Company Updates
CoinGate in 2019: highlights of the year!
Last updated: December 26, 2019 7 min read
Vilius Barbaravičius
By now, it has become our little tradition to start planning for the next year by assessing everything that happened throughout the last one. So here it is – CoinGate in 2019, all wrapped up!
First off, we’re proud to say that our team continues to grow! At the same time last year, CoinGate consisted of 20 people. Now, there are 32 of us, and we’re still headhunting for more!
While our team continues to grow, so does the number of our processed payments. Since the day our gateway opened up for business, we processed a total of 750,000 cryptocurrency payments, whereas 340,000 of them occurred in 2019!
That’s 44% of all payments processed since the company launched, and 13,4% more than the record 2018!
We won’t surprise anyone by saying that Bitcoin payments dominated our gateway, but altcoins were not absent as well. Over the year, our merchants have received 15,393 LTC, 19,185 ETH and 8,080 XRP payments.
If we’d take the number of orders of all 50 cryptocurrencies that we process (excluding Bitcoin), we would have 51,730 altcoin orders processed in a year, which accounts for approximately 15,2% of our yearly order volume.
We even got some traction on the Bitcoin Lightning network! Over the year, shoppers made 1,681 successful orders using our Lightning solution, totalling in the yearly volume of 7.71660321 BTC.
We couldn’t possibly maintain our company’s growth without improving upon our services and presenting new things regularly. We have a long memory lane to walk on, starting with the very first coin integration of 2019.
Support for more cryptocurrencies!
In 2018, we were processing payments natively for just a few digital assets – mainly Bitcoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, with Nano, Ether, and a couple of ERC20-based tokens added right at the end of the year. Now, our basket of cryptocurrencies boasts of significantly larger diversity!
In terms of new coin integrations, Q1 was the craziest one by far. We made our very first public announcement on the 14th of January when we introduced TRON (TRX) payment processing to our merchants and TRON enthusiasts around the world.
Less than two weeks after the launch TRON payments, we have also integrated Dai, which was the very first stablecoin that we introduced to our customers. However, the biggest surprise from us to the crypto community followed right after.
On the 1st of February, we have launched XRP payments and immediately got the most positive response we could ever expect. In fact, the community hyped up our announcement so much that it made headlines in popular crypto news outlets, including Cointelegraph!
There were two more native coins introduced on CoinGate after that. The Q1 integration spree ended with BSV joining the list of supported currencies on the 25th of February. The last addition had taken place on the 17th of July when we enabled BitTorrent Token (BTT) payments for our merchants.
Interestingly, this particular announcement caught the most eyes on social media last year, making it the most publicly appreciated addition to our gateway by far.
Since all cryptocurrencies mentioned above were integrated on our platform natively, all were added to our primary trading services. That means traders can sell any of those coins at CoinGate for fiat, or buy them using bank transfer, credit card, and more. Speaking off different ways to buy crypto…
New payment method and coins for purchase
We are known for our cryptocurrency brokerage services as much as for payment processing. As such, we kept striving to introduce more payment methods and new assets to purchase.
We’ve managed to add more coins for those buying digital assets with credit cards. Until 2019, our customers were able to purchase Bitcoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. By the year 2020, we’ve also added ETH XRP, TRX, ATOM, XLM, and BNB to the list!
Introduction of Litecoin’s Lightning Network
And here’s one of the coolest things we did in 2019. On the 17th of January, we introduced the long-awaited Litecoin’s Lightning Network (LNN) payment support. We’re glad that VPN service provider Surfshark stepped up and became the first to implement and showcase our brand new payment solution, which means they’re likely to be the first ones in history to accept LNN payments.
Since that day, our merchants were able to accept Litecoin payments through the Lightning Network without the need to set up any nodes! It was a big deal not only for us but for many Litecoin enthusiasts as well. We even got a casual “thanks” from Charlie Lee himself!
Even though not many shoppers ended up taking advantage of it, we believe that in due time, this functionality will prove more useful, just as Bitcoin’s Lightning Network did.
The cashback feature
In July, we started testing what we call a cashback feature. While enabled, it allows us to give back a percentage of payment back to the shopper. This tool has yet to reach its full functionality, but we already managed to use it during our promotional offers successfully.
As such, we did a successful test run with XRP, resulting in 1,859 cashback requests and $7,711.28 worth of XRP given back to the shoppers. This functionality also came in handy when we did the Black Friday campaign and offered cashback for purchases with Nano, TRON, BitTorrent Token and XRP.
Our current goal is to develop it further so merchants could enable it for themselves whenever they want for cryptocurrencies of their choice, and issue cashbacks by themselves. That’s on our 2020 roadmap as well!
Permission-based account structure
One of the most significant updates to our platform came in August when we introduced permission-based accounts to our customers. Since then, businesses got an option to invite their team members and assign roles to manage different tasks associated with the CoinGate account.
With this update, we adapted the platform not only for small but also for both medium and large enterprises to build the payment management infrastructure of their own.
With the introduction of account permissions, our user’s experience has also improved. In addition to minor changes like more straightforward navigation, we implemented changes that allow for more flexible handling of data. That includes elaborate filtering, sorting and exporting data of orders and withdrawals.
However, all of this is just part of a more substantial update we’re going to introduce in 2020, so keep an eye for it!
Attended countless conferences and organized a music event!
A significant portion of our team dedicated their last quarter for visiting the biggest tech conferences and establishing new connections in all corners of the world.
To briefly sum up our little tour, we went to eight different conferences in five countries and even organized a music event at Slush 2019 with a world-renowned expert of modular synthesizers Girts Ozolinš!
Here are a few moments from that great night:
Attending these events is both fun and essential part of our yearly activities, so you’ll get a chance to meet us in some of them next year for sure!
CoinGate – the leading force in local fintech
On the 4th of December, the new Global Fintech Index report on the fintech climate around the world caught us by surprise when we saw our company’s name mentioned amongst the leaders of the local fintech industry!
If that’s not enough, our home country Lithuania was ranked at #4 in the Global Fintech Index Top 10 list of most advanced fintech hubs in the world!
For us, it’s a great achievement and a great reminder that we do important, meaningful work. As such, we intend to keep up the pace and maintain our growth as we go forward.
What the future holds for CoinGate?
No doubt it was an exciting year for us and the whole crypto industry. And in a week or two, we will share our roadmap for 2020 and talk about all the future developments in detail. Until then, enjoy the holiday week and see you next year!