Startups • July 30, 2020, 12:00PM EDT
UPDATED: July 30, 2020, 12:03PM EDT

CoinList launches professional exchange in bid to become one-stop shop for token investing and trading

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Token sale platform CoinList is furthering its push into digital asset trading with the launch of a professional exchange venue, the company announced Thursday. 

The firm, which previously announced the launch of an exchange following an investment from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019, is best-known for conducting the token sales of projects including Filecoin, Dfinity, and Blockstack. 

The new exchange platform, dubbed CoinList Pro, is effectively an upgrade of the exchange it launched last year, adding features like "a live order book and multiple order types." It also marries the firm's token sale offering with secondary trading, said president Andy Bromberg. That will improve some of the frictions investors and traders previously faced following a token distribution after a sale, he said. 

"Previously, the token sale would happen and then we would give users instructions to generate a wallet, then they would wait for an exchange to support the token on the trading side and then they would have to send the tokens from their wallet to the exchange," Bromberg explained. 

The one-stop-shop experience the company is looking to offer could give it a leg-up over other venues. Still, there's no guarantee that traders will stick around on the platform to trade large-cap coins like bitcoin. In a sense, CoinList is looking to be "the Nasdaq" of the crypto exchange space, catering to traders in more bleeding-edge tokens rather than "blue chips." Nasdaq was once known for being the go-to listings venue for early-stage tech companies. 

"The exchange space is hard," Bromberg admitted. "But our biggest advantage is: anyone who participated in a token sale on our platform is a CoinList user and they are going to be the most passionate community members. And we instantly will have those community members as exchange clients." 

CoinList raised $10 million in a Series A funding round in October 2019. Its investors include Polychain Capital and Collaborative fund in addition to Dorsey.