Becoming informed is the first step of any solid investment strategy. But with cryptocurrencies, one of the up-and-coming investment classes, it can be difficult to understand the basics.
A team of Miami cryptocurrency enthusiasts have developed BitcoinHub to help investors learn the ropes.
Frank Gencorelli and Andrew Rosendahl are medical doctors with a passion for technology. Previously, they developed Hubspring Health, a communications and resource management software platform for healthcare teams.
Gencorelli and Rosendahl collaborated with Brandon Turp, who works a day job in tech sales, to build BitcoinHub. Sylvia Xistris, Hubspring Health’s Director of Operations, also played a key role in the development of BitcoinHub, since she freed up time on the Hubspring side to enable Gencorelli and Rosendahl to work on their crypto project.
The MDs met Turp in the most Miami way. Turp tweeted at Miami Mayor Francis Suarez when he moved to South Florida earlier this year, in hopes of getting help finding a community of crypto enthusiasts. Sure enough, Mayor Suarez delivered: retweeting Turp’s message.
“I had more than 100 people like and retweet my tweet, and tons of people DMed me” Turp said. “It was a very warm welcome to Miami tech.”
One of those DMs was from Gencorelli. The rest is history.
Over the last five months, the BitcoinHub team has been working to develop their main product: an app that informs users about cryptocurrencies. It contains resources and news articles about everything from the Bitcoin basics to the advice on how to get involved. Article headlines include “Everything you need to know about Bitcoin and taxes,” “What is Money,” and “Bitcoin Future Market Breakdown.”
Turp [pictured with Gencorelli above] aspires for the app to “help educate the entire City of Miami and the rest of the world” about Bitcoin. “It can be a pretty intimidating subject,” he said. “Our goal is to make these topics more approachable.”
“We want to help onboard the next 100 million people onto Bitcoin,” Gencorelli added. He noted that despite the integral role money plays in our daily lives, very few people understand what it is. Helping inform the public about money and cryptocurrency’s role in their financial lives, can enable people to “create a better future with more financial freedom or more opportunity,” asserted Gencorelli.
Most exciting for the BitcoinHub team is the protagonistic role Miami is playing in the cryptocurrency movement. “There’s definitely great stuff happening locally, like trying to allow city employees to get paid in Bitcoin,” explained Gencorelli. He also expressed excitement about “the large amount of venture capital that’s coming to our city to support innovation and entrepreneurship in this space.” Moreover, Gencorelli highlighted Bitcoin trailblazers in El Salvador, where Bitcoin was recently made legal tender.
For investors looking to get into the crypto game, Turp said that the best thing to do is to “be a sponge and really learn before diving in.” He acknowledged that it “takes time to understand the market, which is what [BitcoinHub is] aiming to help with.”
Gencorelli said that the team plans to keep the app free for all users: “We feel strongly that bitcoin education should be free to access for everyone.” That said, BitcoinHub is pursuing a few different potential paths to monetization, including partnerships with Bitcoin-focused companies and content creators, referral fees from when BitcoinHub users sign up to third party services, and fees from Bitcoin conferences that want to use the app for their event.
Up next for BitcoinHub is product development. The startup plans to make improvements to its app within the coming weeks. “We have lots of features and functionalities that we’re excited to launch,” said Turp – although they are under wraps for now. The BitcoinHub team has also got their sights set on funding, according to Gencorelli: “We want to engage with the very active Miami venture capital arena and raise funding so we can scale our platform and engage in more aggressive user growth.”
Find out more about BitcoinHub by visiting @bitcoinhubapp on Twitter and Instagram, or by emailing [email protected].
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