Success leaves clues. Finance Strategists sat down with Benoist Claassen, founder of crypto trading service Altrady. He shared his thoughts on the past, present, and future of the company, as well as the insight he learned from running the business. Q: Who are you and what’s your background? I am Benoist Claassen, CEO and Founder of Altrady. I graduated from the Delft University of Technology with a degree in Information Technology then proceeded with my Master’s in Human Centered Media at the University of Amsterdam. Apart from developing cryptocurrency trading applications, I also have experience in creating sophisticated web-based software and digital identity platforms. Through my tech services, I was able to help governments and companies around the world in securing civilians’ personal data and protecting their digital identity. I successfully created the digital architecture for two major identity platforms in the Gov UK Verify scheme and also developed open-source authentication libraries used by various entities such as the US government. My skills as an IT professional have positively helped my home country by leading the development of an identity platform in The Netherlands and by having been on the advisory board for oAuth and SAML security modules used for standardized usage within the Dutch government. While working on my tech projects, I actively take part in the crypto trading community by constantly looking out for market trends, spotting profitable opportunities, and observing gaps in various trading platforms. My focus right now is the growth of Altrady to be the leading crypto trading platform that can ease the problems of crypto traders across the globe. Q: Who has been your biggest influence, and why did they have such a significant effect on you? The trading community has been my biggest influence for starting Altrady. When we launched Crypto Base Scanner, we made sure to have open social communication channels and virtual communities that allowed us to understand the different struggles of fellow crypto traders. It is through these personal interactions and getting feedback that we were able to come up with solutions that can respond to their struggles, desires, and goals. From a mere base scanning application, we were able to develop an all-in-one trading platform - that’s all thanks to the contribution of the Altrady trading community. Whenever I read comments of gratitude and approval from our users, I feel unexplainable joy and this makes me even more passionate and eager to work hard for the crypto sphere. Q: Knowing what you know now, what would you have told yourself when you were in your twenties? Honestly, I wouldn’t want to change anything regarding my experience that led me to try crypto technology. So if ever I would have to tell something to my younger self, I would say this: “It’s okay, you learn things along the way.” I’ve always been open to my failures as a crypto trader when I was just starting out. If not for all these failures, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to find a solution to such problems. Looking back to how much money I’ve lost along the way and how many trials have led to both errors and successes, there’s just no other way it could have been done. I was able to leverage my personal experience as a trader in developing the Altrady software. By knowing the pains of my intended market, my team and I were able to design crypto tools and applications that could help them ease their trading experience. Q: What is Altrady? Altrady is a cryptocurrency trading software that features a powerful trading terminal and a comprehensive portfolio management tool. It is an all-in-one crypto trading platform that offers easy and convenient solutions so that traders can get access to functional tools that can help achieve success in their trading journey. With Altrady, crypto traders can integrate multiple exchange accounts into our platform and experience a seamless trading process. The exchanges available for integration are Binance, Binance US, Bittrex, BitMEX, Coinbase Pro, HitBTC, Huobi, Kraken, KuCoin, OKEx, and Poloniex. Aside from connecting the Altrady app to different exchanges, you can also use the platform to keep track of your digital assets across exchange wallets. Altrady’s comprehensive portfolio manager lets you see your crypto balances organized per currency and exchange. Since Altrady’s goal is to make trading accessible to everyone, users can take advantage of its web, desktop, and mobile versions so that they can trade anytime and anywhere. You can also use other cryptocurrency tools by Altrady, such as Crypto Base Scanner, Quick Scanner, trading journal, automatic break-even calculator, and more. In essence, Altrady acts as your ultimate trading platform where you can do so many things such as create different types of buy and sell orders, monitor market movements, receive price notifications, see the growth of your portfolios, and more. Q: What makes your company different from its competitors? Although we are a relative newcomer in the field of crypto trading software development, Altrady has already made a name for itself. In terms of sending crypto alerts, other platforms fail to deliver real-time data. But this is not the case for Altrady, because our software uses powerful technology, unique algorithms, WebSockets, and backend exchange updates to make sure that our users receive accurate notifications in real-time. Furthermore, Altrady features a powerful trading terminal that is not available to other crypto trading platforms. Our users can take advantage of Crypto Base Scanner and Quick Scanner tools to automatically track market movements and effectively create price analyses for profitable trading actions. The Altrady crypto trading platform also boasts of other features such as diverse trading order types, a detailed portfolio manager, automatic break-even calculator, customizable trading layout, trading journal, and more. Despite being considered the “new kid on the block,” Altrady is now on the way to becoming the best crypto trading platform. Q: What led you to start Altrady? My involvement in the crypto trading industry did not begin with Altrady. The first crypto software development we had under Web2000 BV was Crypto Base Scanner, a crypto market scanning application that uses unique algorithms to monitor base information against crypto price histories. I had the motivation to start Crypto Base Scanner when I experienced the pains of losing my hard-earned money from crypto trading. Not only did it affect my financial resources but also took away my precious time from doing other stuff that I love such as spending time with my family and having a good night’s sleep. Just like the awful stories of other beginner traders, I had to suffer from all those because I did not have a strategy and a crypto platform to use. This experience opened me to the idea of using my own programming knowledge to create a useful technology that could help cryptocurrency traders like me deal with their own struggles. It was great to have met a friend who is an excellent web designer who helped me in conceptualizing and implementing the plan of having a crypto market scanning application. In December 2017, Crypto Base Scanner was born out of our simple goal to have a tool that traders can use for effectively tracking market movements and using base information for profitable trades. The first year of Crypto Base Scanner was a success with thousands of users have tried the software. But seeing the potential of the first platform that we developed, we expanded our CBS team to include more talented staff who can help us create a better platform that can comprehensively respond to the many needs of crypto traders. In the second half of 2019, we finally launched another brand - the Altrady cryptocurrency trading platform. Q: What has the experience of building the business taught you? Building from the ground up has never been easy. Most startups would understand that it takes a lot of courage, persistence, and patience to make a tech startup successful. Since my experience has been freelance software development, it has been initially challenging to establish my own company, Web2000 BV. Unlike my previous projects when I had to do things on my own, now I have to step up and lead a team to create bigger possibilities. Building Altrady from scratch taught me the values of right vision, talent recognition, teamwork, and humility. From the beginning, our vision was already clear: to be a leader in making cryptocurrency trading easier and accessible to everyone. With this vision directing our paths, we were able to make strategic plans that can lead us to the fulfillment of our goals. Talent recognition and teamwork were also among the pillars in Altrady. If not for the individual talents pooled together, we wouldn’t have reached this far. I am truly thankful for having such wonderfully talented team members who have dedicated their time, skills, and effort even when Altrady wasn’t yet a big name in the industry. Ultimately, humility made our progress possible. By acknowledging our humble beginnings and allowing our users’ feedback to affect our decision-making, we were able to have an inclusive development culture that listens to our customers’ needs and responds to them accordingly. Q: Where do you see things headed for you in the next 5 years? The Altrady team is united in one vision: to be the number one crypto trading platform that offers easy and accessible trading solutions to everyone. Five years from now, we are seeing Altrady to be the leading name in the cryptocurrency industry. From over twenty thousand users in 2020, we are expecting to have over a million Altrady traders in 2025. Considering the increasing number of cryptocurrency traders every year and the speed by which cryptocurrency adoption is happening, we only have high hopes for the Altrady trading community. In view of this, we are looking to expand our team and bring in more experts from the crypto, tech, blockchain, and business industries. Through this, we will be able to improve our platform by creating innovative tools for our traders. For more information, see https://www.altrady.com/.
Introduction
Who is Benoist Claassen?
Business
True Tamplin is a published author, public speaker, CEO of UpDigital, and founder of Finance Strategists.
True is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance (CEPF®), author of The Handy Financial Ratios Guide, a member of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, contributes to his financial education site, Finance Strategists, and has spoken to various financial communities such as the CFA Institute, as well as university students like his Alma mater, Biola University, where he received a bachelor of science in business and data analytics.
To learn more about True, visit his personal website or view his author profiles on Amazon, Nasdaq and Forbes.
