A self-made millionaire whose firm uses artificial intelligence in market trading has slammed the “flaws” of the cryptocurrency market.
Samuel & Co. Trading founder Samuel Leach, 27, is launching the Yield Coin which he says will fix the main failing of Initial Coin Offerings.
“We predicted that most of the ICOs would start failing this year – and we were right,” he told BusinessCloud.
“There are a lot of reasons for this, but mainly it is because they are just built on speculation and the teams behind them are really poor.
“We knew that the regulatory bodies will start to come down on them quite hard so we decided to put together a cryptocurrency which would be both regulatory compliant and different.”
He explained: “Most of them at the moment are what I call ‘single point of failure’; for example, if you’re raising money for one project and it fails, then all the investors lose their money.
“A lot of these ICOs are like the iPhone 4: it’s okay for six months then everyone forgets what it is and no one buys it and so the price falls.
“Ours is based on multiple businesses underneath that cryptocurrency – there are 12 different concepts that have all been built on businesses, from a wealth management company to a supercar dealer.
“We’ve also got eight partners that will all be accepting the coin, so at the moment there are 20 points of failure, which gives it real strength. [In essence] it’s a cryptocurrency built on a portfolio of businesses.
“Those businesses will all be transacting in the coin so it drives liquidity into it from a B2B point of view, rather than just speculation.”
Leach is from the “roughest part of Watford” but launched Samuel & Co. Trading in 2012 using £200,000 of his own money earned trading on the markets – and all this while studying for a marketing degree and working at private bank C. Hoare & Co.
The firm runs an international training course to turn people into market traders then hires the best candidates internally. More than 1,500 people from 34 countries have gone through the online and offline versions of the course.
Samuel & Co. now employs 57 people in offices in Watford and Madrid and is projected to turn over £2 million in 2018, doubling the 2017 figure.
“We also make algorithms to trade the markets,” he explained. “Last year the business was pretty much fully automated when trading on the markets so we could take a bit of a step back from the manual trading and just let our algorithms run.”
Leach has grand plans to build up multiple businesses – and sees the potential for transparency through the blockchain technology which underpins cryptocurrencies as central to those.
“In this industry there are a lot of people out there who aren’t legitimate,” he said. “From the beginning I’ve made sure I’ve gone about my business in an ethical way – from the accreditations to being UK government-recognised – and that makes us stand out above anyone else.
“Over the next five years I want to build a social media platform to bring together experts in the markets, to give out free material and training and really create that community base.
“I also want to create a decentralised brokerage firm to bring transparency to that area. There are so many intermediaries – when you take them out, for example with commodities like diamonds, we can find a way to be able to eradicate blood diamonds and undercut the commodities market by over 100 per cent.
“We can track our commodities from extraction to delivery – as technology advances, we want to be a part of it.
“I believe we’ll maintain the 100 per cent growth year-on-year for the next five years.”