13 Mar 2014 / Voice of America – NEW YORK — The digital currency known as bitcoin, a peer-to-peer form of encrypted payment that exists only virtually, has been clouded recently by incidents of theft and fraud. But two firms, the Ireland-domiciled Perseus Telecom and the New York company Atlas ATS, have announced plans to broaden the appeal of bitcoin and other digital currencies by offering institutional investors a global private network with top-level security.
Executives at Perseus Telecom, which provides secure ultra-high-speed telecommunications and business connectivity services, and Atlas ATS, a digital currency marketplace, said that if their new platform succeeds, online currency will quickly become a valuable new way for the world’s largest investors to trade and store assets.
Shawn Sloves, chief executive officer of Atlas ATS, contrasts the new platform with current trading methods, which he called “bitcoin 1.0.”
“The problem before was [that it was] typically deployed on web-based infrastructure, it was very retail-focused, and it didn’t have a lot of the regulatory compliance security that institutions are accustomed to trading on,” he said. “The new platform will attract investors with the advantages of digital currency minus those drawbacks. It allows you to move money instantaneously around the world without having to deal with borders,” he said, adding that he used it recently to move a large sum of his own money from Russia to the United States.
“On my own server, I was able to transfer the entire value of that on bitcoin within three minutes,” he said. “It’s global, it’s borderless; it’s also a public ledger, so it’s shared by everybody and ownership transfer is publicly stored, and shows the rights of the owner of that coin,” he said. “But we also see it from a trading perspective as a major revolution, because today, traditional asset classes like equities can take three days to settle. We can transfer security ownership instantaneously.”…. Read more
