Billium: An Emerging Flywheel in the Crypto Trading Industry
Given the experience of its founders, Billium's core pitch to focus on new and experienced traders and investors is not surprising. The team understands how much friction new traders face with how they trade and exchange crypto. Many readers probably experienced this in their first few months as crypto traders. This happens primarily because of how volatile crypto is. Many aren't good chart readers; others can't interpret technical data.
Founded and registered in the UAE in 2022, Billium has made its name by providing solutions to one of crypto trading complex problems through copy trading. The crypto trading platform saves new and professional investors from wasting time reading complex charts and interpreting trading signals, allowing them to trade and invest without fear. Billium Crypto Exchange is the resulting company - a growing crypto company with near-miraculous solutions to ease trading and make profiting seamless for crypto traders. Ilia, Billium's founder and CTO, deeply understands how financial independence can reach the underserved population and what is needed to actualize this goal. In this Interview, Ilia Angelov narrates his vision for Billium, the current crypto trading industry, and how Billium is a company with tremendous network effects. He also told us about Billium's groundbreaking trading tools positioned for traders to take a massive bite from the crypto
trading market.
QUESTION: Ilia, thanks for honoring our invitation to this interview. Can you tell us more about your background and what gave birth to Billium?
ILIA: Thank you too. I am from Russia and am a 36-yr old professional stock trader. I have built an impressive career in stock trading with more than 30,000 students in my financial education institute. I am always at the frontier of creating systems that sniff out old ways of doing this. After 20 years of trading stock, I decided it was time for me to replicate my success on the global stage with cryptocurrencies. Exceptional companies emerge when a promising idea meets a well-positioned thinker. Billium illustrates this assertion. I spent years monitoring trades and helping people understand profitable trade secrets. That experience told me something is missing in crypto. People do not need extra layers of knowledge to trade. "Why can't they adopt an already winning formula," I said to myself before founding Billium. This is the gap Billium wants to fill. I believe everyone must belong to a democratized wealth-creation generation. Solutions have emerged to tackle some problems in crypto, but they are of little benefit to new investors. We shouldn't use a machete when all we need is a scalpel.
QUESTION: These past few months have been challenging for the crypto industry. Ilia, we have moved from a market capitalization of $2 trillion to about $1.01T. What can you say about this unexpected shift and what it means for new traders and founders in the space?
ILIA: I agree. This tumultuous period has introduced one of the biggest challenges in the cryptocurrency industry, which is related to carving out real-world use cases for crypto. The main challenge is for cryptocurrency to branch out of the usual payment purposes. We must find and answer these challenges with real-world use cases. Outside of Bitcoin, we can begin to ask how each crypto coin will be used for real-life cases. Would the payment use cases continue? Would there be a new integration, say tokenized assets in arts? What can we do with tokenized real estate? Insurance? We can say theindustry is witnessing a recent breakout, but this needs to continue across different industries. It means we need to innovate within by transforming the existing sectors with innovations through innovative projects. Much like other founders and executives, I believe the present market downturn is an avenue to prioritize deliverables and product development. Nevertheless, the deleveraging by Three Arrows Capital and Celsius, including the Luna saga, affects market expansion. Amidst this turbulence, Billium continues to hire experts and people with a similar vision to strengthen our product andmake inroad passage into emerging markets. It has allowed us to direct our resources and expand our energy internally to make Billium more efficient and streamline our processes.
QUESTION: Apart from Billium, a wave of new projects is entering the space every month. What does this mean for the future of crypto and web3? Do you think we will reach a point where all economies will be based on the principles of blockchain?
ILIA: Actually, people now realize the disruptive potential of cryptocurrency. We will see more governance and enterprise adoption across many countries. According to a recent report by ChainAnalysis, Vietnam now occupies the first position as the country with the highest rate of crypto adoption. We also see some in East Africa. Today, it feels like more people are interested in crypto and how it affects their socio-economic activities. Blockchain will power a new social network of digital natives. It will birth a new generation of actors and players with innovative and sustainable business models. This will take time to happen. I see the current economic systems aligning with crypto in the foreseeable future. We will have a bankless society piloted on a peer-to-peer network through a consensus algorithm. On the one hand, blockchain will complement some existing systems and processes. On the other, it will completely replace those processes. It's still early to predict what mayhappen, but a sudden departure from the legacy systems won't happen soon
QUESTION: Now, let's talk about stablecoins. A lot of people have written about the importance of stablecoins in the world of crypto. From your perspective, how do you see stablecoins in the regulatory arms of different countries?
ILIA: Yes, I have read many reports about stablecoins and the attempt to draft regulatory measures regarding "its potential risks to the national currency, financial system, and end users." Firstly, price swoops, volatility, and dives make bitcoin fascinating. Stablecoins, on the other hand, are boring - being pegged to the value of fiat currencies makes them one. But they are equally helpful, for example, in the case of USDT, which is embedded in crypto trading and lending platforms. Less well-known to most people, the existing stablecoin market is above $110 billion, including about four large stablecoins. People don't trade paper dollars for digital assets; it is crypto to crypto. This makes them a bridge between two opposing worlds. Traditional finance and crypto assets aren't designed to mix. Because these coins are at the epicenter of global discussion, regulation is expected. I understand their view, and it's that the use of stablecoins may facilitate sidestepping some policies connected to several traditional banking and financial systems, such as tax compliance and anti-money laundering. Secondly, SEC and other regulatory bodies see stablecoins as investment and security tools and will apply investor protection measures. Given these, I predict seeing a regulation on stablecoins soon.
QUESTION: Why did you choose Dubai as your headquarters? Why not other countries?
ILIA: The answer is simple (laughing). The UAE has emerged as the global capital of the crypto industry. The UAE government is attracting investors, founders, and talents to shape the future of decentralized global finance. Doing this, they are creating a thriving and engaging web3 community through summits, conferences, and events. Also, they provide a straightforward regulatory process for founders to scale their projects without worrying about ambiguities or uncertainties. We want to be part of the early movers, which explains why we chose the UAE.
QUESTION: What are your expansion plans? Is there any move to expand beyond the Middle East?
ILIA: Definitely, Crypto is borderless, but we don't want to rush. We already have a roadmap and guiding principles. For now, the focus is on the UAE, then the entire MENA region. Our expansion plans will be through alliance building and strategic partnerships with regional and global players, amass an audience and build on that layer to have new entry points. The data available in Africa is enough to aggressively develop our product out of this country and outside the continent. I believe we are still at the starting point of a significant reorganization in web3 and our backers.
QUESTION: How is Billium different from the current projects in the crypto space?
ILIA: While Billium might look like another crypto trading platform, there many innovations under the name. For one thing, we aren't only interested in crypto trading alone but in how we can help onboard new users into the web3 ecosystem through copy trading. It is also our bold ambition to not just build a disruptive company; we want to build a generational empire for new and emerging traders. To do so, we knew we must go beyond the norms. We knew we must make a move that transcends spot and margin trading solutions. It was a natural progression for us to supplement our functionalities with APIs for trading bots and sophisticated algorithms. This will accelerate trade execution without any need to withdraw funds. In less than a year of starting Billium, our intelligence approach and market dominance are getting clearer, making it easy for us to attract considerable funding. Billium is revolutionary- far from being just a trading platform. We are building a differentiated product to address the bottlenecks in the crypto industry,
QUESTION: Let's talk about an important issue most founders don't discuss. A lot of people think we should focus on the deliverables. That is the particular offering to the consumers. Apart from security issues, complex UX design is still a challenge in the web3 space. How are you solving this issue?
ILIA: What are they talking about when they say "focus on the deliverables"? The most important thing for us at Billium is our customers. They come first, and we are building that ownership and obsession through a customer-friendly, newbie-inviting interface. We are talking about a staggering 31% of transactions being dropped during congestion and then 10 mins of transaction approvals. We have achieved incredible growth with our UX because we don't want our users to wait unnecessarily for funds to drop into their trading accounts. Remember, most of our users are new investors and traders copying the winning trading strategies of successful investors. Having a good interface will radically transform their onboarding experience. We want to onboard more users, improve their experience, and increase their chances for profitability while incurring no added risk.
QUESTION: What is the style of leadership at Billium?
ILIA: The leadership is an inclusive one. Our leadership trademark is to press for change. It's to press for progress. The leadership team always relies on our formidable intelligence and domain expertise. Every team member has their respective department, and we work assiduously to move things as quickly as possible. I can't use apt words to describe the style of leadership. Our top-down leadership structure is involved in our daily decision-making. Overall, our greatest strengths are our execution ability and intensive work ethic.
QUESTION: Tell us more about your recruitment strategy. How do you recruit new team members?
We adopt a masterful hiring strategy demonstrated in our recent hires. We have added Anton, our new director, who's versed in B2B, B2C, crypto payment and exchange. We know we need to surround ourselves with experienced people ready to roll up their shirts to get things done. We will always give them the rope to do anything that will keep Billium on the Journey. Then comes Sulaimon Abiola, who's our new Web3 Advisor. The lad is our weapon; he is unbelievably technical but super quiet. He knows many things, a whole lot of topics. Ask him anything, and Abiola will blow your mind. His depth of knowledge is impressive. If you look at the roaster of our team, it's easy to see what I am talking about. We have taken our team to build a team for crypto trading, copy trading, security, and fraud detection - all of these in one package. Because of their deep domain knowledge and leadership experience, every team member can take responsibility and get things done. No hierarchy here. Everything has been decentralized, transparent, and open.
QUESTION: So, what does the future hold for Billium?
ILIA: We know we must navigate through a competitive landscape to reach a super-scale, that level of mass adoption in the industry. We are doing everything to carve out a strong positioning and cultivate powerful network effects. Billium is the future of crypto trading and exchange.
