Uber co-founder will open a cryptocurrency exchange in the US

Voyager, a startup backed by Uber co-founder Oscar Salazar, announced that it will launch a commission-free cryptocurrency trading platform. The new exchange is designed to function as an aggregation mechanism for cryptocurrency analytics.

Voyager has announced that it intends to offer free trading for at least fifteen different coins on the new platform, including BTC and ETH.

The platform intends to function as an aggregation engine for cryptocurrency prices across more than a dozen trading platforms, allowing customers to buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital assets at the best price available. By doing so, Voyager aims to compete directly with Robinhood - a popular trading app that hosts commission-free BCH, BTC, ETH, LTC and DOGE pairs.

Voyager will simultaneously offer prices on ten virtual currency exchanges and three additional market makers. The company hopes for high liquidity to offer better prices to traders than other platforms.

Stephen Ehrlich, CEO and co-founder of Voyager, former CEO and founder of Lightspeed Financial, noted that the company saw an opportunity to build a dynamic smart router that can take advantage of the market, while also offering commission-free trading to clients.

Voyager will generate revenue by selecting the average price of tokens to execute a trade, Ehrlich said. Ehrlich added that the company has already raised significant capital from friends and families of the co-founders, including Oscar Salazar, Uber's founding architect and chief technology officer. 

Voyager is currently in beta testing, and the company plans to release a mobile trading app before November of this year. The platform is currently licensed in 5 states and hopes to eventually serve at least forty US states. In addition, the new trading platform intends to offer exchange-traded instruments for institutional investors and add to the listing of assets not available on most US exchanges, such as XRP and Stellar.