Eldorado Hub is a cryptocurrency exchange platform created to help people from countries where traditional money value is low and drops daily because of the inflation rate.
It provides a secure and easy way of exchanging funds/savings into currencies of low volatility.
Our role was to quickly create the very first version of the platform and deliver it to the market so that El Dorado's founders could validate their product hypothesis, test their solution with real users, collect feedback, improve the solution, gain traction, and find investors.
We managed to achieve these goals in less than six months. After the product handover, the client successfully developed the platform further with their own development team.
Business challenge
The project aimed to create a user-friendly, fast, and secure P2P cryptocurrency exchange platform with a built-in reputation system.
We cooperated with the client through the entire process, from a product idea to the launch of the platform's first version. We started with our Product Discovery Workshop to define high-level goals, must-have features, and non-functional requirements. Later on, we turned it into a roadmap of short, achievable milestones followed by quick execution.
We faced four main challenges:
- Handling the complexity of the p2p cryptocurrency trading domain and integrations between various 3rd party providers.
- Providing an efficient setup of microservices. As we worked with a startup, the infrastructure costs needed to stay within the estimated maintenance budget.
- Assuring high security and scalability standards at reasonable infrastructure and development costs.
- Designing a platform that will be easy to use and work fast even in regions with low internet bandwidth.
Business solution
Our Product Manager and dedicated development team worked hand in hand to ensure we didn't lose a single day chasing pointless goals.
We aimed to check the feasibility of the idea while keeping the costs as low as possible and not sacrificing the quality and security of the solution. That's why our approach to this product was simple: to build the solution fast, get the client's feedback as soon as possible, and then improve.
We speeded up the development process using third-party solutions - for example, by implementing a nanti-money laundering layer. Thanks to providing business logic under domain-driven design best practices, we built safe and extensible microservices that were easy to change and adapt to changing requirements.
To address the challenge of infrastructure costs associated with microservices, we employed a strategic approach by combining select SaaS providers and leveraging AWS pay-per-usage tools. We aimed to generate as little cost as possible as the platform was yet to get traction. For instance, instead of hosting our own Jenkins Master and Slave architecture, we moved continuous integration to AWS Code Build, Code Pipeline, Code Deploy, and other similar tools, which gave us tremendous cost savings.
Results
We provided our clients with the first version of the platform, and it played a crucial role in the product's ultimate success. It helped them gain momentum and secure funding for further development. Since then, they have successfully developed the platform with their internal team and raised new financing rounds.
Now El Dorado is thriving independently, and we keep our fingers crossed for their success!
