Today we’re talking with CEO and Co-founder of DSTOQ, Craig McGregor. DSTOQ is an app that helps you get unrestricted access to stocks, bonds, or ETF’s with zero fees. Before DSTOQ Craig was working in finance in South Africa, investing in companies all over the world. He was first introduced to cryptocurrency when some of his poker friends were using bitcoin to make deposits and withdrawals for online casinos. It was some of those same friends that would introduce Craig to the man that would become his co-founder, Christian. Christian was trying to move money down to South Africa and was getting charged big fee’s by traditional banks. With Craig’s background in financing, his understanding of crypto, and being from an emerging market, he realized a lot of finance in emerging markets is broken. This is when Craig realized cross border transactions were one of the best use cases for cryptocurrency and DSTOQ was born.

DSTOQ is a decentralized trading platform for people to invest from emerging markets to developed markets. The company is focused on first time investors with an app that makes it as user-friendly as possible to buy shares of companies like Apple and Tesla. With DSTOQ the settlement time takes just five seconds instead of five days. A settlement is when legal ownership of what you bought is transferred, and a lot of bad things can happen in five days. Craig says that’s why settlement time is so important. One side of DSTOQ is the traditional infrastructure with traditional banks. DSTOQ will buy all shares of a company and then create a token on Stellar blockchain with a one to one link. It’s then possible to trade those tokens on the Stellar blockchain. It allows transactions peer to peer without the middle man.

Craig says they’re mostly based in Europe but have the most users from Brazil and Nigeria. The DSTOQ team is rather small with a core team of just three people. The team has created an e-learning course for people that don’t know where to start with investing. Craig says education is needed especially in emerging markets and that education is the ultimate equalizer. The e-learning can be found directly on the app.

To learn more about DSTOQ, visit dstoq.com or find them on Twitter and Instagram.

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Divi is creating the world's first closed-loop, vertically-integrated cryptocurrency ecosystem. Much like Apple's ecosystem is anchored by iCloud, the Divi Project blockchain serves as the core of the Divi network of technologies. Thanks to a keen understanding of the divide that separates the mainstream from the crypto world, the Divi team is able to create solutions to the industry's biggest problem: adoption by non-technical users. Divi's user-friendly, one-click solutions aim to bring blockchain-based payments into modernity with great UX. In this podcast, we will cover all aspects of cryptocurrency, hot topics, and technology as worldwide adoption grows.