Ep.6 of 51% with Mable Jiang : Constance Kang — The Prevailing FTX

Note: This is the script to the 6th episode of the 51% Asia podcast series hosted by Mable Jiang and featured Constance Kang, the COO of FTX. Some community members requested to transcribe the original podcast into script so I thought it’d be good to give it an experiment.

The original audio was in Mandarin and was converted into text via the service at Iflyrec and translated with the help of Google Translation. Please excuse me as there may be a lot of grammatical errors due to the Google translation quality as well as my own time constraint, but I have tried my best to make sure it doesn’t hinder interpretation.

Welcome to 51%, a podcast hosted by Mable Jiang that explores blockchain’s rapid development across Asia, with a particular focus on the perspectives, communities and operators based in China.

This podcast will feature a mix of English and Chinese discussions. The goal is to bring Eastern perspectives to West and Western perspectives to East, so the audience can better understand the crypto’s unique market structure and how these distinct communities think and operate.

This podcast is proudly presented by Multicoin Capital.

Mable: Hello, everyone, welcome to the sixth episode of 51%. I’m the host, Mable Jiang. Today we invited the COO of FTX,Constance Kang, to join us, welcome Constance.

Constance: Hi everyone, my name is Constance. Thank you Mable for the invitation. I am very happy to take this opportunity to communicate with everyone.

Mable: FTX is actually very famous in this industry, so I don’t think there should be too much introduction. Before I start to talk more about FTX, I want to talk to you about your personal experience and how did you enter The cryptocurrency industry?

Constance: After I graduated from university, I actually worked at Credit Suisse all the time, and when I first entered, I was doing a project like a management trainee, and then he had a certain period of management training. I was I participated in two years. After two years, they will determine the team you will join in the end, or the work that you will do eventually, after two years of rotation. Then after I finished the management trainee project, when I was given the team that I would go to eventually, I found that I didn’t want to go to any team.

Then I actually started to think about whether I should stay in the bank, and then I actually did a lot of homework at that time, I wanted to find a suitable long-term development as a career of my life. There is one thing that I thought at the time. At that time, I actually did my homework on big data, artificial intelligence and blockchain. Most of the big data and artificial intelligence recruiting were actually related to tech, such as software engineers. For me, I studied finance, and I hope I can play a role that’s more front-end facing, so I decided to go for blockchain later.

Then another reason is that after I learned about it and talked with many friends, I found that the blockchain industry is still in its early stage. The space he can give me is actually very large, so I think this thing might be worth it. I used my next ten or even 20 years to struggle and work hard, so I entered the blockchain industry.

Mable: This is quite impressive, because generally speaking, it is quite rare for someone whose first job in a bank to think of looking for a long-term career after only two years.

Were you in the Bay Area at the time?

Constance: I was in Singapore, because I went to Singapore since middle school, and then studied at the National University of Singapore, and then I stayed in Singapore since I graduated, and then Singapore is actually a new financial center, so it’s The financial industry is very developed.

On why did I actually want to leave the bank at that time..most of the banks were talking about digital reforms. There is a lot of cumbersome and manual work in their internal banks. Some manual processes, they now want to automate all of these processes, but to automate a simple process, it can take months or even a year.

At that time, Credit Suisse was working on an automated personal wealth management platform. It took two years to launch this thing. After this thing is online, we will naturally have some discussions with that part of the people, and we will say that this thing is coming up. After that, you already have new technologies and new platforms.

But everyone still thinks that Credit Suisse is pretty fast, because it took UBS two and a half years, so I think my goodness, I just started working, do I really have to stay in this environment for more than ten or twenty years? Also I know that banks have levels. You need to go up level by level. Then this is a requirement for seniority. So I thought that maybe this environment is not suitable for me, so I left. .

Mable: This is quite interesting. At the time you decided to enter this industry, how did you meet FTX founder Sam?

Constance: My first job in this industry was in Huobi, and I was in charge of Huobi Singapore, which was mainly institutional business. Then sam was actually in the Bay Area when he founded Alameda. Then he developed an OTC system because of Alameda. Your OTC is actually not the same as quant trading. If you do a single quantification, you can immerse yourself in it, you can not show up, so you can make money as long as you have high skills.

But once you start OTC, you need to have a counterpart, and you need someone else to do business for you, so they only started to do external work at that time, and the main OTC market is actually the most flow in Asia. , So the team below went to Hong Kong, then to Singapore, and then I happened to be in Singapore, and my friend introduced him to me, and then he wanted to learn about Singapore and Hong Kong crypto by chatting with me Some of the situation, and then the situation of TC, including market activity, as well as some of the situation of institutions and retail investors, so this is how sam came to know. In the next few months, I communicated with him a lot.

So when I first started doing FTX, I asked me if I was interested in joining him. In fact, we had a very interesting conversation at the time, and I am still impressed. At that time, what did you say to create a new exchange in 2019? One thing very late, the successful exchange, it has formed its own fixed users and its own reputation, and then new exchanges are emerging in endlessly, constantly coming out again.

So in 2019, whenever an exchange forms, you go to an event, the exchange has more people than users. So in that case, I thought at the time why did you want to build an exchange? So I actually had a conversation with him at that time, and I said, what do you think is the success rate of FTX? Then he told me that I think the success rate of FTX is only 30%, but if we don’t try, we will never know. So at the time, I thought I would give it a try because I was young and I wanted to give it a try without thinking about anything, so I joined FTX

Mable: I especially remember that the first round of fundraising of FTX was only a year and a half from now. I think the main suspicion to everyone at the time was that now so many people are working on the same sector, it was already so crowded. How can FTX suddenly outcompete. But when you look back, when binance first started, everyone was wondering if they could do it. I guess in any sector there will always be two waves or three waves of new players coming out. For example, if the strategy of your product is right, and or you have chose the right assets, and then you have accumulated enough of these advantage in a period of time, you may be able to outperform in a very intense environment. I think this is quite interesting.

Still, why did you make your own market and then at the same time become an exchange? What did you think about this conflict?

Constance: In fact, I don’t think it is in conflict.

First of all, I think the exchange has good liquidity and market makers to support it. In fact, for the entire exchange as a whole, the overall liquidity is very good.

But why do people think that it is not good to say that you are a market maker and an exchange? This is actually a question that many people worry about whether you will be the thieve of your own house. I think that for many non-financial backgrounds, there is not something straightforward. But for people who have been trained in such financial institutions as Wall Street and investment banks, why would they do this?

For instance I have been trained in investment banking for two years, and then I have been in the management role for three years. For us,this is a very sensitive topics.

No matter in terms of financial regulations or regional regulations, you can’t do things like self-trading or what we call self trading and wash trading. You can’t do it. Between our BD team and the team that knows transaction information is, we have Chinese wall in the middle.

In fact, I think this is a very clear boundary for me personally.

But maybe many people in crypto don’t think so, and they don’t do it this way. That’s why everyone in the market talks about this topic. But from our point of view, Alameda is a market maker, and FTX itself is an independent project.

When we first started FTX, Alameda only served as a role of a liquidity market maker to provide liquidity to FTX, so when there were not many market makers in the early stage of FTX, Alameda was more like a key supporter. However, there are already many excellent paper makers on FTX, including many market makers that may be better than Alameda. We very much want to promote fair transactions and fair transactions, and then comply with all transaction principles related to financial regulations.

Mable: Yes, in the SEC regulated investment banks there are walls between the public and the private side as you said. But for many people, they are worried that there is no regulation in crypto, and often they need to rely on self-discipline. You have a certain professional background, so you may think that you must do it right at the very beginning, or otherwise there may be some problems later.

Constance: For us, we hope to gain a foothold in the industry for a long time.

So if you say that one day, under any circumstances, when the industry is becoming more and more compliant, you need to start submitting your historical records. We don’t want any history of violations to appear. We don’t want any of these records to affect our development in the industry, so we actually paid attention to these issues from the very beginning, and any activities we do, any new products we do. Many of our external activities and actions, including words we talked, have been reviewed by our lawyers. We still hope that we can do it in an environment without supervision. At least we are in line with the principle that everything is financial transactions and what should not be done. As long as he starts to supervise one day, then we are still OK.

Mable: I have to say that I think your success was largely because that you had a liquidity provider at the beginning. In fact, this is similar to what it is for defi now. Many people will worry about a project that comes without a liquidity provider at the beginning.

If there is a market maker on an exchange at the beginning, the liquidity depth will be very good as soon as it comes up, so this may also attract many people willing to go trade on FTX from the beginning.While I always believe that success can be a long-term effort, large success, or so-called home run, I think it actually requires pulsed bursts. So from your point of view, what are some of the product strategies that have been done particularly right?

Constance: I think I really agree with this. You need to have a few blasts to be successful. In fact, our popularity is also created in waves, partly because of market sense, and partly because of the overall environment.

If we talk about specific products, in 2019, our main promotion is our leveraged tokens. From the very beginning when I promoted FTX, we promoted our leveraged tokens. Now you look at this market, there is still no one, I can say, that does this product as good as us.

So this product did not gain much market response in 2019. I think part of it is also related to our own low popularity.

We have been pushing this concept to everyone in 2019, but everyone did not accept it too much, but it takes time for everyone to keep getting in touch with it.

Then at the beginning of this year, leveraged tokens actually achieved an explosive popularity in the entire industry. More and more people know about leveraged tokens, and understand what it is and its principle of position adjustment. What is it, what is its product mechanism, and is willing to come and do transactions. I think this is one of the products that brought explosive traffic to FTX.

Then some other products are actually some of our more innovative contract transactions. For example, we have listed a lot of indexes, and then listed various kinds of them. For example, we have a platform token index and a defi index. The index was when the public chains were particularly popular last year. We listed the Dragon Index, which was for the Chinese public chains. We kept listing for these indexes, which are actually not available on other platforms.

So for some users who prefer to trade portfolio assets, they are very willing to trade these indexes.And then we will often be in the early days when everyone else is not realizing yet, we list some tokens. For example, we first launched Dot and Link (perp) at that time. Everyone also includes algo. Everyone is talking about shorting algo at one point. If you want to go short, where can you go short? At that point, only FTX has this contract, and later on other platforms, but we are still the fastest one in many other tokens. This has also brought a lot of traffic and attention to FTX, and it has grown step by step to today.Mable: Indeed, I also think that your sensitivity to the market, including the speed of launching various innovative financial instruments, may be beyond the reach of some other peers. Maybe this is because of your team’s background in finance, as well as the deep root in the crypto native world.

I’m quite curious, because there should be a lot of colleagues. From places like Jane Street, TwoSigma or Citadel, what is the culture of working at FTX?

Constance: This is a very good question.

If I really want to summarize it, I can basically use 6 words to summarize it, which is flat, efficient, flexible.

On being flat. So far, our entire FTX team has no more than 50 people. We don’t have many layers. We usually think that for a company with less than 100 people, you have two levels, that is, you have a CEO, and then there is a middle-level management, and then we think that this kind of structure is enough. If you add another layer of people in, you will affect your work efficiency. Then one thing you need to keep up is to find your leader and have your leader read the report and then agree to it. This is very time-consuming.

For us, time cost is our biggest cost, so we hope that we can react to any changes in the market at the fastest speed and in the shortest time. So in fact, a flat company structure is very conducive to this point. So when it comes to being efficient, because we have a small population so everyone has to do a lot of things, if you are not efficient, then you may not have time to sleep.

How about flexible? Everyone from the outside world will usually see that we react very quickly to the market, but in fact, this part actually has two sides. We usually make plan two weeks ahead. But often there is urgent situations, such as the event of SushiSwap at that time. We did not consider saying that this matter would fall on us at the time, and we have already planned ahead what should we develop, what the marketing does, and what the operation side does.

When Sushi’s responsibility suddenly fell on us, and all of our things had to be rearranged. So what is the priority of development now?

The priority increase means that we hope that some of the above development priorities will be postponed. Once postponed, what should our market respond to, what should our operations respond to, and how our activities can be. Can’t it be held as scheduled? In fact, all of them require us to respond quickly in a very short time.

So it left me a big impression at that time. It was a weekend when Sushi’s incident happened. We really all came back to the office and started to discuss new plans and what to do next. So I think it is because we have a flat structure, so everyone is always in a highly synchronized state. Whenever what we need to discuss is to discuss a problem, we all get together to discuss it, and we will start to do it as soon as we finish the discussion.

So this is what I think is our company culture.

Mable: Actually you just mentioned it. I think I have a lot of the same feeling, because teams with such culture uually are very self-driven.

I thought the points you just said are very similar to ours. In fact, our team only has 6 people on the investment committee, and there’s another colleague who is responsible for the marketing of other portfolios and our own branding / communication. All the work, from investment to writing research reports, and then to portfolio services, is done by the same group of people.

If everyone has a good understanding what he/she is good at at, then everyone will be very self-driven, and then there is no need for someone to manage or supervise.

I was chatting with an anonymous leader of a defi team a few days ago. I won’t say which project this is, but everyone is familiar with it. He said that the best talents cannot be hired, but we should pay them enough, and give them a vision that they are willing to work for. In this way, these amazing talents will work together. I very much agree with what he said.

For this reason, I am also very optimistic about this project, because I think that although these defi protocols can be decentralized, but at the end it’s still about human execution. So I think that a team with this kind of vision usually runs very efficiently.

Constance: Yes, I think I agree with you very much, that is, excellent talents cannot be hired. I think that all outstanding talents have their own ideas. There are some very smart and outstanding people who have very strong opinions.

When you guys are really not on the same page, one may be able to do things in the short term if you really force him / her to do something, but in the long term it is going to be difficult. So I think it is very important to give these outstanding people to a common goal that they can strive for.

Mable: How is your day like as COO of FTX? In general, how would you allocate your time, and then you said earlier that you might plan two weeks in advance. Can you share with us roughly what a typical day would look like for you?

Constance: Many times when I open my calendar in my day, I already have many prescheduled meetings. In addition to these meetings, I will try my best to talk to our team, to give them sync-ups and updates with the info that I can get.

I am involved in many projects but I don’t want to say that I am the only one who knows this information. Then I hope that my team can always be in a highly synchronized state with me, so that not only when we need a brainstorm, they can complement my ideas, and then when we need to act quickly, we can also start acting immediately.

One more thing I do in my own time is to think about what we need in this industry. This market may need something in the next step, and what the user needs, but he himself did not expect that when we presented it to him, he would feel that I needed it.

So no matter how busy I am at work, I will definitely take some time in the morning or evening to think about these things which I really need, but we will try to think about these things that we haven’t thought of yet. In addition, there are still many internal collaborations in the company. You may see that I have more exposure in the Chinese market. In fact, why did I start to do the Chinese market?

It’s also because when I first joined FTX, I was the only one who could speak Mandarin, so naturally this kind of market started from my side, so now we actually have a global market, so different teams in the global market need collaboration, especially when there are some global actions. When each team needs to do something and what needs to be done, I actually need to coordinate.

Mable: That your team being a small size and your ability to maintain (according to Ray Dalio) a radically transparent organization is actually quite relevant. In many cases, if a team becomes very large, it is difficult for you to keep everyone has the same page. Everyone is sure that everyone will have information asymmetry, and then this will affect the overall efficiency.

Constance: Yes, and I also think that one of the things that I take up my brain capacity to think about is, do I put the right people on the right tasks? I also hope that it’s because of work, it’s not just Say what we want our team to do, and I often think about what my team wants to do, what each person really wants to do, and what are their strengths?

I think I really want to achieve a high-speed and efficient operation, and then keep the chain in a state under any circumstances. I think we also need to consider what each person really wants to do and what he is best at. Did I put it in that position? This is very important.

As a manager, I actually pay attention to the overall situation a lot of the time, because I think that many times as an entrepreneurial team will run too fast, and then forget to do it, and then think about whether your team is still in the direction you originally thought, and then whether the personal effectiveness is maximized.

Mable: Then you mentioned earlier that it is developing in various parts of the world. I remember that earlier this year you guys completed a round of equity financing. That was in February, when I also talked to Sam, he mentioned that you guys think that the next 12 months this year may be a very important period, and you hope to have enough funds to do all the work that needs to be done. Although FTX is already very profitable, you I hope that there will be enough funds to seize this opportunity to expand in all aspects of the world.

Did COVID-19 affect your plans, and how did you manage to change the original plans?

Constance: In fact, for an online business, the impact is not very big. I think the most significant impact of deductions on us is that we are not able to travel freely. Then when you really need to have some exposure in certain markets, you do online exposure and you do offline exposure, it is actually completely two different effects.

Offline events were definitely the biggest bottleneck during COVID-19, so we are also trying to move many offline things and offline things to online. Let’s take the Chinese market as an example. Actually, since July, The Chinese epidemic situation has improved to a great extent, so everyone has started to attend the conference and engage in offline activities.

So as for us, we may not be able to go back. One we go back from abroad, we will be quarantined for 14 days after we return, and then we will be quarantined for another 14 days after we return. If you add in the time you spend doing business in the middle, you may be out in more than a month. So in this month, some major changes may have taken place, like Bitcoin falls and rises. These may just happen in minutes, so we think this time cost is a bit too high. But at the same time we really want to engag, so I think this is a relatively large impact on us during the period of consideration.

Then what kind of changes did we make? In fact, we try to communicate online as much as possible through daily chats, often with some of our major customers, and then some of the more important partners continue to communicate on the phone, and then how to say as much as possible online Actively participate in some online activities such as podcasts and live streaming. Generally speaking, we hope that these can make up for our inability to participate in offline activities but sometimes it is still not as good as offline, because it actually involves the maintenance of a relationship.

Mable: For Asia, especially I think it is a society that requires a high degree of trust between people, so contact with necessary people is also very important. But when it comes to your live broadcasts and podcasts, I feel that there was basically a period of time that every day I open twitter, open apple podcast, and open my wechat moments, I always saw Sam. So I can see that you are still working hard on this one.

Which markets will you focus more in this year, other than China?

Constance: In fact, we are working hard on all of our markets.

The Chinese market is unique due to language problems, so the entire Chinese market actually seems to be a relatively independent market. In other markets, there are some such as Japan, Japan, and South Korea. There are dedicated small partners and dedicated teams to follow up and develop. The Turkish market that we started to develop last year, this year also has a great growth. In addition, we still want to establish cooperative relations with some partners. We are working on developing the Russian market, the European market and the South American market, and then we launched FTXUS in June this year. FTXUS is a fully compliant U.S. based exchange. It only targets users in the U.S.

In the U.S. market, one of the big moves we have done is actually to acquire less than follow. It is a well-known crypto portfolio tracker. We hope that this acquisition can bring some user growth to our European and American markets.

Mable: I would like to follow up and ask about your two strategies. On the one hand, the strategy for major institutional clients, and on the other hand, the strategy for retail investors. How do you plan on the two sides?

Constance: For the institutional aspect of your plan, in fact, we have been constantly optimizing some of our support policies, VIP policies, and our liquidity, and try our best to design our platform and products to make it available to professional users, including that we continue to optimize our API and our current products. For people who don’t know about our market making reward plan, we are actually quite generous. I am inserting a small advertisement here. If you are interested in coming to our platform to be a liquid market maker, we pay rebate to the market maker every month. There are also bonus pools, which are contract and spot. The two types add up to a bonus pool of 750,000 U.S. dollars. Then the bonus pool of 125,000 U.S. dollars is used for future options, and the rest is a 125,000 bonus pool. For wood and logs, it is actually equivalent to a contractual option. You don’t need to quote prices; you can directly trade the MOVE product to straddle.

So in this respect, it is actually a benefit for market makers and VIPs.

Regarding retail investors, they are actually more scattered. Sometimes you may have a product that retail investors especially want, they just come by themselves. For example, when the Algo product launched at that time, the entire market wanted to short algo, so we did not engage in any activities after we launched, and everyone would still trade.

So we have been mining this product. Then in addition to these, we still continue to do some activities, whether it is to pull new activities or activate old users, in fact, every activity will be targeted at different users, for example, there are Transaction fee, Tier1~6, and then there are three VIPs on top of this, and then there are market maker. In fact, we hope to divide a user’s portrait through the fee.

Every time we do activities, we will also clearly emphasize that this activity is for tier one to tier three, or tier four to tier six. Last month, we just had a trading 888 event. What was fun at the time was that there were some communities, where the key opinion leader told everyone that they should go churn FTX. In fact, we welcome active users to churn us and engage in the events. It’s a way to encourage users to try trading different things.

And now what we are still continuing our Black Friday event for the Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving activity that started last week, when we used the whole day’s transaction fee as the burn of FTT. Recently, we have listed the stocks. After listing the stocks, we had a trading competition, and then the first place was given one share of Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, where one share is worth 340,000 U.S. dollars.

Mable: This is amazing.

I think you are really very sensitive to the market. I must mention your prediction market here. The prediction market is quite common in the United States. There’s decentralized prediction markets like augur.

Early November it was the U.S. election. There were many people around me who care a lot about the U.S. election. At that time, many friends outside of crypto sent me a screenshot of FTX’s prediction market. I talked about it on Twitter. I thought it was funny.

Everyone is talking about how to get out of the circle, and every day you are thinking about where your so-called mass adoption come from? Unexpectedly, it was done by the prediction market of the U.S. presidential election on FTX, which was very interesting.

Constance: At that time, we actually did not expect this to be so hot, because our presidential contract for the US presidential election was announced at the beginning of this year, and all the candidates were there. At that time, from their various political parties, they had several When I was a nominee, we were all up, and then people were constantly eliminated, and finally Trump and Biden were left. This matter has always been tepid. Suddenly, this matter exploded a week before the US election. We thought that’s amazing.

This is actually something we didn’t promote, but the market gave this reaction at that time. This thing makes us realize that the entire prediction market has a huge potential, especially that it can be combined with decentralization.

Mable: I was surprised by what you just said. I thought you promoted it. Sometimes you do need to wait for the trend to come. You don’t know when it will come, but when it comes, you have to prepare well. Other people did not prepared like you guys did, so they didn’t earn this fruit.

Constance: The general election contract is exactly what you said. I really need to wait for the trend to come. The timing is very important, and the preparation is also very important.

Mable: With the Block’s article, Sam also mentioned another acquisition case that you did not disclose before, which is electionbettingodds. Then he said that it also brought you a lot of registered users in that. Then I saw you have some time ago on WeChat Moment you mentioned that you also spent a lot of time doing investments. In the past 12 months, what are the most impressive deals for you?

Constance: I was most impressed by two deals.

One is the Blockfolio. We made it public in the middle of the year. We purchased it with 150 million USD. Another relatively recent example, was one that we just invested in this month. It is called Maps.me. Maps.me is actually a very famous offline map software in Europe and America, but it may not be very well-known in China. It has 140 million users. Although it is COVID-19 this year, it still has 60 million active users. Its user base is very large. Map.me’s own team also has a vision: it wants to bring decentralized finance to offline map software.

You may think: what are you even talking about? But think deeper.

A map is a thing that can most clearly define a person’s goal in a short period of time. Let me give an example. If we look at WeChat, Taobao, or Zhihu, we will always browse, we will continue to click and click. But when you enter the map what are you doing? You search directly where you are going, then determine the location, and then you go over, right?

It’s where you are going. This action is very clear. You won’t hesitate to say that I will go to A point first, and then if I don’t think this is good, I will go to point b. You may be sure that I am going to point C directly. In this process, you may have some consumption, for example, you took a taxi, or you went there to eat, or go shopping. In fact, its maps are not only an offline map, it still includes some Book hotels and restaurants, and you also know that there are usually sponsor promotions in these map software. For example, Google’s revenue from advertising in 2020 will be more than 10 billion, so it is actually all related to each other.

Maps.me hopes to bring decentralized financial decentralized finance to the maps platform. In the maps software, it not only has maps, but also these information you need to use when you travel. He also hopes that everyone can use Maps.me for a currency exchange.

When you go to a new place, especially a new country, when you travel, what do you think of first? Is it whether I want to get the local money, how do I change exchange and how much I exchange, this is a question we must think about. So he hopes to make it through a decentralized way, and then combine it on the map, to bring a more convenient overall service experience for tourists.

So in fact, we think that this mission is very good. How can we use our experience in crypto and our experience in deepening finance to take it further, so I think this is the most recent project that got me very excited about this month.

The total number of users in Defi does not exceed 10 million. Then only the software of maps, its current users are already 1.4 hundred million, if it can really successfully drive the users of decentralized finance to the maps software, it will actually become the largest collection center in the entire decentralized finance.

Mable: A month ago we actually discussed it in our investment committee. At that time, I wondered why would someone use a money market in a map?! I only used the current defi primitives to think, but what you just said essentially solves a last-mile problem.

There is really a very big demand. You need to exchange foreign currency in a new place. In fact, crypto itself is a non-sovereign currency; it makes a lot of value transfer easily.

After hearing what you said, I also felt Wang Xing (founder of Meituan) should feel pressured haha.

I’ll share a little bit of my previous experience. When I was at Didi, I happened to be in charge of the competition with the online cabbing service of Meituan, and then we discovered that the so-called last mile problem was actually very simple. If you search for a place from Dianping (the Chinese Yelp), you are looking for where to eat, but once you have determined where to eat, you will directly press a taxi button. It essentially solved the last mile problem. At the beginning, we thought that it might not have too much moat, but in fact, the lead generation was high! I won’t say what the number is, but the number at the time surprised us. It’s what the Asians called the super-networks.

I said that Wang Xing would feel that there might be a little pressured. Of course, this is a joke, but I think what you both have thought may be quite similar in nature.

Constance: Correct. Most of Map.me’s users are actually in Europe, which is also an area where crypto is difficult to activate so far.

So we think it is actually a good channel to activate users in Europe, and most of its users are actually 18–40 years old. I think it fits the entire age group of crypto users’user profiles.

So we think that if he can make it well in the future, he hopes it can become a very high potential application.

Mable: Other your next main business, do you also spend much time on the serum? If so, I would like to talk to you about some of the latest developments in serum.

Constance: Correct. I also have a relatively deep involvement in Serum. We feel that centralization and decentralization are complementary. We don’t think that one side will eat the other side’s market. By doing a good job in centralization and decentralization, we can push the industry forward, so I still have a lot of energy to spend on decentralization.

Mable: In the first two months after serum was live, Sam actually did a lot of AMAs and livestreaming to promote it, and then everyone slowly learned about serum. Before the solana wormhole was ready, FTX also helped the non-Solana-native tokens to launch on Serum. Are there any more exciting updates in the last 30 days?

In the most recent 30 days, our own development team has actually been improving our on chain stake and government.

Constance: In fact, the popularity of SRM was quite good at the beginning. We hope that through the continuous improvement of its pledge and its on-chain management, it will further increase its application scenarios, and that is to say, let everyone not just buy and sell tokens, but to hold it, and then to do some further actions, this is one aspect. And on the other hand, because we launched the swap of serum before, we also hope to continuously optimize the function of swap and some of its UI/UX design. Another one is that we are now doing Ledger integration, so we hope to improve the performance of our wallet through integration.

Then we also have an ecosystem grant. We hope to use an ecosystem grant to give money to those excellent teams that need funds to develop, so we have recently done a lot of due diligence in this area, and continue to communicate with different teams and understand how much resources each team needs.

Then we will not only finance through ecosystem grant money, but also introduce our resources, such as investors, such as community resources, to the project party, and then hope to help the project party to achieve maximum growth within the shortest time, and then to build an ecosystem. People most often questioned Solana for not having enough projects on it. So if there are more projects on the serum, everyone will think that the network effect will be stronger. In fact, this is something we have been working hard on now, so sometimes we need to do some of our development, for example, work like an advisor to help them. To see which things in development can be further improved.

Mable: I think people in the community must have seen the benefits, because I will give a small example. Recently, Bao.finance is quite popular. I was looking at their webpage that day, and then I saw their doc said their v1 is Ethereum, and v2 is SRM/SOL. So I wondered if it has anything to do with Serum. At first I thought it might be in your ecosystem already, but when I asked the colleagues at Serum, they said that Bao did reach out but it was not an incubated project. So in fact, it is quite clear that you have been willing to support the community that everyone knows they could come to you for some resources. I think this shows that you spent a lot of time, and the results were obvious.

Then I believe that in the early stage, especially when building an ecosystem， it does require some more coordinated/ organized efforts in many cases. Then, when the ecosystem is stronger, more people will come to develop on their own. Then just like the founder of the anonymous team mentioned earlier, he is talking about the best talents will go to the best place themselves, as long as you give them enough incentives. I think this is exactly it.

At the end of the show, I would like to ask you, in the next 12 months, what plans do we have that we can look forward to for FTX?

Constance: In the next 12 months, there are many things, one of which is worth mentioning is that we actually hope to further optimize our US part of the website, whether it is the user experience, product design or product type. We all hope it can be improved to a large extent. In addition, we will have a relatively large action on blockfolio in January and February next year. Then we will tell you more then. We hope to combine these two parties. This is the first point to develop the American market to a greater extent.

Then the second point is related to FTX main. In fact, many users have noticed recently that we have changed the design of our UI and the design of the web page UI. We will continue to do this work to make our webpage and the end UI becomes better, and at the same time we will optimize our mobile app because many users feel that the usability of our mobile app may still need to be improved, so we will spend a lot of energy to do this.

In addition, some plans on the tech infrastructure of FTX too. We hope to expand the loading capacity of our matching engine several times, and then include the loading capacity of our database, so that during a time of a large market volatility, our website will not be stuck.

We also hope to reduce FTX’s latency by building more servers, or its response speed, to give professional users a better experience and make their latency shorter. This is some at technical level, and some at user levels.

We will add credit card support in the future, but the specific support is actually related to our channel of on and off ramps. We continue to follow the laws of different regions and our team members have been working hard, so which region will be launched first has not yet been determined, but this is a direction we will focus on next year.

Mable: These are some exciting news. You guys definitely have a very in-depth thinking about long-term planning; at the same time, you also have a very flexible and efficient team to achieve these. I wish you all the best next year!

Thank you very much for participating in 51% today. This is a very meaningful conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Constance: Thanks Mable, thank you everyone.