A social trading platform is dropping equities for cryptocurrencies. The network, investFeed, announced on Thursday that it has decided to stop allowing investors to trade equities on its platform.
Instead, the over 15,000 current users on the platform will use the platform to trade in decentralized digital assets.
(Related: 4 Popular Candidates for the Next Bubble: Kleintop)
Ron Chernesky, CEO of investFeed, is a former trader who launched the platform with CTO Andrew Freedman in early 2015.
The platform is the result of Chernesky and Freedman’s goal to “build a transparent type of Twitter for the financial markets,” where users create profiles they can integrate with their existing brokerage account. Users can share their trade with peers “and create a fully open and transparent environment for the equities industry on the social level.”
As the market for cryptocurrencies has grown, though, Chernesky said, users started asking for them to be added to the investFeed platform. The cryptocurrency market hit over $100 billion in June, according to Autonomous Research, but CoinDesk reported on Sunday that the market fell almost 50% to $61 billion.
“Over the last few months, the uprise in this has just created that much more demand on our platform,” he said.
“Once we had a change to get an understanding of the underlying technology … and figured out what technology stack we wanted to use, we realized the advantages that this technology has over what we had been using,” Chernesky said.