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Meet the Founder – Exclusive Interview with Spectre CEO Karan Khemani

Spectre CEO Karan Khemani interview

Spectre (which is an acronym for Speculative Tokenized Trading Exchange) aims to become the world’s first brokerless, financial trading platform with an embedded and decentralized liquidity pool that acts as a counterparty to all trades.
Spectre removes brokers out of the trading equation entirely, hence introducing a shift to today’s current yet extremely outdated model.

The goal of the platform is to disrupt the digital options and classic retail FX/equities trading industries to empower the client instead of the brokerages.

Being a platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain, Spectre allows users to trade on assets like currencies, commodities, and even stocks fairly as Spectre is governed by smart contracts, NOT a centralized team that controls everything the client has.
What sets this project apart is the team behind the Spectre platform. The platform is being developed and built by a group of extremely experienced individuals in the industry with an impressive resume of past high-ranked positions at places like J.P Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank.

We recently sat down with Karan Khemani, the CEO of Spectre to have a chat with him about the project as well as finding out his thoughts and insights.

spectre.ai logo

Hi, Karan. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us more about yourself and Spectre?

Thank you for having me here. My background is in finance and investment banking with a career in J.P Morgan and Goldman Sachs and an educational background in Finance at the London School of Economics. A few years ago i decided to make a change in my career and move away from a corporate career to entrepreneurship. I have been working with my current team for the last 5 years, and Spectre is the latest result of our efforts. Spectre is a concept that we created in order to tackle a very important problem that we and a lot of our clients had experienced: fraud in financial trading.

First off, why did you decide to use the blockchain in building Spectre?

The answer is easy. The nature of the ethereum blockchain and smart contracts that can guarantee the creation of a safe and fair environment for financial trading without any broker intervention.

What can the blockchain do that other technologies cannot?

It can guarantee that once the code has been released, then it cannot be changed or influenced by outside factors. Also, it can be publicly audited which is great for transparency.

Spectre.ai removes broker fraud from financial trading

Tell us about how you came up with the idea of Spectre.

Did you face a problem within the financial markets industry or do you think there is a gap in the market for Spectre to fill?
We have been running a trading academy for smart options and forex trading for a few years now training a few thousand traders, and we have come to know the problems that our clients were facing with brokers. Also, there have been many incidents were people even lost their lives because of their losses in trading; losses caused by broker fraud. Ever since we came to know about the ethereum blockchain and the possibilities, we decided that it is a perfect fit for this problem, and it could help solve the problem. There is certainly a gap to fill.

What do you think is the biggest problem Spectre will solve and why is the problem important to solve?

Spectre.ai removes broker fraud from financial trading. There are no more deposits or withdrawals. Traders trade from their ETH wallet and smart contracts govern all transactions. There is no room for human intervention, and everything can be audited. The above creates a fair and safe trading environment.

Editors Pick: Spectre.ai ICO

One of the more interesting aspects of Spectre is the availability of two tokens, SPEC-D and SPEC-U.
What was the reasoning or thought process of having two tokens?
Can a person hold two tokens at once or buy both during the ICO?

First of all, a person can hold more than one type of tokens, yes. We have created 2 token types as we wanted to cater to both types of token holders out there. The utility token gives the traders in platform benefits, while the dividend token is more suitable for passive investors. We chose to offer more flexibility to the people wanting to help us in our project.

spectre trading app

Currently, many see binary options as a form of gambling and this notion is further asserted by negative media such as news of people being scammed by brokers.
What is the role of Spectre in changing the public’s perception of binary options?

The reason why binary options have a bad reputation is the financial fraud we mentioned earlier. The existence of a conflict of interest between the broker and the trader caused a lot of brokers to become greedy and manipulate the platform in order to cause trading losses. Also, there have been instances of blocking withdrawals and also charging the credit cards of their clients. All these things can be removed with the use of the blockchain. Smart Options is far from gambling and our experience in this field and the clients going through our academy has shown us that if you invest the right amount of time and effort in learning how to read the markets, and also how you can control your emotions, then your chances of success can increase significantly and you can actually beat the markets. Our role is to create a fair and safe trading environment for traders to enjoy trading without the risk of outside factors.

Why did you implement a buyback program for tokens in Spectre? Is this a decision that you think will be the standard practice for future ICOs by other businesses?

We have implemented a token buyback program for the Utility token only as a way to be able to support the price and reward the token holders at the same time. It is a practice that can help the token holders and if used correctly can add value to a token sale.

Tell us more Spectre’s tokenized balance sheet and if possible, could you explain it in a way a 10-year-old could understand?

You can consider it as a bag of money that was created during the token sale. A trader will be placing a trade and when they win, they get money from the bag, and when they lose their money goes inside the bag. The people that helped create this bag, get paid a small percentage of each trade that happens on the platform. Also, SPECTRE.ai gets paid an equal % of each trade.

What has been your happiest moment so far working on Spectre?

The happiest has been the getting the positive response from the community about our project and vision.

Is the Spectre platform already working with notable businesses or firms? Are there any future partnerships in the process?
If yes, can you explain briefly about it?

The Spectre platform is going live in March 2018. There are a lot of future partnerships being formed at the moment, especially for the Liquidity Pool, and the moment that agreements are signed, the corresponding announcements will follow.

Spectre interview

Unlike other ICOs, Spectre takes the bold move of releasing an alpha way before the actual token sale.
Why do you think this is the best decision, moving ahead?

Yes, it is, as it shows that we are serious about what we are trying to do and that we have more than just an idea or a white paper.

Moving on to more personal stuff, what does a typical day in your life look like?

Mostly working, researching, spending time with my family here, and also going to the gym.

Can you express one personal opinion of yours about the blockchain? It doesn’t matter if it’s negative or positive, we just want to hear your thoughts on it.

I believe that Blockchain will shape the next 5-10 years of our life, it will be that important.

Finally, what other personal goals (besides your career) do you have in life? Is there anything else in life you want to achieve?

There are a lot of things. First of all, stay healthy and be able to help people in every aspect that I can. I have taken a personal interest in health care as well and I have a personal goal to achieve something in this field.

That concludes our Interview with Karan Khemani

More Interviews to come

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