Company Name: River
Founders: Alexander Leishman
Date of establishment: February 2019
Headquarter Location: Columbus, Ohio
Amount of Bitcoin in the vault: Proof of Reserves Launching Soon
Number of employees: 50
Website: https://river.com/
Public or private? private
How can you make money by brokering Bitcoin trading only? The answer is not complicated.
Provide the highest quality services to the largest possible number of people at a good price.
This is the strategy of Alexander Leishman and his team in river employment.
River’s high-quality services depend largely on staying true to what Leishman calls the “Bitcoin Principles,” the core of which is the philosophy of “not your keys, not your coins.”
“At River, we decided to take the slow and hard road, which allowed us to build our own custodial systems, hold our clients’ bitcoins, and operate as a financial institution,” Lizman told Bitcoin Magazine.
Building a strong foundation is clearly important to Leishman, someone who operates from a prestigious educational and professional base.
The Engineer
Leishman earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.
for him biography He has experience ranging from robotics engineering internship to cryptography researcher at Stanford University to software security engineer at Airbnb.
In short, he has remarkable technical capabilities — the kind you’d want someone who secures millions of dollars in Bitcoin on behalf of clients.
Despite all his knowledge and experience, he is still humble enough to be aware of the risks involved in his business.
“Our first focus is not to make any mistakes,” Lehman said.
“People underestimate the fact that this doesn’t happen automatically,” he added. “You have to actively spend 50% more of your resources on containing entropy and making sure that you’re always improving systems and procedures, building automation, building everything you need to contain these risks and prevent new risks.”
“That’s actually where the bulk of the work goes.”
These are shocking words in an industry known for stock market crashes and/or losing clients’ money. And Leishman knows it.
“It turns out there aren’t a lot of trustworthy people in this industry,” Leishman said.
“We’ve seen even the most well-organized trust companies collapse,” he added. “They’ll tell you, ‘We have this certificate and this license and this, this and this.’ Then when it all comes out, you find out this guy was asking people to deposit coins into a ledger that they lost the key to three years ago.”
“That’s why we do things ourselves.”
Why Bitcoin?
Given the difficulty of running a Bitcoin business safely and the fact that thanks to his qualifications and experience, Leishman was able to make a good living in a number of fields, why did he turn to Bitcoin?
“The reason I got into Bitcoin was because I was studying economics in college,” Leishman recalls. “I started reading about Austrian economics and eventually read Denationalization of money By Friedrich Hayek.
He was drawn to the idea of challenging central banks as he became more aware of the dangers of centralized power structures of all kinds—from the Federal Reserve to supranational entities like the European Union.
Before discovering Bitcoin, Leishman wanted to create his own form of money that the government could not control.
“I wanted to create a commodity-backed currency, but it had to be centralized,” he said.
“I couldn’t really figure out how to do it without going to jail, and I didn’t know how to make it a business,” he added.
“When I came across Bitcoin, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is a prophecy — it’s going to change everything.’ I knew I had to work on it.”
And he did. After graduating, he completed a coding bootcamp and then headed west to San Francisco to look for work in what was then the birthplace of the Bitcoin industry in the United States.
Bitcoin and the Gulf Region
“I didn’t have a job before I moved to the Bay Area,” Lishman recalls. “I moved there because all this Bitcoin stuff was happening at the time, and I wanted to be in the thick of it.”
It didn’t take long to find work, though. In March 2014, Leishman landed his first job in the Bitcoin space with a Taiwanese Bitcoin exchange called MaiCoinspecializing in Bitcoin trading and payments.
At MaiCoin, Leishman identified and fixed security vulnerabilities and built APIs used in merchant services.
Beyond his experience at MaiCoin, Leishman remembers his time in the Bay Area fondly.
“The culture was very different back then,” he added.
“There wasn’t really this concept of maximizing the benefits of Bitcoin,” he added. “Nobody was bothered by new currencies because people were basically using these things to try out new ideas.”
“It was more free, more academic, where people could experiment with ideas without the economic element and without creating this binary between scammers and largely legitimate people.”
From one perspective, these words may seem strange coming from someone who runs a company that deals solely in Bitcoin. From another perspective, one might imagine that Leishman learned more than a handful of firsthand lessons about why Bitcoin is different from all other crypto networks and assets during his time in San Francisco.
“Everyone knows Bitcoin is king — and no one has tried to get it,” he added.
After MaiCoin, Leishman completed his graduate studies at Stanford University, where he served as a teaching assistant for a course on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that he teaches. Dan Bonnetco-founder of Stanford Computer Security LabThen we built a secure asset management infrastructure for Polychain Capitala cryptocurrency hedge fund.
By early 2019, he was ready to start his own business.
river building
Harnessing what he learned about cryptocurrency security and payments, Leishman set out to build a Bitcoin platform that not only had a first-class multi-signature security model for customer funds at its core, but also helped users more easily use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange via the Lightning Network, where River provides users with custody services. Lightning Governor.
What sets River apart from other brokerages, Leishman explained, is its in-house infrastructure. When brokerages outsource, they give up control over what they can offer their clients.
“They can only use what the third party decides to build,” Leishman said of exchanges that don’t build their own infrastructure. “And the third parties are all custodians of multiple currencies and they rarely prioritize the Bitcoin stuff.”
With Leishman at the helm wearing the hats of CEO and CTO, River has a clear advantage in forging its own path.
“Thinking like a good engineer leads to good work,” Lehman said.
“I’m the one who leads the company. I know how to build what we need to build. I know how to ship what we need to ship to serve our customers,” he added.
“For a company like ours, I think this is the perfect model.”
More of the same – for now
While Bitcoin has become increasingly popular as a store of value, Lizman believes we still have a long way to go before it becomes a widely accepted medium of exchange.
Additionally, River’s core bread and butter is its brokerage service.
“We make most of our money from bitcoin brokerage,” Lizman said.
He also noted that River makes money from its other services, such as running two Lightning masternodes, but the revenue generated from this pales in comparison to what the company earns from its brokerage service, which River continues to work on improving.
“There’s always more we can do to simplify the process and make it higher quality for registration and purchase — and Guard feels like you have all your security needs covered,” said Lizman.
“The hard work is also in dealing with the monetary system,” he added. “So the big trend that we’re heading in over the next three to five years, in my opinion, is that Bitcoin will continue to grow as a store of value.”
“We are entering an era where people will save in dollars and bitcoin, and we are focused on seamless exchange between bitcoin and fiat currencies.”
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