Australia's first crypto exchange isn't a typical success story
Categories: Crypto News US
Australia's first crypto exchange isn't a typical success story
When Australian entrepreneur Asher Tan started cryptocurrency exchange CoinJar in 2013, more than half of his work was simply explaining to users what bitcoin is. Nearly a decade later, that conversation happens very rarely. "The narrative has moved on from that," Tan tells The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. "The conversation right now isn't 'what is bitcoin,' it's 'Tesla should sell its bitcoin'."
“Ten years ago this would have been a ridiculous headline – what is a car company doing with bitcoin anyway? It all goes so far.” Tan, along with his co-founder Ryan Zhou, holds the honor of being one of the earliest Australian crypto exchanges to launch, with Tan jokingly having high hopes for CoinJar as the company was funded in the same round as"a bunch of unicorns".
Expected or not, CoinJar has abandoned the traditional VC-fueled startup growth trajectory, raised no further capital after its seed round, and instead opted to grow the business organically. Today the exchange has about half a million users and oversees approximately $1 billion in funds. The more measured approach has served trading well through the downs and troughs of the notoriously volatile crypto market,Tan believes, especially with the recent sharp decline in crypto assets prompting the closure of international exchanges Celsius and Voyager.
“In every market cycle you see different heroes and villains, but you don’t have to be one – you can just be yourself,” he says. "Everybody's always trying to yell at everyone, but you don't really have to participate in that." This is why Tan really welcomes the bear market for CoinJar, saying it will cut out a lot of the “noise” in the industry.
And allow the business to focus on building out its service, so that the company can continue to pull out whatever the future throws at the crypto market. “It’s been a long time. When we started, both Ryan and I were still in our twenties,” he says. “I’m just glad I don’t have to explain to you what bitcoin is.”