Cryptocurrency, financial services entrepreneur Andrew Elliott says, suffers from a terrible problem:
“It’s not fraudulent or anything, but it’s not really trustworthy.”
It’s precisely that problem that Elliott and co-founder Will Trible hope to solve with Coin Savage, a financial services product that launched July 20 and that Elliott described as “the Airbnb of crypto advice.”
Coin Savage, which started out by providing expert analysis of news and trends in the field of cryptocurrency, will operate as a leaderboard of experts that users can turn to when determining which investments to make. Experts can post their own content, track their own trading activity and interact with users, all of which can move them up or down in the rankings.
In return, users dipping a toe into cryptocurrency investment or looking to expand their involvement in the market can take advantage of a pool of experts whose accuracy and knowledge is constantly being evaluated.
“We want [experts] to build their own brand, and we want them to use our own platform to do that,” said Elliott, who described the leaderboard framework as a “mechanism for trust.”
Elliott’s own fascination with the often-murky world of cryptocurrency started small. A graduate of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a former investment advisor for Davenport, Elliott described himself as “a stocks and bonds kind of guy.” Consequently, when he first encountered cryptocurrency, he dismissed it as a bubble — until a friend suggested that he check out Ethereum.
“I found myself going down this rabbit hole, where I was staying up all night going through white papers,” he said. “I was challenging myself to open my mind, do my homework… As I started to do that, it dawned on me: this is huge.”
What particularly captured his attention was the ease and speed that cryptocurrency brought to transactions, qualities that he said have “fundamental value.”
After that realization, Elliott and Trible, who had been brainstorming startups, decided to join up to see what they could make of the growing market.
That was nine months ago, and since then Coin Savage — the name stemmed from a vision of the experts as warriors, competing to demonstrate superior expertise on cryptocurrency — has expanded from two to four people, all with equity in the company.
So far, the company has been bootstrapped, with the largest expense being the platform buildout.
Coin Savage may still be enmeshed in its launch phase, but its founders have big plans for the tool’s future, including adding a booking mechanism that will allow users to obtain advice from crypto experts, providing Spanish-language content to tap into the growing market of Spanish-speaking investors and even “gamifying” Coin Savage itself.
The goal, Elliott said, is “to be recognized in Richmond as the company that brought crypto to Richmond in a mainstream, credible way.”
“A year-and-a-half ago, I thought all of this was a stupid bubble,” he said. “Now it’s all I do.”
