My Coming Out

You spend decades doing truly awful things, and then you become a congressman, a governor, or even the president of a country. Nobody will say a bad word about you. And only twenty years later people learn about you from letters to Epstein.

And then there is a different situation.

You build a company in a competitive market, follow all laws and rules, and try to be open with your clients. And in reality, just like everywhere else, you receive threats against your family, accusations, and insults.

No matter what you do, sometimes an audience can be extremely toxic. And this can seriously hold you back from growing.

Ten years ago I was 26. My daughter had just been born, and I was still very sensitive to every negative word. We were working 12–14 hours a day without weekends, putting all our strength into our creation. And then, for no reason at all, someone writes to you describing how they will slaughter your entire family, in detail. After that, there is no desire to be open or to let people know who you are. I hid my personal data in every possible way, just to avoid even the thought that something could happen to my loved ones.

That’s how the idea was born — “to be myself, but under a different name.” And for 10 years now, I have been calling myself Anatoly, signing corporate emails as Anatoly, and all clients know me under the name Anatoly. For 10 years, neither I nor any member of my family has had social media accounts, YouTube videos, audio chats, or anything like that. The maximum I allowed myself was recording a short holiday video for our community last year — dressed as Santa.

But we only grow when we make an effort over ourselves. When we step over our fears, whatever they may be. I don’t want to hide anymore. I haven’t done anything illegal. By creating a new project — our Zylo ecosystem — I want to tell you about myself and show who I am, so that you have no doubts that we work honestly. I will tell the story here. And I will show myself in an upcoming video on our YouTube channel.

In fact, our clients from intrade.bar know almost everything about me, except my real name. So here it is. My name is Alex Chekalov. I am married and I have four children. In 2011, I started trading, and two years later I was able to trade profitably, which became my main source of income. Three years after that, we created the binary options broker intrade.bar, which to this day remains a benchmark for companies in the CIS market in this niche. Today, we are building a large crypto company consisting of several products, with an audience of more than 50,000 loyal users at the moment.

I know that people haven’t changed in ten years. There are no fewer toxic people in binary options. There are no fewer of them in poker, in crypto projects, or anywhere else. In products like Granny VPN and CosmoFox, we have already seen our audience, while in Zylo Poker we are only about to dive into this in a couple of weeks.

Despite the negativity we have encountered over the past ten years, there have been far more positive responses. We wouldn’t have lasted even a year if there were no people who, just like us, genuinely care about the project. This is the fuel for a locomotive moving at high speed. No wall can stop us if we are aligned toward a positive result. We work and grow for you. In the next article, I will write about these people.

To conclude this article, I want to leave a routine reminder that the internet is a huge dumpster, full of both good and bad things. If you look for good, you will find good. If you look for bad, you will find bad. My personal choice is not to look for anything, but to verify everything myself. We are all adults, and our heads are not only meant for eating and reading reviews on the internet. They also have the function of thinking, analyzing, and coming up with an original comment under this article.

With great love for our community, Alex Chekalov CEO of Zylo