Hello world

Cybex is a new decentralized exchange built by the team behind ICOAGE, formerly the largest ICO platform in China (before ICOs were banned in China in September, 2017). Cognizant of the shortcomings of centralized platforms and the necessity of a complete ecosystem for token issuance and exchange, the team began working on Cybex, a decentralized exchange that’s far more secure and transparent.

Our logo, a gray rhinoceros, pays homage to the excellent book written by Michele Wucker and act as a reminder to ourselves to be mindful of the “highly probable, high-impact, yet neglected emergence” in the world today.

Cybex is scheduled to launch a crowd sale on January 6, 2018 at 8PM Tokyo time. This is the first in a series of articles which we hope will could help convey our vision for the Cybex ecosystem.

THE PROBLEM

As market interest in cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology mounts, we’re seeing an exponential rise in valuation as well as variety. As of this writing (November 13, 2017), according to CoinDesk, the cumulative ICO funding has risen to ~3.34bn USD in value across 223 tracked projects, an estimate that’s likely only a subset of the overall market.

Most crypto-assets traded today are done so over centralized trading platforms, which faces a slew of challenges,

Opaque: centralized platforms operate in a black box, with the constant risk of investors falling prey to the platform operators’ penchant to leverage information asymmetry to their favor. Illicit practices such as price manipulation, improper usage of investor funds are commonplace occurrences.
Illiquid: most projects launching ICOs are unfinished or uninitiated, with no utility token to actually distribute to their investors, instead issuing IOUs with the promise to issue tokens at a later date. These IOUs often have limited liquidity, with trading (if any is even offered) mostly limited to the platform that issued the ICO in the first place, or some other centralized exchanges with exorbitant listing fees.
Insecure: centralized platforms are vulnerable to DDOS attacks that not only severely disrupts trading, but also erodes investor confidence in the process and the ICO model as a whole. They’re also juicy targets for unscrupulous hackers (think Mt. Gox, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, DAO, CoinDash… the list goes on).
THE SOLUTION

It’s based on the Graphene Blockchain Library, which also powers a variety of large-scale and well-known projects such as Bitshares, Steemit, Openledger, and BlockPay (refer to this excellent Graphene ecosystem mapping).

With Graphene at its core, Cybex was designed to avoid the pitfalls of a centralized exchange:

It’s fully transparent and auditable by anyone

It provides liquidity to IOUs generated from ICOs
Its decentralized architecture makes it very hard to hack
It cannot be shut down by any political entity
Beyond its Graphene core, we’ve integrated a series of technical improvements to create a truly modernized exchange.

Atomic-swap: we are in the process of implementing cross-chain atomic swaps to make its core asset CYB fully tradeable with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, without being dependent upon any third-party centralized gateway, which has been the Achilles heel of the generic decentralized exchange.
Crypto-asset custody: as more and more financial institutions see crypto-assets as a natural part of their portfolios, the Cybex team developed a fully-featured and rigorously-tested crypto-asset custody mechanism with hardware multi-signature, on top of the common software crypto wallet, solely based on well-established cryptography algorithm and well-designed cold wallets for crypto assets broker service.
Decentralized ICO: Cybex has built-in decentralized ICO capability that comes complete with a set of best-practice rules such as the IOU / token lockup periods, enabling users to create and issue their own customized crypto-assets.
Bitcoin based CYB-assets: we will use interest as an incentive to attract bitcoin holders to issue assets such as CYB-USD and CYB-JPY to meet demand for price-stable assets. By using bitcoin, we could minimize collateral volatility and CYB-asset supply constraints.
Improved user experience: we have developed far more user-friendly web, desktop and mobile interfaces to ensure Cybex is inclusive of the largest possible user pool.
HOW FAR ARE WE

Our development is guided by the following plan:

Cybex near-term development roadmap
Thus far, we’ve achieved the following,

Preparation: the team systematically researched and prepared for the development of CYBEX. The product designers and developers studied all relevant blockchain technologies and communicated closely with partners and future users of the platform. As a result, the basic architecture of the CYBEX ecosystem has been fully defined, and we launched a voluntary test version of the CYBEX exchange and the CYBEX test net.
Kicked off voluntary testing: the preliminary test was conducted from October 1 through October 31, 2017. Over 200 volunteer testers participated, creating more than 300 valid test accounts resulting in over 240,000 CYB distributed for test in total. From this initial test phase, we collected over 60 suggestions, ranging from UI adjustment, functionality, platform operations and business development, all of which are being diligently pursued one by one.
Secured a partnership pipeline: in the spirit of making Cybex “real-world” compatible, the team has built a solid partnership pipeline with the likes of the largest crowd-funding site in Japan (the Kicstarter of Japan) and the largest robo-investment firm in Japan (the Betterment of Japan).
MEET THE CORE TEAM

James Gong: Founder of ICOAGE (formerly the largest ICO platform in China) and ChainB (the largest Chinese blockchain media). James has been a leading blockchain and cryptocurrency evangelist in China since 2012. He has helped to translate innumerable blockchain related articles and whitepapers into Chinese, as well as having authored many books on blockchain, including “The Blockchain Society”, “Blockchain — the New Economy’s Blueprint”, and “Cryptocurrency”.
Yuri Milyutin: Co-founder, marketing expert, and growth master of The 8760 based in Lodon. Miyutin successfully helped with closing following ICOs: Populous, AIGang, and Crypto20, helping them to raise over 80mn USD. Formerly a UX Consultant, Growth Hacker in Evoplay, Kiev, Ukraine, CEO & Product Manager of internal project Holibody in Yandex, Moscow, Russia.
Jianbo Wang: Formerly Director of ETF and China Risk trading at Deutsche Bank Asia, VP of ETF and Equity derivatives trading Citigroup Asia, VP of Equity derivatives proprietary trading at Credit Suisse. Jianbo is familiar with global financial markets and derivatives trading and has a deep understanding of ETF and other innovative financial products. He holds an undergraduate and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Steven Pu: Steven is a serial entrepreneur and strategy consultant, with over a decade of experience advising and implementing strategic transformations for Fortune 100 clients. He was an associate director at Monitor-Deloitte Consulting. He co-founded LinkSens (IoT mesh networks), EviPath (social network for physicians to exchange and discuss medical cases), and Master He (on-call massage service app). He received both a B.S. and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2004 and 2005, respectively.
KEEP IN TOUCH

Medium: https://medium.com/@cybexexchange
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CybexExchange
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/Gmz68UScWa3dbskAG2hUug
Slack: https://cybexexchange.slack.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cybexexchange