Since this is my first blog post I’ll try and do a general overview of why I got involved in cryptocurrencies and why I decided to co-found a company in a totally new, wild branch of technology and financial services.Having worked for a while in finance I have a good general overview of how the stock market and fiat currencies work and more importantly I have experience with the services and ecosystem built around them. I had expected to find a similarly high level of services in the cryptocurrency space. Even though there was an amazing community with people that had dedicated big parts of their life already to the Bitcoin project I felt there was a lot of chaos as well. Everything was spread out across multiple discussion forums, webpages, and IRC channels, it was hard to decide which wallet is best for you or which exchange to use. Mining was poorly documented for most coins and you needed to spend a lot of time investigating existing software.Most of the services offered were not user friendly and the information provided was difficult to understand for anyone who didn’t have a background in software development and finance. I wanted to invest in a few cryptocurrencies at the beginning of 2014 and I found there was no reliable source of information that I could use to make an informed investment decision.There was a “dark side” to all of this as well, as there always is when a big technology shift appears. Amongst early adopters of new technology, you’ll usually find people who operate outside the law. They are generally the ones who need to adapt to an always changing landscape where the law enforcement seems to be just a few years away from totally disrupting and shutting down their business models. I guess it is not a big surprise that Bitcoin and now other cryptocurrencies have gained some popularity in that sector. The thing that bothered me most about the “dark side” in altcoins was the constant flow of new, uninteresting coins promoted by pump and dump strategies. Not only where they accepted by some of the exchanges but it also seemed like they were part of the business model. The whole sector felt a bit like the wild west of finance and we (chayter and I) felt something needed to be done to create a better, user-friendly, platform for the community.We met in one of the oldest pubs in the City of London (I know, a bit ironic) and started talking about the future of money and how cryptocurencies can shape the global financial landscape. We both soon realized that there was a huge entry level barrier in terms of finding useful information about cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, once you found the information there was a steep learning curve when it came to understanding how everything is connected together. The thing that fascinated us both was that once you had spent enough time and understood the logic behind most of the components of the Bitcoin protocol, it felt like you were “going down the rabbit hole” (as Andreas Antonopoulos likes to say). There is real potential in using Bitcoin and it’s blockchain to solve a lot of the complicated problems that we are all facing on a day to day basis. We both decided to get involved and managed to raise money to build a one stop shop for all the cryptocurrency ecosystem.As soon as the transfer from our first angel investor went though, we both quit our full-time jobs and retreated to chayter’s house in Cambridgeshire where, for close to 4 months, we worked around the clock to build cryptocompare.com.chayter, Bailey and my work computer. This is where cryptocompare.com was born.We are still far away from reaching our end goal which is a place where everybody can find good, useful, reliable information about Bitcoin and the other altcoins. We also want this to be a place where the community works together to create a defense mechanism against fraud and scams. This has already started to happen as more and more people use our services but we are still new to the scene. It will take a while until we build the user base and the reputation to have a significant impact in the ecosystem.Join our community and help us build a better and safer experience for people that are just starting their journey to the decentralized future.Why I Co-Founded CryptoCompare was originally published in Tales from the Crypto on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.