We just have to look at what businesses have successfully been built around cryptocurrencies and build them for blackcoin. This infrastructure would help our currency stay stable and make it viable for commerce. Such as payment (like bitpay), gambling (poker sites, etc), exchanges, hosting companies, etc. Services like these will go a long way to in securing our slow rise.
If you decide to move forward with the exchange, how long do you estimate before you can do some beta testing?
I giving myself about 4 weeks to start accepting people into a beta test phase, but may be longer. Most of the code is done, I'm still writing spec code once that is finished. I have some features I would like to add too before launch. My javascript is very similar to mintpal though, they did a really good job on their exchange.