Five Questions with Johan Eleveld from Deribit

Johan Eleveld: After finishing law school, I started working as a creative in advertising for over 15 years. John Jansen (our founder and CEO) is a long time friend of mine. He told me around 2014 that he would build the first crypto derivatives exchange in the world. That’s how I got involved.

Johan Eleveld: We will always be focusing on being the most technologically advanced platform. Crypto derivatives are complex products. One way to achieve user growth is to get more people interested by explaining our products better through education, hence our extensive free options course. Another way is to add less complex products to our portfolio in the near future.

Furthermore, from a development perspective, we will remain focused on continuous performance increases facilitating further user and messages per second growth and platform stability. 

Johan Eleveld: We deliberately choose to keep our team relatively small. We believe that we have a good balance between enough innovation power and enough agility to be efficient. We like to see ourselves as a small but robust ship.

Johan Eleveld: I think that it’s a natural evolution. Mr Benz invented the car, and afterwards, there became a need for traffic rules. We have many big institutional clients, and no one left because we voluntarily introduced a strict KYC/AML. Our new clients wouldn’t join Deribit if we didn’t have these strict rules. Over time we have expanded our KYC/AML requirements and monitoring and we recently announced to join Veriscope to be able to abide by Travel Rule requirements. When you’ve been driving in a busy country with hardly any traffic rules, you’ll learn to appreciate them. 

Johan Eleveld: That isn’t easy to predict. We are based in Panama, and this week Gabriel Silva unveiled a bill to make Bitcoin a legal tender in Panama. If crypto gets more accepted by governments over time, the marketing challenges will also slowly disappear.

Our former CEO Andras Caron chose not to do aggressive marketing but relied on a reverse solicitation model where the client comes to us instead of the other way around. A wise decision. Deribit always focused on the product, education and things like excellent customer support. Some competitors may have grown faster, but got into a lot of problems also. We will try to be on the safe side, no need to poke the bear with a stick.