Trade.io, a Swiss Blockchain startup that proclaims itself a "next-generation financial institution", has hired a veteran of the financial industry to its board of directors.
Vorsprung durch Technik
Arnaud Barray has been hired to help Trade.io receive its VQF authorisation. This is a licence awarded by the Verein zur Qualitätssicherung von Finanzdienstleistungen (Financial Services Standards Association), a self-regulatory association for the financial industry in Switzerland. It is approved by the country's official watchdog, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA).
According to the Trade.io press release, this licence will assure people that all Trade.io operations are compliant with Swiss anti-money laundering legislation.
Barray has worked at institutions such as Barclays, BNP Paribas, and Standard Chartered, and is currently employed as a business scout at a consultancy firm in Geneva, according to his LinkedIn profile. He said: "I’m very excited to join trade.io and assist in not only decisions from a board level, but also to assist them in obtaining VQF authorization. Given my experience and contacts in the industry, I’m confident that I can be the difference maker and finally deliver for the trade.io community as I’m fully aware they’ve been waiting quite a while for this."
A storied history
Trade.io was launched in late 2017. In December of that year it integrated with Bancor, and in January 2018 it raised $31 million in its ICO. In July 2018 it launched a cryptocurrency-to-cryptocurrency exchange.
In October, tokens worth millions of dollars were stolen from the company. They were stolen from a cold (offline) wallet which the company kept in a bank safety deposit box, but (interestingly) the company stated that the safety deposit box had not been compromised.
The company managed to track the stolen money and freeze it so that the culprit(s) only got their hands on a small fraction. However, the rest of the money remained stolen - it just couldn't be used by the thieves. Trade.io decided to fork (upgrade) its TIO token to render the stolen ones completely useless. The new version is called TIOx.
Trade.io has still not explained how the money was stolen from the safety deposit box. COO Roy Gutshall said in October that the team had "so far concluded that there was no technical hack on the third party Cold Storage unit".
As a result of the theft, Trade.io was permanently de-listed from Bancor.
