If setting up an e-commerce marketplace is hard, setting up your own digital currency-exchange may be levels of magnitude more challenging.

Fortunately, there are companies like AlphaPoint that specialize in building customized digital currency exchanges—including bitcoin exchanges—in less than 20 days.

While bitcoin drives the digital currency bus in many ways, the proliferation of cryptocurrencies and altcoins means that exchanging value between alternative and traditional currencies is more complex than ever. AlphaPoint sees its role as two-fold: helping digital currency exchanges cope with the demands of their enterprise clients, and making it possible for startups and new companies to enter the market with the latest in technology.

AlphaPoint statistics

• Founded in 2013
• Vadim Telyatnikov is CEO
• Headquartered in New York, with offices in Philadelphia and San Francisco
• Powers nearly 20 exchanges in 15 countries across six continents, including the world’s largest Bitcoin/USD exchange, Bitfinex
• Processes 1 million transactions per second

The story

AlphaPoint CEO Vadim Telyatnikov has referred to his company as the “Intel Inside” of digital currency exchange. As a white-label digital currency-exchange platform, AlphaPoint serves the fintech industry in three main ways.

• Enabling quick launch of new digital currency exchanges for entrepreneurs and startups in any region, “with liquidity on day one.”
• Helping established companies looking to add digital currencies to their product mix.
• Delivering better performance, more functionality, and additional features to existing digital currency exchanges in need of upgrades.

For their Finovate debut, AlphaPoint choose to demonstrate their platform’s newly overhauled front end. Enhancements include new order types, improved scalability, and faster processing speed.

The technology

AlphaPoint 2.0 is a high-performance platform that allows users a wide range of customization options. The platform’s modular, widget-based design gives operators a lot of control over how visual data is displayed. The platform includes six predesigned templates, though users are “encouraged” to develop templates of their own. AlphaPoint also lets FIs configure, track, and trade their own currency pairs and combinations—fiat to fiat, commodity to fiat, and fiat to virtual.

The robust technology features error-detection codes for each record, and quick fail-over support to provide “best-of-breed” security and reliability. The platform also comes with Quantum Front, an system-admin resource that gives operators a wholistic view of users, risk, trading activity and more without being limited to the functionality of a web browser.

AlphaPoint’s platform is available as both a fully branded and white-label solution. The technology is fully supported on both Windows and Linux operating systems, and supports both FIX and FAST API connections to make it easy for traditional FIs in particular to deploy and use.

Joe Ventura, AlphaPoint founder and CTO, has more than 15 years of experience as a software architect at corporations like Deustche Bank and UBS. Talking about the platform, Ventura emphasizes that the technology was built with two things in mind: scalability and security. “Our vision is to make it as seamless as possible for mainstay financial institutions to embrace digital currencies,” Ventura said. “[We] are excited to add these new front-end features to make integration into existing web products even easier for our clients.”

The future

AlphaPoint came into 2015 with the momentum of a $1.35 million fund-raise at its back. Following its Finovate debut in February 2015, PaymentEye called AlphaPoint one of the top demos of day two, and many observers credited the company for helping keep bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in the conversation at the London conference.

Asked for his company’s initiatives and goals for 2015, Telyatnikov put greater access to digital currencies at the top of his list. And it is no surprise that he sees AlphaPoint as playing a major role in making that happen. “We are excited to release a stream of new features and products in 2015,” he said. “[We] will make it easier than ever for institutions to embrace digital currencies.”

See AlphaPoint’s live demonstration video from FinovateEurope 2015.