Trust In A Trustless World
Three key areas to building trust in a decentralized landscape
As a non-technical founder entering the cryptocurrency space, one of the most fascinating aspects of blockchain technology was the possibility of an entire financial system with no third-party trust required. Coming from an area of the world where censorship is prevalent, the idea of having a transparent, immutable ledger was a feature of the cryptocurrency ecosystem that really attracted and convinced me to forge a career in this space. However, there’s one unfortunate and ironic reality of starting a cryptocurrency company; most companies building on and around decentralized protocols are themselves centralized and require the trust of their customers to function.
One of the biggest challenges during the early days of 3Commas was building customer trust.
Our first “product” for 3Commas was actually just tools that we build to help balance and mitigate risk in our own cryptocurrency portfolios. Word spread to our friends, who were also interested in finding a way to find some stability in the volatile cryptocurrency markets. Based on the huge amount of interest in our initial products, we knew that we had a potentially good business model on our hands. However, we quickly realized that we were now entering uncharted territory. Now, we weren’t just building tools for friends, but random cryptocurrency users, a group that as a whole places huge value on transparent, trustless, and decentralized systems.
As CMO, part of my early role in 3Commas was to build customer trust. In particular, one of the biggest barriers was the fact that we ask for our customer’s exchange API keys. In a world where it seems like we hear about a new exchange hack every week and pushes the mantra “not your keys, not your coins”, the prospect of asking someone to voluntarily give away their keys was daunting at first. However, after experimentation and some bumps along the road, I’ve come up with three key areas to building trust with customers in the decentralized landscape: Transparency, Open Dialogue, and Security.
At 3Commas, transparency to our users is one of our biggest priorities. Trading bots can be confusing even to experienced traders, so our goal is always to ensure that our users fully understand everything involved with the trading experience, from product features, to prices, and of course the potential risks involved. To that end, we publish guides for each of our trading bots so that our users can get a feel for the experience on each exchange. If you’d like to learn more, check out https://help.3commas.io/en/ to read some of our educational courses and product guides.
Next, our company builds trust by prioritizing having an open dialogue with our user base. From our early days, we built our products based on direct user feedback from Telegram and other forums. A lot of that early criticism was harsh, as our products weren’t at their current level of sophistication but that open dialogue was crucial to seeing what worked. Three years later, we’re still glad to hear out our users for the next product to keep up in this fast-moving space.
Finally, and most importantly, we built the most secure tech to make sure that our users funds are always safe. As cryptocurrency traders ourselves, we understand the intricacies of security in a hacker friendly ecosystem. In addition to having an amazing technical team who are constantly looking to build new products and secure existing ones, we also have a great bug bounty program to get help from our great (and talented!) users.
Building trust in a trustless world hasn’t been easy, but we’re glad that our past hard work to build trust has led 3Commas to be trusted by over 200,00 users! We look forward to continued growth by doing the same thing that got us here, focusing on our users first and building trust.
