Matthew Rodbourne of EthBits Discusses Crypto Copy Trading and Market Manipulation At CoinFest UK

The company is gearing up for a significant expansion with iTrade, slated to go live in August. This new offering functions as a social trading system enabling participants to mirror the positions of other traders across Bitcoin and a curated selection of altcoins. A critical component involves a risk assessment mechanism designed to curtail coordinated trading patterns. Rodbourne elaborated: "To stop market manipulation, we have a risk rating so if one of the users is buying bitcoin and he has lots of followers and the followers are not making money because he is selling to them at the top the risk rating is very high, so you can't manipulate the market we've really taken care of that."

The strategy involves launching iTrade initially as a conventional trading platform, with mirroring capabilities phased in as internal trading grows. Rather than benchmarking against external market metrics, the team will measure growth within the ecosystem itself. When asked about which digital assets might dominate the market, Rodbourne highlighted the ongoing competition between EOS and Ethereum. The platform will prioritize established, heavily-traded coins before gradually introducing smaller-cap tokens: "On iTrade we are going to exclusively keep it to the high-volume coins, and implement the lower volume coins down the road."

Rodbourne hinted at a forthcoming development designed to make waves across the industry, though he declined specifics. "We have one event that is going to shake the crypto community, I can't tell you what it is as I don't want someone to steal the idea. We have reserved a lot of money for it, will be announced in August one of the biggest events in crypto. When the exchange opens we are going to announce the big event, we'll bring in people from around the world because it will be one of the biggest in crypto."

The ETHBITS ecosystem includes its own dividend-bearing token, distributed via Ethereum to users. Should the firm generate one million pounds in revenue, it commits to distributing 30% in equivalent Ethereum tokens. Additionally, iTrade will introduce a separate utility token that both existing token holders and new participants will receive. Rodbourne emphasized the model's novelty: "We're actually going to be giving up part of our equity in the business to our token holders, which is going to be revolutionary in crypto as well, no one has ever done that." These utility tokens will themselves be tradable on iTrade.