Urdubit is the first and biggest Pakistani Bitcoin Exchange, in this interview, we talk to the company’s founders Danyal Manzar and Zain Tariq about the implications of running a Bitcoin exchange in Pakistan, they are also announcing a partnership with Bitwage to allow Pakistani’s Freelancers to receive and exchange Bitcoins.
Urdubit was the first Pakistani Bitcoin exchange, and its operating since October 11, 2014, its main goal is to help people in Pakistan to easily trade their Bitcoins. Urdubit is operating over Blinktrade’s platform and engine.
We contacted the operators of this Pakistani Bitcoin exchange and asked them some questions, we began by digging up the motivations behind creating and operating a Bitcoin exchange, Zain Tariq told us that he learned about Bitcoin in 2012 and it gained his attention, indeed, he realized the huge potential that it offered for a market like Pakistan -which accounts for $16 billion per year in remittances- This resulted in the creation of Bitcoinpk , which besides serving as a bitcoin education portal also served as an Over-the-counter exchange in Pakistan. Danyal Manzar came to meet with Zain Tariq and they decided to start a web-based Bitcoin ATM using the now defunct Coinsafe , this bad experience enabled Zain and Danyal to realize that a locality based service was not the answer, they contacted Blinktrade and decided to provide a full orderbook-based trading platform.
Setting up a Bitcoin exchange in Pakistan was not all that easy, asked about the challenges at the beginning Zain stated: Trust and awareness were the main challenges we faced. Pakistani market was subject to high scam rate and exchangers were charging high fees on over the counter trades. Seeing this people did not know about us or were not willing to trust us with their data specifically because we […]
