Suppose the stock market didn't exist yet and was invented today.

What would he look like?

"Similar to the crypto market," says Eric Demuth, founder of the Bitpanda trading platform, with conviction.

Without opening times, investors could trade around the clock.

And it would be easy to get chunks of expensive stocks like Tesla, too - just like investors can buy even a tenth of a bitcoin.

Neobrokers and investment platforms such as the Austrian start-up Bitpanda are challenging the traditional rules of the financial market.

Trading should be cheaper, simpler and more digital, ideally via a mobile phone app.

Bitpanda is one of the fastest growing fintechs in Europe, the platform can also be used in Germany.

Three million users buy and sell cryptocurrencies, precious metals in digital form and, recently, partial shares on it.

This success started in 2014 with a problem.

“Bitcoin was incredibly difficult to buy.

You first had to convert money into dollars and then place an order on a cobbled-together exchange on the Internet, ”says Demuth.

A Bitcoin was worth a few hundred euros at the time.

Today it's around 50,000 euros.

The northern German native ended up in the financial sector in a roundabout way. He actually wanted to become a captain and traveled around the world as a ship mechanic. But he changed his mind and began to study economics in Vienna and London. He met the Austrian Paul Klanschek through mutual friends. Like Demuth, Klanschek was fascinated by Bitcoin early on. And he too complained about the difficulties that buyers were faced with. Demuth and Klanschek decided to turn their frustration into a start-up. The two were convinced that cryptocurrencies would turn the financial world upside down in the future.

But something was missing: “A tech company without a technical founder, that was absolutely impossible.

We needed someone who can program really well. ”The Bitcoin Austria network helped out and put the software developer and crypto expert Christian Trummer, founder number three, in touch.

A web shop becomes a platform

“At first we thought that we would simply build a web shop for bitcoins.

But that was a naive idea, ”says Demuth.

After all, unlike t-shirts or shoes, bitcoins weren't something that usually ended up in virtual shopping carts.

The skepticism, for example among regulators and banks, was correspondingly high, but they needed them for the money transfer.

“It was difficult to get cryptocurrencies out of this bad image.

That cost us a lot of persuasiveness and persistence. "

Persistence that now pays off. Bitpanda has been Austria's first unicorn since March 2021, i.e. a start-up valued at more than a billion dollars. Within five months, the valuation then tripled to 4.1 billion dollars when the start-up raised around 263 million euros in a financing round in August. Peter Thiel's company Valar Ventures, PayPal co-founder and tech investor, is also involved.

The start-up waited a long time before opening up to professional investors. It wasn't until 2020, six years after it was founded, that Bitpanda raised money from start-up investors for the first time. Even today, the three founders still hold "a little more than 50 percent", which almost never happens at fintechs of this size, says Demuth. The idea of ​​an online shop quickly turned into an entire platform on which users have been able to manage their crypto systems since 2014. If you buy virtual coins like Bitcoin, you want to store them with the help of a virtual purse, a wallet.

And it didn't just stop at Bitcoin.

There are now around 60 crypto currencies on the platform, including the well-known stars such as Bitcoin and Ether, but also fun currencies such as Shiba Inu or Dogecoin.

In addition, investors can add gold, silver and platinum as digital goods to their portfolios.

Bitpanda stores the physical precious metals for this in a high-security safe.