Suspending Gekko Plus

Today I bring sad news. After a full year of development and only a few months of initial operation, I am indefinitely putting Gekko Plus on hold; I might pick Gekko Plus up at some point in the future. This is a very tough personal decision and I don’t take it lightly.

I want to thank everyone who has been a part of this amazing journey.

What is happening now?

• I have reached out to strategy creators: unless explicitly discussed with strategy creators, I will be completely deleting their strategies (their property) from Gekko Plus.
• I’ve contacted Gekko Plus subscribers and am winding down their subscriptions..
• I am now informing everyone else, including people on the waiting list who expressed interest in subscribing.
• I will be pausing most of the backend behind Gekko Plus but will keep the frontend online with this announcement.
• Nothing is changing to the open source Gekko project on github!

Why is this happening?

I want to make a few things clear about why I’m making this decision: I have worked for years on Open Gekko (the open source and free project) as well as on Gekko Plus because I believe in democratizing finance. I think everyone should have access to financial tools such as algorithmic trading systems and Open Gekko is a good way to make this vision come true.

With Gekko Plus, on the other hand, I am facing a few obstacles to realize this vision truly. Many of those are legal, questions like “Is Gekko Plus an investment platform?” and “Do I have the required licenses to offer this to consumers?” turn out to be very hard to answer. Especially in all the different jurisdictions I want to offer Gekko Plus. And offering any services to users from the United States and a few other countries proved even harder (and more expensive). On top of that the fiscal situation regarding VAT in 28 EU member states isn’t something I want to be spending all this time on.

At the end of the day I am a coder and I want to write code. But most of my time is spent with lawyers and accountants instead. Gekko Plus is operating from the Netherlands (my home country), which isn’t exactly the most crypto friendly jurisdiction right now.

In this light I will continue to focus on Open Gekko.

Mike van Rossum
Creator of Gekko and Gekko Plus