A start-up crypto exchange that was funded by an established precious metals trading company were looking to build a new exchange, providing crypto trading against fiat and precious metals.

As a start-up, the entire business had to be built from ground up, which included branding, operations, financial systems, inventory systems and the exchange itself. A cross functional team had to be built, and since the start-up were cost conscious, an offshore hybrid model was built to offer a balance of capacity and cost effectiveness.

To maintain financial efficiency, the exchange wanted to utilise a combination of onshore and offshore resources. We identified the roles that would remain onshore, and started the recruitment process, and for offshore we defined a set of criteria for vendor selection and went to market to identify a best fit supplier.

We used a Kanban approach with dynamic release dates rather than the fixed sprints in Agile Scrum. We grouped stories that had common ground into work streams, and implemented a branching strategy that allowed multiple work streams to develop in parallel and release based on priority at the time of completion.
We set up the entire business operations, including:

1. Building the onshore and offshore development and quality assurance teams

2. Setting up the network infrastructure, including disaster recovery

3. Developing the code for exchange

4. Defining operational procedures.

We worked with stakeholders across the business as part of the entire end-to-end process – from defining the requirements to achieve their goals, to operational support once the platform was launched.

• Fully functional trading platform for crypto and fiat

• Fully operational business with defined processes and systems to meet FSA standards

• Entire team had to be built as the exchange was a startup

• Development supplier yet to be sourced

• Crypto was relatively new, not much expertise in the market and technical development knowledge was extremely limited