Sasha Ivanov graduated from Moscow State University in 2001, having studied in the Theoretical Physics faculty. He undertook further study at Leipzig University in Germany, and took an early interest in electronic currencies. From 2008-09 he was involved in programming bots to trade on the international forex markets, making use of artificial neural networks, later working on trading operations and neural network trading systems for banks. In 2013 Sasha launched Coinomat.com, the first instant cryptocurrency exchange, and in 2014 created CoinoUSD, the first fiat-backed crypto token. In 2015 he launched Coinoindex.com, the first tradeable cryptocurrency index, and the Cryptoasset.fund blockchain-based venture fund, which held $200K under management. In 2016 Sasha founded custom tokens blockchain platform Waves, which crowdfunded $16M (29,445 BTC).