Hello, I'm Alison Bobert.

For many years, I've been actively involved in the cryptocurrency space and remain dedicated to Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision, which includes ideas like decentralisation, privacy, inflation resistance, and autonomy from banks and the governments, unlike many institutions today (e.g., the ETH Foundation) that prioritise compliance and centralisation above all.

I've stayed away from custodial wallets and centralised exchanges, following the tenet, "Not your keys, not your coins". Rather, I have used self-hosted full nodes like Monero and Bitcoin Core. However, clients occasionally prefer paying in other cryptocurrencies (e.g., Ethereum, Litecoin, or USDT), requiring me to convert them to Bitcoin.

For years, I used exch(.cx/.net), a platform that aligned with my values, prioritising privacy, low fees, no KYC, and no arbitrary freezes. Unfortunately exch is no longer available, and as centralised exchanges increasingly impose restrictive policies, high fees, and fractional reserve scams. This left a gap in the market for a truly privacy-focused exchange.

To address this, I began developing a new privacy-focused exchange. Initially, I secured a sponsor, but due to legal complications on their end, the funding fell through. Without the necessary resources, I was forced to halt development. Rather than let the project disappear, I’ve decided to release the entire source code (frontend and backend) publicly.

Project Overview

This codebase is a fully functional prototype originally intended for investor review. While it lacks some planned features (e.g., distributed architecture, DDoS protection, and persistent storage), it serves as a solid foundation.

Privacy-First Design

This exchange was built from the ground up to respect user privacy at every level. Unlike mainstream platforms, it deliberately avoids JavaScript, cookies, and any form of tracking. It doesn't log users ip, headers or tls fingerprints and of course it doesn't have a capability to freeze funds for any reason.

Technical Details

The backend is written entirely in Go, providing cross-platform support (though currently only tested on Windows).It maintains a minimal amount of imports to reduce potential attack surfaces while implementing advanced form parsing for additional security. Price data is retrieved via CoinMarketCap's WebSocket API. The system requires users to run their own full nodes for each supported cryptocurrency - following the essential "don't trust, verify" principle. In my setup, Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Monero nodes ran on one server, while the Ethereum node (using Lighthouse + Geth) ran on another.  The architecture leverages Go interfaces, making it easy to add support for additional cryptocurrencies without modifying core design. All operations, including refund processing, are fully automated and utilise anonymised data for troubleshooting. Notably, except for price feeds from CoinMarketCap, all functionality is handled locally through node interactions without relying on third-party services.

Code

https://github.com/AlisonBobert/AlisonsCryptoExchange

Thank you for reading,
Alison Bobert