Crypto and compliance

There are many debates about the possibility to run crypto related businesses and be legally and otherwise compliant with institutions in the country of operations. Strategic development of such operations will surely require the completion of multiple steps. One group of companies established by the same founding team of entrepreneurs have mastered competencies in compliance with institutions and therefore is a good example to learn from. The story of SpectroCoin and Pervesk tandem started in 2013 when three entrepreneurs from Lithuania aiming to capture the quickly emerging opportunities in crypto-currency related business established a crypto-currency exchange, SpectroCoin. Crypto-currency exchanges is an online platform, in which users can exchange, meaning by yourself, cryptocurrencies or exchange cryptocurrencies to fiat currencies, such as EUR or USD.

This was an extremely tiny development because in early 2013 only the Bitcoin was the most popular cryptocurrency. While a few years later, around 2017, a large amount of other cryptocurrencies existed and were known in the market. As a result, within the first three years after the establishment, SpectroCoin became a well-established medium size brand with 500,000 registered users from the crypto community. The company had 20 employees, three million in sales revenue, and half a million net profit. SpectroCoin released a cryptocurrency brokerage service, cryptocurrency wallets for buying, selling, sending, receiving, and storing bitcoins, and various solutions for crypto payments. All this has been created at the time when no clear regulatory framework was still established and the shared values in the industry were also lacking. How did SpectroCoins succeed with compliance issues and gained legitimacy among the customers and other stakeholders? Well, when building these operations, the firm was anticipating the forthcoming regulations and followed many procedures before the regulations were issued. For example, they had established similar to anti-money laundering prevention process before the AML5 regulation came in force. Having succeeded very well in the crypto market, the firm soon became ready for the further vertical growth and started to realize other niches existing in the traditional financial market.