October 19th 2019 — BitMax.io, a leading global digital asset trading platform, celebrated its memorable first-year anniversary with many blockchain industry leaders, innovators, and influencers from the globe in Beijing, China. With remarkable growth over the last 14 months, the platform has clearly differentiated itself in a highly competitive industry with its deep thought leadership in the financial market, distinctive token economics, rigorous product innovation, and reliable and quality client services.
Overall, more than 200 global blockchain and cryptocurrency experts, entrepreneurs, developers, investors, and key opinion leaders attended a celebration conference focusing on key drivers to the sustainable advancement of blockchain technology and crypto industry – Innovation, Break-through, and Collaboration. The productive conference included several enlightening keynote speeches and three in-depth panel discussions around concurrent topics such as “the Future of Crypto-exchanges”, “the Rise of Digital Asset Management” and “the Opportunities and Challenges of Blockchain.”
Ariel Ling, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of BitMax.io, gave an inspiring opening remark with many highlights from the two-year adventure of her transitioning from a 20-year successful Wall Street career to being an entrepreneur venturing into digital asset trading space. She shared her insightful thoughts about BitMax’s management principles and philosophy, comprehensive industry trend analysis, multi-year strategic plan for the overall financial platform which BitMax is part of, and near-term business priorities in the current challenging market condition. She pointed out that:
“In the next couple months, the team will be working on 1) more product offering from OTC trading, fiat ramp-on, to futures trading, etc.; 2) acceleration of institutional client acquisition and supporting service offering; 3) continuous effort in North America market pending the regulatory development.”
The Co-founder & CEO of BitMax.io, Dr. George Cao, hosted the first-panel discussion. On the mission to raise the industry bar of digital asset trading platform, Dr. Cao and Ms. Ling founded the platform with a team of Wall Street quant trading veterans and have been leading the transformation ever since. The industry trailblazers who joined the panel discussion with Dr. Cao were Mr. Harry Wan, Partner of MatrixPartners China, Mr. Hao Wang, Vice President of Sequoia Capital, Mr. Shuoji Zhou, Founder of FBG Capital, and Mr. Kaihao Ni, Partner of DFG Crypto.
Mr. Harry Wan said:
“The blockchain industry develops faster compared with many traditional industries. At the early stage, exchanges had to provide additional services in the face of a yet-to-be-improved industry. As the industry evolves, we will be able to concentrate on matching trading – what we are best at.”
Mr. Hao Wang remarked that:
“The expansion of exchanges is closely linked to blockchain development and regulation. Looking ahead, as investors and the whole industry mature, exchanges will become more specialized in providing specific services.”
Mr. Shuoji Zhou pointed out:
“Crypto markets abound in opportunities. To seize them, exchanges have to showcase strengthen in product design, R&D etc. As long as there is profit, exchanges will be able to survive and thrive.”
Mr. Kaihao Ni analyzed:
“There are new competitors emerging every year and they usually have to experience two stages of development: First, focus on operation, innovation and strong financial support; then move to depth, brand building and compliance.”
Mr. Yuesheng Ge said:
“Covering all products from upstream to downstream is like the Mount Everest for people in the finance industry. The competitiveness of financial products resides in users, as the product itself is easier to copy. In the future, set aside regulation issues, I think the blockchain industry will see companies that are best at specialization, as well as offering a package of products.
Following the thought-provoking industry discussion, the attention was shifted to three honorable members of BitMax community who were invited onto the stage to share their individual growth stories with BitMax.io. They represented the over 53,000 BitMax users around the world and were rewarded by Dr. Cao with “Special Contribution” for their continuous support in the user community.
As the founder of NGC Ventures, Mr. Tao Gu kicked off the next half of the event with a keynote presentation, sharing his experience and observation in the digital asset allocation strategy. He said:
“Market sentiment (fear or greed) is reflected in token prices. Fundamentals of the industry have a lot to do with technological advances, industry application, and on-chain transactions. With regard to the outlook of the industry, Libra, Bakkt, and Defi represent a positive; landing of public chain applications and Dapp represents a negative.”
Ms. Christina Jin, Chief Marketing Officer of UltrAlpha – an innovative digital asset management service platform, presented her keynote speech on the ecosystem of the digital asset management industry.
Christina said:
“Currently there is a big market for digital asset management and there is still a lot of room for imagination in quantitative trading. We aim to bridge the gap and solve the inefficiency of communication between investors and trading teams.”
She also summarized the current performance in her observing area of digital asset management, and what she had planned in the near future in facing those challenges.
Mr. Christian Xu, as the representative of ETC – the strategic partner of this event, gave a keynote speech and introduced the difference between ETC and ETH:
“First, ETC supports deflation policy, while ETH does not have a cap on the number of tokens; second, ETC does not have difficulty boom and still apply PoW consensus; from the perspective of hashrate, community and market cap, ETC is growing continuously. Vitalik once proposed to use ETC as a data layer to alleviate the network congestion problem, to increase the speed while lower the gas fee.”
The second panel discussion, The Rise of Digital Asset Management, was hosted by Han Liu, CEO of UltraAlpha, with industry experts including Yongmin Li, CEO of Red Blockchain; Zhimin Xu, Founder of 1 Token; Weiping Wu, General Partner of BVC GAIA; Zheng Ren, Partner of Consensus Lab; and Li Huo, CEO of LMT.
Han Liu pointed out:
“With more institutional players entering, the crypto market is getting more competitive at a cost of the profitability of retail investors who in comparison lack the know-how of sophisticated trading strategies. As a result, the cost of hiring asset managers is becoming more justifiable than ever. Asset managers who can demonstrate not only their trading skills but the abilities to combine that with transparent and rational risk control should find themselves rewarded among the rising opportunities.”
BlockVC and Red Chain Capital, as institutional investors, remarked that:
“In BVC, we mainly manage our private fund. From the perspective of LP, the management of digital assets is pretty loose and mostly based on a credit agreement, which usually goes ignored by investors. In digital asset management, risk control before an investment is much more important. As for risk control after investment, we can emulate professional VC companies.” Red Blockchain Capital pointed out that they prefer to be a long-lived company than a company with high profits yet a short life.
A representative from Token Fund, Mr. Zhimin Xu believed that:
“Development of financial products in the blockchain industry represents a necessary step toward an even larger market for token economics. There are mainly two types of long-term value fund: one is large in size and scale, which requires compliance and proper strategy; the other is small yet delicate, which needs strategies supporting high return. The current market is not suitable for large-size fund. Our goal is to focus on small-size funds and continue to refine it.”
ConsensusLab, affiliated to Mars Finance shared views from a distinct perspective:
“Digital asset management is yet to be improved. At the current stage, there are two quite odd phenomena: in terms of digital asset management, it’s still in its infancy, but there already exist the need to manage fund targeting various specialized segment; and for asset managers who have rich experience of managing large-size traditional assets, they are now managing a small amount of digital assets with strategies borrowed from traditional large-size asset managements.”
Mr. Li Huo from LMT said that:
“The crypto market is becoming professional for three reasons: 1) the market is growing and the odds of getting profit from trading is also increasing; 2) market rules are much more standardized; 3) there are more players in the market who are becoming more and more professional. In a word, digital asset management is developing towards the direction of traditional finance.”
The third panel, “Opportunities and Challenges in the Blockchain Industry” brought together six industry experts and was moderated by BitMax’s Global Head of Business Development, Shane Molidor. Joining the final panel were Ms. Mengxia Wu, Senior VP from Matrixport; Ms. Bingjie Huang from Fenbushi Capital; Ms. Chaowen Li, Marketing Director at Harmony; Co-founder at InfPool, Rudy Lu; and Content Director at Stake.Fish, Mr. Hongda Luo.
Matrixport believed that:
“Guarantee security and liquidity of digital assets is the focal point for blockchain and digital assets to go mainstream. And the institutional custody, transaction and loan services provided by Matrixport will play an important role. In terms of CeFi and DeFi, they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Now the market is still in its infancy, facing a small number of customers and lacking the ability to meet a mainstream need. As for CeFi, centralized custody removes the need and risk for clients to keep their own private keys and reduces the threshold of managing and using digital currencies for clients. This will result in more capital and users entering the market. Besides, centralized trading and borrowing will concentrate liquidity in the short term, enabling better price discovery and risk control. In the short run, it will better adapt to the digital asset market’s transition from the early stage to the next one.”
A representative from Stake.Fish, a world-leading PoS mining pool and node service provider, said that:
“PoS and staking will trend in the future and will play an important role in the field of DeFi, providing a significant channel for mainstream users to access inclusive finance. People have already started to use staking coupons and Defi products to overcome the liquidity issues of staking assets under the current PoS mechanism, advancing the price discovery of PoS crypto assets. It takes time for the PoS network to be mature. Stake.Fish is now running confirmation nodes of a mainstream network. We firmly believe in our growth potential in the next 5 years and beyond.”
InfPool, one of the world’s greatest PoS mining pools and node service providers, remarked that: “
Staking will become one of the major value drivers for decentralized finance in the future. As the underlying assets generating stable returns, staking will provide more derivative assets for the DeFi ecosystem. Although the PoS mechanism is now facing liquidity issues of staking assets, generating liquidity by staking tokens is now popular in the field of DeFi. It’s fair to say that staking and DeFi are naturally matched.”
As a world-renowned quality project, Harmony believed that token economy is highly dependent on the underlying architecture: innovation of blockchain technology and its applications.
Speaking about the opportunities & challenges the fast-evolving blockchain industry presents, Molidor noted:
“A lack of metrics and heuristic signals has made estimating the fair value of many digital assets notoriously difficult. The ecosystem as a whole is hungry for clearly defined business models and token economics designs to attribute fundamental value to assets that are otherwise purely speculative in nature. Projects that can showcase clear linkage between their asset’s utility, a revenue-generating business model, and secondary market price action are those that will emerge strongest from the current bear market.”
The last keynote speech was from Mr. Yao Li, Vice President at Cobo. Presenting on the topic of Custody in the digital asset market, Li stated that:
“The Competition between next-generation crypto exchanges would be between compliance, security, and specialization. With the entry of compliant exchanges such as Bakkt, which no doubt will attract more attention from traditional markets, market makers and high-net-worth users, industry in the future needs more regulated third-party custodians and safer wallet infrastructure. Compliant custodians such as Cobo will not only reinforce the security system of exchange wallet but also help exchange to develop wallet with better cost efficiency and grow into the next leader in the highly competitive crypto trading space.”
Mr. Li wrapped up his speech by recognizing BitMax.io’s efforts in compliance and security, wishing better cooperation between Cobo Custody and BitMax.io
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