many of the professionals we spoke with were considering the Bitcoin as a bubble. Good thing was that Steve (another lecturer of the same school I was attending) joined the crew as a mentor and as an angel investor.

It took a few months before we found an engineer happy to join us in this project. He was a young engineer from Tunisia, and we immediately got on well together. We met online and, after several meetings, he started coding my algorithms for trading and predicting the trend of the assets at the end of September 2015. The first prototype of this small tool was ready at the beginning of December 2015 and it was connected with Coinbase exchange, Bittrex, and Poloniex.

September 2015, BTC = $ 570.00

The initial code embedded my API keys from the exchanges, so I realized that these could be switched easily. First thought was: "so everyone can connect with our system!". We reviewed our plans and started the implementation of an ambitious project which is now known as BmyBit.

The aim was (and it still is) to provide a tool that could solve the problem of trading with crypto 24/7 with no risk of losses caused by the volatility in the price of the assets.

We have incorporated BmyBit December 30, 2015. I dropped my job and we injected some liquidity into the company. After 1 week we hired other 2 engineers and a designer. One of the new engineers is Samir, our current CTO.

December 2015, BTC = $ 425.00

The first months of development were like a dream that come true. I felt like with my idea I could have changed the world (or at least the portion of the world interested in trading with cryptos). We didn't have an office, so we were working from home and in remote locations.

Although you could think that the distance might cause issues during the development, we have been very lucky in putting together the right people that speeded up the project in a such a way that the first working prototype available for alpha tests was ready in less than a month and a half.

February 2016, BTC = $ 420.00

Here comes the challenge......... TO BE CONTINUED.

If you'd like to read the next chapter, follow @mario.stumpo !!

Thank you for your attention!

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