By Sami Start, Co-Founder & CEO of Transak
2020 has been an exciting year for Transak.
In this year we:
- Graduated from the Consensys Tachyon accelerator program
- Released our product at ETH Denver
- Gained traction and grew our volumes into the millions per month
- Raised our seed round
- Expanded the team from just 2 founders to 10 people
- Partnered with the largest blockchain apps, such as Metamask and Aave
We send our sincere appreciation to all of the partners who integrated Transak, all of the customers who on-ramped from fiat to crypto, and all of our investors and community who have supported us. It’s a cliche, but — we wouldn’t be here without you guys, so thank you.
There was a clear gap in the market for end-users who wanted to buy crypto directly to their wallet, in order to use blockchain applications, which was not served by the bottlenecked UI of major exchanges. The need for a fiat gateway that delivers crypto directly to a wallet with fast processing time has been proven by tens of thousands of completed orders. The demand for a high conversion fiat gateway integration for blockchain applications with a simple developer experience and powerful API parameters has been proven by integrations from top apps such as Metamask, and Aave, and over 60 others.
We are at the start of an exciting growth period in 2021 where decentralized applications, and Transak, go mainstream and find their place in the everyday lives of people around the world. We look forward to continuing to support old and new partners and customers with delightful on/off ramp experiences.
Volume and User Metrics Grew Exponentially
Transak experienced rapid growth in volumes this year. A surge in July came from a successful partnership in selling ERD, followed by a yield-farming craze when gas prices soared. From August we started to see some sustainable volumes coming from a range of sources such as Metamask and Polymarket. As of writing, we are expecting our volumes to more than double for January 2021 from December 2020.
Most of our volume came from GBP, since this is where we started our product and we have the highest limits and quickest processing times there. Transak launched access to customers in the USA as well as payments with credit and debit cards. We released our SEPA payment method in 26 countries in Europe and also transitioned from peer-to-peer on-ramps to a direct brokerage model in India after the Supreme Court ruled against the ban on cryptocurrencies in March.
Transak shipped a unique fiat-to-any-ERC-20 functionality
We integrated with DEXs and other crypto-to-crypto exchanges to support any ERC-20 token (yes, any!) as well as 100s of other assets. This allowed our partner Aave to on-ramp their customers directly to a-tokens in their wallet from fiat using Transak. We also shipped a native integration into Matic network, so that customers can on-ramp directly into layer 2, and bypass layer 1 gas fees and mining times altogether! A huge win for our partner Polymarket, who uses Transak and Matic to provide a world-class user experience.
Average processing time for orders was under 8 minutes across all payment methods from clicking the first button, doing KYC, and receiving crypto in the wallet (apart from EUR SEPA payments which have an average time of 23 hours, since the SEPA payment network doesn’t settle outside of weekdays or working hours). We expect SEPA times to be greatly improved by SEPA Instant in Q1 2021.
We raised our seed round
Transak graduated from the Tachyon accelerator (by Consensys) and we then raised our seed round, with investment from IOSG, Lunex, Blockrock, The LAO, Koji Capital, and angels Suji Yan (CEO of Maskbook) and Li Gong (Partner at Youbi Capital), and follow on investment from Consensys.
We Grew our Team to 10 People
In 2020 we grew our team to 2 Customer Support & Operations, 4 Software Engineers, 1 Compliance Officer, 1 Head of Growth, and 2 Founders. We have assembled an incredibly strong core team that is building our product and growth at an ever-increasing rate. I’m inspired to work with these people and feel confident that we can do great things together in 2021. We plan to grow our team to more than 50 people in 2021, and you can see our careers page for our open positions.
In 2021 is for Scaling and Exploring Decentralised Finance
In 2021 we plan to expand to more fiat payment methods, integrate with more blockchains and protocols, refine and scale our core processing engine, as well as explore new markets that are built on top of fiat-to-crypto payments. We look forward to growing collaboratively with others in the industry, as well as forging partnerships in industries outside of the crypto world, in order to take decentralised finance, and Transak mainstream.
Roadmap
- Off-ramp (already in beta)
- Improved conversion rates for card payments (currently testing)
- Interac payment system (Canada)
- ACH payments (USA)
- Direct integrations for more blockchain and layer 2 protocols
- Gas optimization
- South-East Asia coverage
- Improvements to partner dashboard, including increased analytics and self-serve for account parameters and pay-out
Connect with us
- You can buy/sell crypto at http://global.transak.com/
- Integrate Transak into your application. We are partnering on a daily basis with the most ambitious projects in crypto. Get in touch with us sales@transak.com or sign up at https://dashboard.transak.com/
- Join us on Discord, Telegram, or Twitter
- We’re hiring! Find out more at http://careers.transak.com/
