The Pomp Podcast - #405: Hong Fang on Building A World Class Crypto Exchange

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

Hong Fang is the CEO of OKCoin, a leading fiat-focused digital asset exchange with service in 184 countries. She previously served as a former Goldman Sachs banker, a growth equity investor, a global citizen, and a longtime member of OK Group's Board of Directors. In this conversation, we discuss Hong's background, why she has such deep conviction in Bitcoin, the OKCoin story, why the company is funding Bitcoin development, and what the future of global crypto adoption looks like.  ============================== Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ============================== Masterworks.io is an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is: you don’t need to know anything about art. Their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks.io you don’t have to choose between big risks and big returns. Sign up today, select PODCAST and you can skip the 70,000 waitlist to get first dibs. Just go to www.masterworks.io and use code "POMP" ============================== Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Hong Feng is the CEO of OKCoin, a leading fiat-focused digital asset exchange with service in 184 countries. She previously served as a former Goldman Sachs banker, a growth equity investor, a global citizen, and a longtime member of OK Group's board of directors. In this conversation, we discuss Hong's background, why she has such deep conviction in Bitcoin, the OKCoin story, why the company is funding Bitcoin development, and what the future of global crypto adoption looks like. I really enjoyed this conversation with Hong, and I hope

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You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Hong here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Let's jump into your background. Kind of give us an overview of what you did before you got to OKCoin? Sure. Yeah. Look, I'm not an earlier adopter like many of your other previous interviewees are when it comes to Bitcoin. Some of them probably got into Bitcoin in early 2011, 12, 13. I got it a bit late, although I heard about it in 2013 or 12.

I didn't really, quote unquote, convert until later in 2016. But before I talk about that, I'd like to talk a little bit about my personal background as well, just to share how I've grown up and how that kind of shaped up my perspectives and why I ultimately converted. So I was actually born in China. I grew up in China, in the southern part of China, a small town close to Shanghai. And I was born in the year when the free market concept was first introduced into China in 1979. Anyone who was familiar with recent history of China would probably know that that was the year

when Deng Xiaoping basically opened up the door and said, okay, it's not about whether it's a planned economy, a communist or a capitalist, it's about how we can help our people to live better. In that case, whether it's a black cat or a white cat, as long as the cat catches the mouse, it's a good cat. So that was the year when actually you started to see market elements in a fully planned, centrally planned economy.

And that was when I was born. So I actually had the luxury, like everyone else in my generation, to actually experience that transition of economy, a huge economy from 100% centrally planned fashion into a hybrid model. and I also had the luxury to experience what it was like when it's all centrally planned because initially when that policy was introduced you still had the the a lot of social stigma attached to being an entrepreneur right now we talk about entrepreneur like it's great right you have entrepreneurial spirit that's all you really want to strive for everyone is becoming an entrepreneur but back then if you are you became an entrepreneur it's a social stigma It means that you're probably not good enough on your previous position.

You're a loser. So there was a huge mentality shift and also a huge release of productivity when free market was introduced and people, individuals are given that freedom to choose, to make decisions on what they want to work on, what they think are fruitful and actually execute it. And you see a huge creativity in that sense. And that's also why China has been able to enjoy a lot of huge growth, exponential growth over the last 40 years. It's all because of free market, the introduction of free market. And when we see hurdles of that recently, there's growth slowdown from that perspective. There was also a lot of debate on whether that's because you kind of get to in certain areas where it's really hard to further bring that market concept into certain areas of either society or economy. So that was the larger background of where I, you know, how I grew up.

I had that kind of a personal firsthand experience of how free market is powerful. And then I went to Beijing for my college education and spent a couple of years there, actually nine years in Beijing. Went to Peking University to study economics and language. In 2006, I decided to apply for an MBA. As you know, MBA stands for something that you can, you know, basically after MBA, you can do anything you want kind of myth. I decided to do that because I want to be more integrated into that market first. I think that economy and capital market is really what's really driving the innovation in the world. And U.S. has the most sophisticated capital markets and has a lot of innovation going on in Silicon Valley that was funded by the capital, free capital structure.

So, you know, my dream was kind of go to that and be part of it. So back then, I had different offers, including Chicago and Wharton and Columbia. I ultimately went to Chicago because, again, you know, Chicago was a school where there are multiple professors having got Nobel Prizes for economics, right? You know, Milton Friedman, Eugene Palmer, Stigler, and most recently, Taylor, for his behavior economics. And so, you know, I went there. I spent two years there and graduated in 2008.

It was a fantastic time to graduate from business school, but I was lucky because I, you know, had an offer back then in 2000, before 2008, a crisis hit, you know, all the LBO hit an all time high and people are all, you know, this, this is a new era, nothing, nothing, nothing we have experienced before is going to be expected this time. So that was that kind of narrative. So I got an offer from Goldman. I went to join Goldman in the investment banking division. So I had another choice back then with Goldman, either joining a financial institutions group, FIG, or TMT for the investment banking division. And I made the decision to go to financial institutions again, because I feel like, you know, money is the invisible hand. That's what I've learned from my business school, from my finance education. Money is the invisible hand. the free market, there's a lot of good things happening, but everyone, all our, the whole world is built on incentives, right? Every one of us, we act on incentives. And a lot of those incentives, some of those incentives are probably not monetary. Many of them are, and the monetary system, the financial system actually organizes and allocate resources to the way that the society needs, either appropriately or inappropriately, inappropriately. So I think, you know what,

you know, TMT sounds very interesting. But I really want to really understand what's going on in the financial institutions, in the capital markets, and probably FIG is the right place to go. So I ended up in FIG and spent eight years there, more than eight years with FIG. and now thinking back 2008 joining FIG was not too bad a choice because 2008 was a year when even before I joined full-time everything's starting to crumble down and after I joined I'm sitting there found and looking around and finding my associate in the first class actually got got they got moved around because of the crisis some of them even were moved into back office support because of that. But FIG was kept busy throughout that year because only banks and

insurance companies, particularly banks who actually need money, they are doing a lot of work, right? Recapitalize, getting TARP, raising blind pool, all sorts of stuff. So luckily I was there in the middle of it, seeing all the drama happening, seeing all the TARP being handed out, working on blind pools, stuff like that. It was kind of interesting because I was back then still kind of in the learning mode. I had no idea what's going on. I had no idea how banks operate,

how insurance companies operate, how asset managers operated. So I was really kind of duck my head down and really learn and hope that I didn't get fired just because of the market volatility. So I survived. I ended up working across different subsectors within FEG, serving all kind of customers for their needs, for IPO, for M&A, spin-off, refi, hybrid, all kinds of stuff, kind of interesting. But there are also some aha moments throughout that process.

One of it, which is, you know, when you're sitting in the middle of the financial crisis, you see all kinds of things going on. I was working with a client raising capital, and then in another situation, I worked with investors, private equity investors, trying to pull blindfolds together and buy those bad assets. But they actually were able to secure government sponsorship, basically government guarantee that up certain loss level, government will eat it with taxpayer money. The rest of it, a PE can take and reallocate assets and put out a quote-unquote good bank out there. So actually, it turns out that investing in those bad assets in 2009, 10, and 11 were actually one of the best investment time and investment activity that a PE, a financial-focused PE, or any type of PE investors can actually look for, hope for. So that got me thinking, right, because initially the whole crisis, why it happened, there was huge misallocation of resources, huge upside down for the general public. And I was even worried if I went to a social event, I didn't really want to talk about being at Goldman because in 2008, you don't really want to be part of the Goldman story. But seriously, thinking about that got me to think about the resource allocation, what went wrong.

And also, coming out of that financial crisis, people who don't have enough financial resources end up having less financial resources because you don't really get the leverage to invest in one of those worst periods. Only those with a lot of financial resource, excess financial capital, they can actually, they have the luxury to invest and actually get more return out of it. So that got me to start thinking about what's going on and what was wrong. And then, you know, because I also have different experience working with banks and insurance companies versus with fintech companies, I also got to see how the different dynamics when you work with fintech companies, you know, the mindset is very different. Trying to think of, look at the status quo and think about what we can change to really benefit the larger generation, larger population. Well, you know, the traditional financial industry is more about the status quo, right? The business model is very straightforward.

It's about capital allocation based on whatever the incentives are depend on, you know, the current system set up. And so that got me to think about, you know, what I really want to do. When I think about what you are doing in the capital markets, there is a big portion of resource allocation to support the high growth, the technology firms who are driving growth through innovation. There are also a big portion of resource allocation or asset reallocation. You know, people pursue M&A, spinoffs, a lot of those are capital markets and movers that reallocate resources, but does it really create extra value? And also, when you look at the price movement, market movement in U.S. market, or even in global market, you know, take China, for example, you see periods of asset bubbles. And when those prices really deviate from fundamentals, fundamentals doesn't really matter anymore.

And at some point, that music stops. And you start to think why that actually deviates from the fundamentals, what's going on. Because we all think about market, free market. Free market believers say, okay, the price is an indicator of the supply and demand, right? We don't have to know, we don't need a central planner who knows everything going on.

And we just, every one of us just look at the price and price will tell us what I should do, how I should allocate resources. So there must be something wrong with that price indicator that lead to that large scale misallocation of the social resources. So fast track to 2016, I decided to shift because I, you know, I want to actually be on the investment side, go get closer to that, the innovation side. going through growth equity investment, looking at tech companies, tech companies. So I was asked by a serial entrepreneur in China. He was a very famous and legendary one to join him and help him do basically growth investment. So that was in late 2016. And it was because of that shift that I got to know Star, who was the founder of OKCoin.

He started OKCoin in 2013 as a RMB crypto trading platform, primarily focused on Chinese market back then. So between 13 and 16, it's all about Chinese customers trading in and out of crypto with RMB. So I got to know about him and got to know him and the team, and we seriously started to talk about investment. I was actually leading the Series B investment back then. So we were talking about that. And that was the time when I actually started to look at Bitcoin in all seriousness. I heard about Bitcoin actually in 2012. One of my MDs, a very senior lady, a female MD actually talked to us about Bitcoin in a random meeting. We were talking about something else, and then she was like, you know what? Have you heard about Bitcoin? It's actually a very interesting thesis, and the value has been going up.

It just slipped my mind. If I have a time machine to go back, I'll probably change that. But, like, unluckily, there was no time machine. So in 2016, I was – end of 2016 was really when I started to really seriously look at Bitcoin. and uh you know honestly uh back then in in uh in 16 okcoin was doing really good um was number one uh trading platform in china so it has a lot of user has a lot of activity a lot of volume and a lot of cash flow but that was not the reason why i ended up investing in them because when i look at bitcoin and really debate on what really it offers like if if there was something

that i've learned from my investment banking experience was that really there are a lot of noises in the market. The market can deviate from the fundamentals, but long-term, it's about the fundamentals. So give it some time and the fundamentals will catch up. So I was asking myself, are there any fundamentals in this or is it just all price speculation that will fade at some point? And I was looking at Bitcoin and I realized that actually this is something I've never seen before. It's very new because it really challenged a lot of the assumptions I had, right? Some of the assumptions like, for example, monetary system. Again, I came to the US because I believe in free market. I think this is the center of free market. I went to Chicago because

there's a lot of economists talking about free market and kind of how you should not tax, you should do less tax and give that power to people. But in the traditional economics and the current the way that the central banking was talking about policies. There was never a question about whether a monetary system, number one, should or should not be created or run by government. And number two, there's never a question about the assumption whether inflation is a given. We always talk about the base monetary policies

that you need to have some 2% inflation maybe to encourage spending to produce growth. That was taken as a given. So those are actually powerful moments of kind of realization and say, okay, actually, you know what? That probably explains why the price signals in market was not working as well because you've got monetary policy that actually intentionally inflates

And it's really hard to bifurcate that from what's really going on. And what we are seeing this year exactly show point that again. And it's a replay of 2008. Because arguably what happened in 2008 was a aftermath of what Greenspan has been doing with monetary policy in 2000. So I think that was a big aha moment. And that was when I was like, OK, you know what, there is a lot of uncertainty related to this because when it comes to monetary system, it's not just technology innovation. It's actually there's a lot of invested interest in this and invested interest not only by individuals, but also by various sovereign governments who knows what will happen. And, you know, something happened with China policy in 2017 related to crypto, which kind of speak to the volatility, inner volatility of this long term.

But fundamentally, I think it shows that it's possible to rebuild a sound monetary policy that is responsible, that actually rewards the savers and rewards those who have longer term time preference. And it shows if you look at China versus U.S. economy, right, China has a much higher saving rate versus U.S. has a much higher leverage. We all tout about leverage in the capital markets. However, if you look at the growth rate, when you have a higher saving rate in the society, you actually have more capacity to invest for longer-term benefit. So I think that is really powerful.

And the other powerful thing in Bitcoin that I see was not just related to monetary policy. It was also because part of it is technology, that blockchain concept that, you know, very simply designed and you can actually use those simple things to effect large-scale interpersonal collaboration and enable value transition one-on-one. But it's also because the way it is set up,

It actually allows, it used the combination of technology and incentive system to allow, not devilize people who pursue their own individual interest. Because I think human beings are built to pursue their own incentive. It's just part of us. It's just inhuman to ask everyone to act in everyone else's benefit. You know, some of us can't do that, but it's unnatural to ask everyone to do it. So when you have a system that actually reward individuals who just pursue their own benefit, and as a result of that, actually build the ecosystem and build the whole platform for everyone's benefit, I think that's marvelous.

I've never seen that before. So that was, again, those are things that kind of come together and, you know, made my decision, I made my decision to invest in OKCoin. Let me ask this question. When you made that decision, what were kind of the driving factors, right? So it's kind of like you bought into the idea of Bitcoin, you found that interesting, you saw value there, but why OKCoin specifically? Yeah, I think if I believe in a potential of that future, it is a future where there is a combination of blockchain technology and incentive setup that build beyond Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the monetary layer. And the technology, even as it stands right now, is still not there. But once the technology gets to the next level or the level beyond it, I think we would be able to see a revolution even beyond that monetary system, right? In the financial system,

as we kind of are seeing right now in DeFi, but it's still very early stage. It still doesn't allow large scale, high efficiency transactions. But even beyond that, I think really what matters is that real use cases, like, you know, ICO in 2017, there was a lot of white paper floating around

that doesn't really have the substance to support it. But I think the direction it was heading for was right. We just didn't have the technology to really support and make it happen. But I believe in a world where ultimately different parts of our economy right now, which was run on internet version right now through a centralized platform, hopefully that can be realized in a more decentralized fashion through token. So it would be a combination of that underlying protocol development and incentive system built into it. And to be able to have that type of crypto world taking effect and function smoothly, you actually have to have a price discovery system for people to really see the value of their crypto, whatever that crypto asset is for, right?

maybe peg it against Bitcoin in the future. You have to have that price discovery system. So my thinking is, okay, this is definitely a long-term right. But no matter what, you'll need a marketplace to discover price, meaning a trading exchange. And OKCoin seems to be in a good position back then. And, you know, that's the place to go. So that was really why I made that decision.

Yes, there was a lot of speculation, But without speculation, without price increase, it would be hard to attract new users into the space. So it's just a starting point. Absolutely. It makes complete sense. Talk a little bit about OKCoin today. You guys are based in the United States and kind of have a whole bunch of different features. When you describe the business and the products to somebody, just give us an overview of what does that really entail? Yeah. So OKCoin today, we actually went through a lot of transitions.

You know, as I mentioned, back in 2016, 15, 16, 17, we were all Chinese market. And the only trading pair we had back then was just Chinese yen versus crypto. In 17, we went through a transition because of the Chinese government shutting it down informally and not allowing that fiat crypto trade. So we actually decided to come change our strategy and come to the U.S. and other jurisdictions where there is a clear regulatory framework where we can actually build out that fiat on them. Because we believe that, you know, in the future, it's probably all 100% crypto. Who knows that that's such a remote future. In a realistic way, it's probably a parallel, right? A parallel where you have crypto, but you also have traditional fiat stuff.

So we need a bridge between the two. We need to give people easy access into crypto or out of crypto. And that's what we are trying to do at OKCoin, to provide that easy on-ramp, off-ramp access to crypto and also drive adoption. I think crypto, even today, with all the excitement that we are seeing in DeFi over the last three months, it's still a very small population thing.

It's very hard for people, general public, to grasp the concept of private key and, you know, access and set up node. Not even everyone within crypto can actually do that. So I think there's still a high bar to cross. But getting more people to really understand, to start off, to understand what Bitcoin is about and see if they actually agree with the fundamental principles that Bitcoin is proposing. And then maybe going beyond that, you know,

what are the other potential protocols and crypto assets that they identify with, either want to invest in or utilize in the future. I think that's really what we think about ourselves. Our mission is kind of on that adoption direction. We want to make it easy for the general public to do that. That's why, you know, for now, we have been in a building mode because to be that bridge, like it or not, you have to be compliant. and getting licenses in the U.S. in the right way takes time.

So we're taking time to do that over the last three years. And over the last year, we've been also, you know, with license application kind of more than halfway done, we started to also invest in areas where, you know, product and marketing growth and kind of try to build that infrastructure and get some of the good products out there to serve markets. We have been updating our current product as is to make it easy, adding instant deposit and making easy flow.

But there is a lot more that we want to do with our product. So we'll continue to do that. Yeah, that's awesome. I read somewhere and something I found very interesting is that you're actually helping to fund Bitcoin development as well. Talk a little bit about where did that come from and kind of what's the thought process behind it? It sounds like you guys are basically have money going out, but not necessarily directly money coming back in and are more just supporting developers building on Bitcoin. Yes. Yeah. I think that circles back to how we see Bitcoin as part of the crypto world.

world. And also my experience from Goldman, again, going back to the fact that when we look at what's going on out there, either in traditional space or in crypto, we went through the ICO process, the bump and burst. And we are right now in a DeFi wave. There's a lot of debate on whether this DeFi is the same with ICO or it's different. But coming down to, I think, what really matters for crypto to be long-term successful and actually deliver what we believe in in the first place is about the fundamentals. Are we building the protocol in the right way? And again, when I think about crypto, there are two elements. One is that underlying protocol level, and the other is the incentive that's built into it. Obviously, Bitcoin is the most

mature crypto asset in crypto and the way the incentive system is built is very clear very simple and it's it's built in the in the sense that it was meant to be right being that digital gold being that kind of monetary layer but there's a lot of stuff that need to be done to the protocol to make sure that it actually is secured it's it's it protects privacy it can scale to the to the best it can so i think there's a lot of work that need to be done there and you You know, we, as an exchange, we don't necessarily get direct benefit from sponsoring those developers. But we think it's important for us to do that because Bitcoin is the fundamental layer of our industry. So if anything bad happens to it, you know, we are all gone.

And we would like to be able to sponsor continuous development. And we don't think we are the only one, right? And it's good that we are not the only one. and we don't want to be the only one. And we don't want our form of donation to be the only form of donation. I think it's actually good to have different parties jumping in actually after our efforts.

So we also see a lot of our pales in the exchange industry to jump in and also provide support, which is great, which is what we would love to see. And we started with Bitcoin, again, is because it is one of the oldest developer community. It doesn't really have a central sponsoring entity, right? And it's very much community-driven.

It's unlike Ethereum, for example. There's a lot of different organizations sponsoring it. Bitcoin is really out there on its own. And I think it takes efforts from every one of us to support its continuous growth. So that's really why and we'll continue to do it. But ultimately, I think it's really kind of investing in that protocol and also see to whatever extent we can try to be that bridge to between developer community, which is a more fundamental community and more niche, more specialized community to the general investor and general public, help people understand what's going on there. and why they're working on what they're working on, why it matters to us, things like that.

We also learn a lot in that process as well. And we'll continue to do that. How do you see the kind of landscape of exchanges, both in the US and internationally, kind of unfolding, right? There's kind of a whole host of different exchanges. They all have different strategies. You guys have kind of a very unique type strategy.

You spend a lot of time building recently. How do you think of like differentiation and kind of like where you want to kind of find success? Like what is that thing that you guys say, hey, we want to be known for X? Yeah, I don't want to speak for other exchanges. I think, again, as you mentioned, there are a lot of players out there.

Some are around longer, some are around shorter. Obviously, most recently we have Uniswap, which is a totally different animal. And we're very happy to see them grow and the volume outpacing Coinbase. But again, from our perspective, our focus is really on promoting adoption, and we want to do whatever we can to do that. And that means that we have to focus our resources on that, make it simple, make it easy for people to get in and get out. Does that mean it has to be centralized exchange or whatever format that we want to take?

Maybe, but it can also be connecting to the DeFi world in some sense. So we're exploring, we're doing that internal debate and some of it will translate into product and some of it probably will not after internal discussion. But hopefully we're all moving in that direction and which is, we wanna help promote adoption, help more people come in and understand

and embrace it into whatever format. Because not all, some of us are diehard Bitcoin holders. We just buy and hold, we don't trade. Some of our daily traders, right, coming in and out, you know, Bitcoin or altcoin, it doesn't matter. And then there's some other people who are not really familiar with it, and they're still debating what it would be and how they should manage it. I think from our perspective, and me as a kind of a long-term Wall Street practitioner, I think everyone should take a very responsible approach. um not diving before you have actually have some uh idea of what's going on and and and also particularly if you don't know what's going on you don't have full conviction don't all in just

put a small amount into it and then see how it goes uh that's probably or just get you know one bitcoin for your children and just leave it there so one of the interesting things to me is like part of the bitcoin narrative of store value is to hold bitcoin right obviously exchanges want as much trading as possible because that's how they make money how do you kind of think through the balance between uh maybe that bitcoin ethos of holding and store value with uh kind of the business goals of lots of transactions right that's a very kind of interesting thing and i think you guys have a unique perspective on yeah again as a from a business like from personal perspective i obviously have my personal preference when it comes to hold versus trade

And I respect that for everyone. I think everyone has that and should make that choice. And that's also what will make it successful for Bitcoin long term. Like if all people are trading and not holding, then it's problematic because you all end up having speculations. But if no one is trading, everyone is holding, then there's no liquidity and there's no price fluctuation and no interest spike from the non-crypto community. So I think it's actually healthy to have both. And as an exchange, from a business perspective, we're not going to dictate on whether you should hold or whether you should trade. It's all individual choice. Again, back to how I grew up, I really believe in that empowering individuals.

I think if you look at the evolution of the Internet over the last 10 or 20 years, last 20 years in the U.S., last 10 years in China, I think there is a very clear trend of democratization of everything, starting from e-commerce trading, buying and selling, and then gradually getting into media. more more uh more sensitive areas of media but you know the the recent uh tiktok was making a big splash here one of the big reason we i i actually invested in tiktok when i was doing my growth investment i was you know hopefully it looks like it's a good one um but one of the reason that they were successful is because it was really giving that uh uh right to users it's all user-generated content it's not that platform trying to centrally produce it it's whatever user want to do you produce it and you know you see uh how much interest you're generating locally um so i think that uh democratization um is very powerful and um what we are doing crypto is i

think is in line with that the the ultimate thing is really to empower individuals right um and uh crypto hopefully with with the right incentives and and we we do need as an industry we do need more technology advancement, more advancement in the protocol level to be able to host more use cases, real use cases. And to be honest, I spent all my professional life in financial institutions, and I love what's going on with DeFi, but I think ultimately what will make us successful as an industry for crypto is we have to see more use cases outside financial industry. that's when things will really take off and you know yeah look forward to that absolutely and so

when you think about that future world where you know things have taken off go out maybe 10 or 20 years like paint a picture of what is the kind of holy grail situation or kind of where are we headed if you will uh 10 years i don't know what happens in 10 years we'll see um uh but you know 10 years is a long horizon. If we think about what happens in 10 years, over the last 10 years in US, in China, things have totally turned upside down. But maybe crypto will bring

even more drastic changes to us. Maybe not. There are a lot of hurdles to that too, right? There is the advancement at the protocol level. There is regulatory framework, how that will shake out. Because even in the internet space or where you see more innovations that actually benefit society, benefit people, is when actually regulators taking a seat back and see what's going on before jumping in and say, this is not right. That's not right. um you actually give them some space to experiment and see uh what works versus what doesn't work so

it's hard to tell um i'm i'm generally positive uh but you know it's hard to there there are some pieces of it that that's kind of uh hard to predict as well so i i would say that long term i'm very positive um but but there is uh natural um volatility because of that that i think we should expect and we should embrace as an industry and work through it. Ideally, in an ideal situation, I think we are, I don't know if that happens in 10 years or so, but I think in an ideal situation, there's no company format. There's probably no government format. It's all community and each community based on each protocol with its own token is almost like a country that we have right now but again that's a that's a you know i don't know if it's a remote reality

absolutely and then what about okay coin 10 or 20 years from now like what is that kind of north star or where are you driving the organization and want to see it get over the next kind of decade or so again i don't know uh 10 years it's really hard to tell uh right now what what we currently have is i think the the way we see the evolution is that there is a there is a long uh period of uh transition time or uh a period where the two worlds ran in parallel right there may be situations where the two worlds collides um you know we'll put that possibility aside first but there will be a long time wherein the two worlds um uh coexist together so we want to be for okay coin in its current form and we want to be that connection point between the two

uh that the format of that connection point can change uh as the industry changes you know uh we are as you know uh much better than anybody else you know our industry changes every minute um so it's hard to tell you know our internally we we uh we look at things every two months And that's probably feeling still too long. So it's really hard to tell how things will look like 10 years. But I think that North Star of promoting adoption is going to be important for us to mobilize around. Yeah, look, I think that just the perspective you have is it's so balanced. And I think this idea of like, hey, we're building a business, but we believe in the ethos of Bitcoin and a lot that's going on there.

and the willingness to support Bitcoin developers and kind of really be thoughtful about what you're building and kind of how you roll it out and stuff is it's pretty impressive to see. Before we wrap up, I ask everybody the same two questions and then you'll get the opportunity to ask me one.

The first one is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? I like Foundation Trilogy. Awesome. Why do you like that? um i read it uh very early age um and i think it was eye-opening it's a combination of uh sociology and you know the the way they talk about psychohistory you know on one side it reflects almost reflects what happened with roman empire uh but on the other side it um

It shows the possibility that, you know, human being, human society, individually, it's very hard to predict. But if you look at it on a over a long enough horizon and a larger enough scale, you can probably see some patterns and use that to predict things. It's different from central bankers trying to predict monetary policy, I think. uh and there's a lot of uh interesting uh um moments where you see small uh small characters in the story actually shaping history but not shaping history changing it because it kind of diverged from that path it still follows so math uh matters actually there there there are some uh sacred uh uh rules embedded in that number game so i think that's really interesting Yeah, I love it.

I love that answer. That's awesome. Aliens is the second question. Are you a believer or a non-believer? I think it's unlikely that we are the only planet with life. I thought you were going to say it's unlikely that aliens existed. I was going to be shocked. But okay, unlikely that we are alone makes more sense.

It's unlikely. we just don't know uh where they are well maybe they are but we you know we are not aware of it maybe we are in their program whatever um so yes i i i think it is uh we just don't know yeah i i tend to agree with you and uh based on 2020 i started to think that maybe we are actually in a simulation right yeah it's like somebody is saying uh hey you guys dealt with that pandemic thing okay here's a tornado here's a hurricane like deal with murder hornets right they come with all kinds of crazy stuff yeah yeah um you could ask me one question to wrap up what's the one question you have for me uh look you have talked to so many people uh you know you said 400

podcasts uh everyone bring in different perspectives um are there anything that surprise you uh that is kind of almost like a common theme uh that you're seeing again and again um um despite kind of what kind of background they're coming from yeah i don't know if there's things necessarily that surprised me i i guess the the biggest surprise and and uh this is somewhat of a joke but uh there's only ever been two people who came on the podcast and said they believed in ghosts more than they believed in aliens that was a little surprising um but but in terms of like the actual content around like business and things the things that are maybe uh less obvious or the really simple things right so everyone who listens is always waiting for

somebody to come on and have you know you say hey if you want to build a successful exchange here's the secret right or like here's the magic bullet i wish i had a magic bullet of course right because the the operators understand there is no magic bullet right it's it's building a business right so you've got to build a product you've got to make sure that it's what people want you've got to scale it you've got to market it you've got to hire people you've got to manage people Like, it's all the blocking and tackling of building a company. And I think that that's probably the thing that it doesn't matter what industry, doesn't matter what stage of the business, like the blocking and tackling of building and or funding companies is exactly what you think, right? It's hard work.

And there is no magic bullet. There is no kind of, oh, Hong woke up this morning. She, you know, typed in the secret code. And now all of a sudden, OKCoin is successful. like as much as we want that yeah as much as we want that to be the answer that's just not how the world works and so i think that um that's probably the thing i've taken away the most is uh everyone if they can kind of realize the people who came before me and have been successful did the same things that i have to do and people who come after me are going to do the same things

there is no shortcut um i think it just focuses people like okay let's go do the work right and so that that would kind of be my answer that's very good thank you thank you for sharing that Absolutely. Where can we send people to find either you on the internet or find out more about OKCoin? Obviously, I'm on Twitter. I'm not super active, to be honest, because I'm so focused on a lot of the internal stuff. But you can find me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is HBangCA. I've been using that for a long time. Obviously, we have our website. You can visit OKCoin.com. And we also have our OKCoin Twitter as well. Please come and interact with us and give us your feedback. Awesome. Well, listen, Hong, I really appreciate you taking the time

to do this. I know you're super busy. And I think people will really appreciate just hearing your perspective and kind of the vision that you have for not only the company, but also where all this is going. And again, it's really cool to kind of see the approach that you guys have taken in terms of funding Bitcoin development and kind of really taking the time to build stuff. I'm pretty impressed. So thank you so much for your time. We'll have to do it again in the future.

Yeah, looking forward to that. Thank you, Pom. Thank you for your time.