In January of this year, a new crypto exchange established itself in Amsterdam. The name of this crypto is Fine. The brand new Finst started a serious rise almost immediately and that is not surprising, because the exchange offers users a number of unique advantages that cannot be found anywhere else.
We asked one of Finst’s founders and CEO what exactly these benefits are; Julian Vallet. Not only that, but we also touched on the story leading up to Finst, and what the future will look like for this new Dutch exchange.
Finst sees opportunities in the market
First of all, it is important to talk about the DEGIRO stock platform. Why? Both Julien and co-founder Marcel come from here. Both were partly responsible for the huge success that the DEGIRO trading platform has achieved over the past few years.
Together with other former DEGIRO managers, they saw an opportunity in another market; the cryptocurrency market
“Surprisingly, we found that crypto trading was kind of in the same place as stock trading 15 years ago. Firstly, it is very expensive for private individuals to invest in crypto, with many platforms it is almost impossible to find exactly how expensive it is. We thought to ourselves: we can do better.”
Julien and Marcel were also not satisfied with the features that almost all other exchanges offer. So is an extensive profit & loss (P&L) tool that allows you to clearly see how much profit and/or loss you are making, almost nowhere to be found today. So Finst has already made the much-needed change here.
Certain functions appeared to hardly exist among established players. For example, performance analysis is extremely important for an investor. After all, how can you get better if you don’t know how well you’re actually doing.
Finally, there was a major problem regarding security and transparency, according to Julien. They saw long before FTX went down that certain companies did not have their affairs in order. Finst would do that differently, and not much later the FTX debacle also confirmed that Finst was on the right path in this way.
Finst also works closely with Bunq. All customer funds are placed with this regulated Dutch bank, which of course makes Finst a lot safer than it already was. Finst will also be completely transparent about the financial situation at all times, which is not one of the priorities of many crypto exchanges today.
“We want to set the highest standards in the crypto industry. We hope to make it a safe industry where users can trust that their platform is reliable. That is why we set up Finst.”
Expansion in Europe
Finst is based in Amsterdam, but it does not intend to limit itself to the Netherlands. The ambition of Finst’s team is clearly also a ‘conquest’ of Europe.
“Investors in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, experience the same problems with the current crypto industry, for which we have the solution. So expanding to these countries is definitely on the agenda. It is still too early to put a precise date on this, but we will probably be live across Europe within 24 months.”
It is therefore clear that there is no lack of ambition in Finst’s team either. The battle with other exchanges is already underway, and with the feature package and extremely low costs that Finst offers, they could certainly win this battle.
Finnish in the future
At the moment, Finst can already show off a number of unique functionalities. An example of this is the previously discussed analysis of your performance as a Finnish customer. Previously, many investors still used excel to track their performance. Finst claims to have the best performance analyse tool built in Europe.
In the future, the number of unique functions will only be expanded. For example, more crypto trading pairs will become available at a rapid pace and customers will soon be able to send and withdraw crypto.
But according to Julien, there are also a lot of truly revolutionary new features on the agenda. While Julien wasn’t ready to say exactly what this is about yet, he says no platform has such features yet. In any case, we are curious.
If you are also curious and want to try out Finst, you can do so here create an account for free! Users who sign up now can trade $5,000 at absolutely no cost!