New BitBox exchange promises 'secret weapons'

It’s the newest bitcoin exchange and the first to be incubated at a university. BitBox launched this week with CEO Kinnard Hockenhull promising innovation from the get-go.

"We've got a couple of secret weapons in the works but you'll have to wait to get the scoop on them," Hockenhull said in an e-mail to CoinDesk.

Recent events have shown that the bitcoin economy is too large for a single exchange to handle, Hockenhull said, in a veiled reference to the market-dominating bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox.

"Simply put, there aren't enough exchanges for bitcoin to be as successful as we all want it to be," he said. "Even if we weren't offering anything new (and we are), we're working to make sure that there are no single points of failure in the bitconomy by increasing the number of options people have."

The BitBox platform empowers anyone to store, trade and track bitcoin, the company states on its website:

"We want to make bitcoin easy to get and easy to use for both merchants and consumers through seamless banking integration, secure storage, and a joyful user experience."

Hockenhull says the company, registered in the state of Michigan, has taken steps to avoid the hacker attacks that have plagued the Mt. Gox exchange: "We use cloud-mirroring services, have a more efficient, spam-protected order-matching engine and are pursuing a DDoS (denial of service) shield partner."

Conceived at the University of Michiganhttp://www.cfe.umich.edu/techarb/, BitBox is compliant with US Financial Crime Enforcement Network (finCEN) rules, says Hockenhull, adding that he believes the regulations around bitcoin will only increase over time.

"What that means, few -- if any -- people can say, including the regulators," Hockenhull says.

"Bitcoin isn't just money or a way to make money," he adds. "It's a movement to change the meaning of money. We understand that and want to be at the forefront of it."