Earlier this month, Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara said on UnikrnRadio that Bittrex will soon begin accepting USD fiat deposits. This is definitely a game changer, and could make life easier for those of us on Steemit. Currently, only Coinbase and Gemini allow someone to begin trading crypto by depositing USD from a bank account. Yet both exchanges offer very limited options when it comes to trading out of USD.
Shihara was interviewed on UnikrnRadio (Dash Radio) by Kingsley Edwards and Rahul Sood; you can access that interview here. He's worked in security engineering for BlackBerry and Amazon and co-founded the Bittrex exchange in 2014. One thing that set Bittrex apart was that its developers weren't anonymous. They posted their names, their resumes, and their backgrounds in security and software development, which gave people a level of confidence in the platform.
Asked how Bittrex might make trading cryptocurrency easier, Shihara said this:
"Crypto, I think, fails for the average person when you're talking about public/private key pairs. I don't think that makes any sense. And so I get super excited when I see consumer-facing solutions, whether it's a blockchain project or it's a wallet project or anything like that where it makes it easier for people to adopt digital currency.
"There's a couple of things we're doing in that space... We will be doing US dollar trading. This won't be open to everybody, but we will have US dollar trading available for the majority of our customers."
Shihara said there will be a separate enhanced due diligence process to upgrade your account to trade US dollars. Contact Bittrex support for more information on that. No word on exactly when this new development will happen.
