GCR

 Joyce Yang, founder of Global Coin Research talks to Wei Zhou, CFO of Binance, on the Binance podcast to give him a firsthand account of the Asian Blockchain Summit that took place in Taipei last week. They discuss topics including the debate Arthur Hayes and Nouriel Roubini, the crazy Bitmex.com 10k party and more.

Joyce also poses Twitter questions to Wei about recent developments with Binance US; Binance’s potential stablecoin, and Wei’s insights on identifying favorable, portable jurisdictions for expansion. He also touches on Binance’s hustle – “whoever works harder shapes this industry”.

More versions below

https://castbox.fm/channel/id2163161?country=us …https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/binance-podcast/id1459987353 …https://open.spotify.com/show/72cevY812C46bWgaKvU14H …https://www.spreaker.com/show/3590728 

Transcript:

Wei Zhou 

Hello, everyone and welcome to the Binance Podcast. My name is Wei Zhou, I’m the Chief Financial Officer for Binance. So what I want to do with this show is to spend time talking to specialist, entrepreneurs, scholars, influencers, basically meeting people from a variety of industries. Hopefully through these conversations, we can share insights on how blockchain is changing not just these different industries, but also in changing the world.

Here’s a quick disclaimer. 

All opinions expressed by our host and our guests on this podcast are merely their own opinions. They do not imply any endorsements or opinions of their companies. You should not take these opinions as specific investment advice as you will be solely responsible for your own investment.

Everyone, this is Wei. Well, I’m back recording a really really cool session with one of my favorite people in the crypto industry; Joyce Yang who’s the founder of Global Coin Research. I met Joyce a couple of months ago, and found out that we’re not only like Alums; both Alums from Harvard, but actually both went to the same Elementary School in China and then we both moved to the U.S. at a really young age. And then I’ve been basically traversing the Pacific Ocean between US and Asia for the last 10 years doing for her and about almost 20 years for myself in the financial industry. And we both kind of like joined crypto in the last couple of years. So I’m going to talk to her, give her a little bit chance to talk about her work. And then after that, the second part of the podcast I think is what most of us are going to be joining into listening is basically what the heck happened at Asia Blockchain Summit in Taipei. Not just with a lot of heavyweights within our industry speaking there in terms of my boss CZ, Authur Hayes from BitMex, the Litecoin’s Charlie Lee was there, and then also the unseen. Still no video footage yet of the debate between Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini and Authur. And then also some of the like sick after parties that I heard took place there as well. And then also Joyce later will have some questions about Binance from her Twitter fans. 

All right Joyce, you want to kick it off and tell me a little bit about Global Coin Research? What you guys do, and then we’ll go on from there.

Joyce Yang

For sure. Thanks for having me. 

Wei, so funny story; my husband’s name is also w-e-i and he’s from Singapore. So you know, now I have two w-e-i’s in my life, and it’s good to have two of them. And now technically I’m really more close to you, given our shared background. 

So Global Coin Research; we are a research and advisory firm that started about 2 years ago. My background is in finance, primarily equity research where I spent 5 years in Merrill Lynch and maybe a year at CICC; a very Chinese bank helping folks really in the institutional space understand technology. Also China Tech you know, companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, those are kind of increasingly large heavyweights that everyone around the world are looking to understand more and more of. And the Global Coin Research was built on the premise of that cryptocurrency is bringing together a kind of very global group of folks who cannot underestimate the various regions of cryptocurrency activities, and that’s specifically focused on Asia. And as you can see this on the stats, over 60% of mining in Ethereum and Bitcoin is essentially coming from China. All the largest exchanges such as BitMex and Binance, and Huobi and OKex are all coming out of Asia. And a lot of project developments are coming out as well as people are very enthusiastic about this trend. And lastly of course, retail; the retail markets which we cannot discount given that we are still a very large retail driven market, and this current market coming back up is definitely a tribute to a lot of what’s going on in Asia. So we provide as a platform, Information Analysis for a lot of English speakers who may not understand Asia as much as they should be. Specifically, we provide them information from translated news, as well as actually contextualized analysis that we write and cover on a weekly basis. We’re known for our twice a week newsletters that kind of summarizes the top events that are happening around the world. As you can imagine, lots of things are happening around the world, but we really kind of succinct it down and make sure that you get the big takeaways. And over time in the last year, we actually also have involved into an advisory firm as well, given that we have lots of English speaking projects, for one who understand Asia better and one who wants to identify and tap that market. So most recently, we’re a work group with the project Tezos as well as Stockware; they’re all mostly technology oriented on my background.

Wei Zhou 

Your clients are mostly I would say, not from the Asian region, but because I would say all the best actions in crypto are taking place in Asia, you provide that link, that connection for sort of the not non-Asian based people or businesses to understand what’s going on. 

Joyce Yang

Yeah, exactly. So our readers include lots of journalists such as Nathaniel Copper, Laura Shin, and investors such as Multicoin, Scalar Capital, and also projects like Coinbase, Facebook, crypto who all want to understand what’s going on Asia. But to be honest, I think over time now, we’re also seeing this trend where folks in Japan want to learn about what’s going on China, folks in Singapore want to learn about what’s going on Korea. And that is a language gap also, and by kind of providing our product in English, and actually soon we may be rolling it out in Chinese and some other languages, we want to make sure that people are aware of not just what’s going on their own jurisdiction, but also what’s outside of it.

Wei Zhou 

Yeah. So I’m a subscriber of your newsletter, and they’re really helpful sort of like summaries for me to understand what’s going on. Because I think one of the things at least for…. Even for Binance you know, given that we probably have the most global businesses amongst all the exchanges. And even as for me in my work, when I try to go out and add on some of the fiat exchanges that we’re launching, there’s a lot of blind spots from an informational flow perspective. And that comes down not just language, but also not knowing what to read and what to trust in different countries and regions.

Joyce Yang

Yes, for sure. And honestly, I’m learning as well as I’m really kind of learning about different countries. And you cannot even discount the smaller countries like Philippines and Vietnam for example, because even though they’re small by geographical limitations, but if you look at sizes by trading volume or technology talent, Vietnam is actually kind of on the top I think in terms of interest from many projects and companies in Asia. So you know, it’s a really learning process for me as well, kind of tapping that entire market, of understanding what’s going on. Hopefully it will be helpful to anyone who really wants to understand Asia including obviously Binance, but I do agree with you, Binance is one of them, is the largest and most global teams I’ve met. And you know, you guys are so savvy going to Latin America, going to Africa, and really just reaching out to the folks around the world and kind of sharing what your platform and what Binance believes. So I really respect that and I obviously want to support more and more you know. If you look at a lot of our news actually, we cover a lot of Binance just because Binance is everywhere around the world. So you know, there’s always like 5 news articles coming out about Binance in various continents and it’s very clear.

Wei Zhou 

Yeah. And I’m going to pitch our Pink Care Token right now. I’m not sure if you’ve seen that. It’s trending on Twitter; I want to get it trending on Twitter. Have you seen it?

Joyce Yang

Yes, I have seen that. You got to make the post…. 

Wei Zhou 

You got to do the florist scan? 

Joyce Yang

Yeah.

Wei Zhou 

Yeah, so just for people who don’t know, the Binance Charity Foundation has launched a stable coin essentially; that’s a charity token where you donate by buying the token. That token will be ended up in the hand of end user. And the mission behind it is to fund a million girls with sanitary napkins or sanitary pads in Africa. The token itself is called the Pink Care Token. And yeah, and we have about 30 different companies within our industry who are supporting it and raising awareness to an issue that I think a lot of people in the developed world don’t really think about. So anyhow; now, we’ll get to the second part of our discussion which is the Asia Blockchain Summit. You were there, I’m sure you have a ton of content, I’ve been getting nonstop updates from your newsletter about it. Walk us over like, what are some of the top things, some of the top takeaways, some of the top events or announcements that you saw from that conference?

Joyce Yang 

Yes, for sure. So I think in the last few months, we’ve seen, the markets kind of picking back up again, and this has been one of the most interesting conferences I think that have been in Asia thus far this year, given that we’re seeing lots of people coming from different countries in Korea, Japan, China. and also from the North Americas, kind of wanting to learn about what is actually finally driving this market. You know, as a platform from Global Coin Research, we obviously want to bridge more gaps and have more folks understand what’s going on in Asia. And I think this was one of those few conferences where you really see folks on stage from Japan, China, all together speaking and sharing information. So I thought that was really wonderful and really wonderfully organized by government teams, as well as the organizer Andrew Fai from OBITO and Block Tempo; the media company based of Taiwan. I think that some of the highlights were, of course, the Nouriel and Arthur’s debate which was off the record. And you know, I will definitely share some glimpse of it. I interviewed Arthur right immediately after that debate you know. And he is a person who has a good attitude, and Nouriel, I never really have seen him besides outside of tweets, and honestly he sounds as condescending aa his tweets you know. Some people don’t really appear the same when they’re on Twitter versus when they’re in person.

Wei Zhou  

I think that is that is probably definitely the highlight within the crypto world last week. So first question; who won?

Joyce Yang 

Definitely Arthur. You know, I know him as a person, I also….

Wei Zhou 

Take your crypto hat off, take you a Bitcoin bull hat off. Who won?

Joyce Yang 

Definitely Arthur. I mean, just from the way he delivered his conversation and talk and the way he dresses points, and how poised he is about this industry. It’s not personal at all, you could just tell that he’s actually there for the long run. And Nouriel on the other hand you know, like after the conference, people wanted to talk to him about his thoughts, he didn’t want to talk anyway. Just literally sad on the inside, just wanted to ignore everyone. Just really you know, he seemed really miserable to be there. And you know, honestly we don’t need to have more actors like him in the space. And you know, nothing personal there, but at the same time, from the way he’s delivered his messages and arguments. A quick summary about the debate you know, I think what Nouriel has been and argue for is that he says the cryptocurrency space has no security, no scalability in the blockchain adoption and the current technology developments that we are in right now, and there’s no privacy. And he was like “Why the hell do we need this?” This is just currently what we see is just a lot of retail markets getting scammed and lots of Shitcoins getting listed. And he just used the word “Shit” at least 10 times. And honestly, once you see the videos coming out, you would count on your fingers. At the same time you know, we didn’t make the argument for why the space is currently the way it is. Given someone who’s an economist, you assume there will be more thoughtful kind of thinking around these claims, but he was literally just attacking and calling a space full Shitcoin, full scams, and not kind of taking any of the conversation further and making it productive. So that’s what I really found it to be kind of disappointing there. But Arthur, on the other hand, was really trying to emphasize that you know, why do we encourage cryptocurrencies? We want to have another choice. There are folks who are looking to take money out when the government is monitoring them, but they have no way to kind of go about doing so, and they have no way to do so. With a matter of the factors that the choice is the emphasis that we want to provide for folks when they decide to choose either to use fiat or use Bitcoin or use Zcash. And that’s something I fully respect, I think I really kind of jumped and spoke to the ethos of the space as well. Even though everyone is working for example for exchanges are there primarily to profit off of lots of trades which you know, this is what traditional changes do as well. But same time, folks like Binance and BitMex are actually there to try to lift the space and really be inclusive in all different types of folks and communities there.

Wei Zhou 

What are some of the key points that Arthur made? To all the swearing aside. Because I read some summary reports, it just seemed like there was a lot of swearing.

Joyce Yang 

Oh yeah, there are so many swearing. It was very comedic to be honest. I think you know, it definitely is a worthwhile video to watch over James. It was at 9 a.m. today and I think he got everyone’s blood hyped up, how fun it was to watch actually. 

So I think Arthur’s points was that, his main point was that you can’t just look at the current market that we’re in now. There are a lot of the Shitcoins, and of course there’s a lot of bad actors. We’re in a decentralized type of space where it may very likely draw in a lot of bad actors, and in the beginning, it’s very hard to regulate because of the fact that it’s decentralized. But at the same time, we’re seeing great actors as well, there are a lot of projects. And what the ultimate purpose of Bitcoin, is to help folks to navigate through this period now that we’re going through which is under increasing technology scrutiny and monitoring from the regulators all around the world. That’s something I think is very literally true and kind of happening globally. With kind of Facebook coming out with another token as well as WeChat Alipay of course on an ongoing basis, increasing their presence in Asia as well as the rest of the world.

Wei Zhou 

So that was probably that headline event. What are some of the other things that you saw that grabbed your attention?

Joyce Yang 

Oh, so Binance announced they’re doing 20x leverage. That’s really exciting; that was one of the announcements that CZ made. And some of the other trends that I’ve been seeing I think, given that we kind of look at and talk to projects in the West as well as in the East, we’re seeing a lot of developments happening in very local jurisdictions that are really interesting and very…. Kind of folks creating their own flavors of different chains, and kind of tools to cater to those chains. So I’m going to give an example. For Korea, we’re seeing technology platforms trying to push all this gaming narrative. You know, gaming is a very big trend; crypto gaming specifically in Japan and Korea. And while the Korean folks are looking to build a lot of gaming apps on top of the blockchains, they realize that all the blockchains are not scalable enough, they’re not as fast enough. How can we actually resolve that? So they started building their own tools around these things. So I think that’s super interesting because they are really focusing on looking to build adoption and interesting stuff. While in the Western side we are seeing a lot of those still centralized finance trends and people trying to draw more liquidity into these platforms while the kind of large platforms are still building as part of our focus right now. And so I think there’s a huge divergence between kind of West and East, and that’s something that it’s super interesting to see.

Wei Zhou 

Yeah. I think for CZ, he was one of the keynote speakers there. I think he walked through a sort of Binance’s success case or success story as an ICO. Because for us, we’re coming on our 2-year anniversary next week I think. It’s hard to believe that we’ve only been around for 2 years; after we did our ICO I think in July of 2017. And now we’re joining the fray in the process, and planning to deliver a futures product to the industry. 

Joyce Yang 

Yeah, that’s really cool I mean, you guys have moved so quickly, I asked some of the trading firms and kind of parties you know, many of the exchanges. And I asked them who are the best execute exchanges, and they say obviously Binance and BitMex. And I couldn’t agree more, I’ve been following Binance since the beginning, and obviously CZ has been a great brand ambassador. And the team that he’s built around him you know, including you has obviously been really hustling and just focusing on growth and coming up with new products. And I didn’t know you’re hosting a podcast before, and you asked me to get on the podcast. Now I know that you’re wearing many hats as well.

Wei Zhou 

This is our 10th episode that we’re doing. We try things; we start small, we try if it works, keep it going, and then invest more resources into it. I think, because we’re very decentralized organization, and then everybody in the role has a lot of flexibility and freedom to basically try things out, and then if it works, then you go and ask for more resources. And if it doesn’t work, you just sort of like hit reset and try it again or try something else. 

Joyce Yang 

Yeah, I love that scrappiness.

Wei Zhou 

So think it’s one big sort of organization, but we’re very nimble in terms of trying out things, because I think this industry moves so fast. And all the other businesses that I’ve been, anytime you come out with a business plan like in this industry, like 3 months later, like that businessman is out the window. Because whatever technology you’re using, whatever blockchain you’re thinking of doing, it is already changed. So the only way to stay in the game is by keep doing it, is by keep doing things.

Joyce Yang 

Yeah, I agree. I think in the cryptocurrency space, I encourage everyone to do that. Because you’re talking about global audience, you don’t really know what will stick on the wall, so you got to throw 20 things at it and 5 things stick. And maybe 5 other things a year later and then you just keep trying and you got to keep doing all these things because you never know what markets are picking up, you never know how much revenue these markets will generate because they are all just so many untapped potentials.

Wei Zhou 

Yeah. And I think one of the unique things about Binance and also a lot about BitMex, we have very very charismatic leaders who really drive not just the organization that they lead, but also drive the industry and bring that out there. I was really excited to see like CZ and Arthur sort of overlapping in Taiwan for this conference, because I think that’s a really big draw for the conference goers. And thousands and thousands, not thousands, but definitely hundreds of selfies. 

Joyce Yang 

I’m sorry, but that’s right.

Wei Zhou 

Because both of them are very photogenic people.

Joyce Yang  

Yeah, sure. You guys need to set up like a Madame Tussaud kind of the wax museum or crypto figures and that will do really well exist. You know, selfies with CZ 24/7. 

Wei Zhou 

That’s amazing, right? Anything else you want to talk about from the conference? I want to know about the after parties. Taipei is a fun city.

Joyce Yang 

Oh, yeah. I’ve heard so much about Taipei before, but I actually never been there. And being able to participate in BitMex’s 10k party was definitely very eye opening. He flew in and DJ, so Arthur flew in a DJ, because he didn’t think any of…..

Wei Zhou 

 Tell me about, where was it? What was the venue?

Joyce Yang 

The venue was taking place at…. 

Wei Zhou 

Was it a club or a lounge?

Joyce Yang 

It was a club. Yeah, so we go to dinner. So BitMex hosted a smaller dinner at Kmew, which was kind of a 2-star restaurant, which was wonderful of course. And we all kind of headed to the club. And apologies, I don’t remember the club on top of my mind, and it’s not because I drink too much I promise you. But he flew in this really great DJ and techno DJ you know, and then we went to club with screens of you know, BitMex logos everywhere. And the DJ was like kind of inserting BitMex whenever he’s kind of making the announcements and the music sounds. So that was really cool. And of course, I felt very privileged to be able to get invited to the backstage in their VIP section where it was quite fun to see CZ and also some of the other industry leaders of course, all getting together in a very capital manner and really enjoying themselves.

Wei Zhou 

Because it’s quite stressful, it’s an extremely stressful industry. So I’m sure these guys really enjoy these moments, that sort of like to huddle up and have a couple of drinks.

Joyce Yang 

Yeah you know, I think one thing that’s very differentiated in Asia is that everyone knows how to fun. If you go to the West Coast or the North America, in New York there’s some finance folks that don’t like to party, but in the West Coast, folks there’s mostly happy hour, and there are not many clubs in San Francisco specifically and I think that kind of leads to a lot of not having that many parties, but at the same time of course. In Asia, you have places like Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, all placing like large party venues. So you either have it on your event

Wei Zhou 

And there’s no closure at midnight or 2 a.m. They go on until really late.

Joyce Yang 

Oh yes. Yes. You know this very well.

Wei Zhou 

One of the beauties I think of going out in Asia is you can show up really late. Like for me, I have a family. I can put them all to sleep, everybody’s happy, and then I can still go out. And then sacrifice about 3 or 4 hours of sleep, but then I still sort of like you know, I don’t feel guilty.

Joyce Yang  

Yeah, no formula there. You can do everything; you can work, have a family and open a party at the same time. I totally agree. I mean, lifestyle is all that and I feel like everyone just gives up sleep to have a really fun life. It’s pretty amazing.

Wei Zhou  

Yeah, I think that drives you to sort of run harder. I think it sort of keeps that edge, which I think is really really important to have in this industry. 

Joyce Yang  

Yeah, for sure. 

Wei Zhou 

Anything else before I open it up for questions from you?

Joyce Yang  

Yeah, for sure I mean. Which clubs do you go to? That’s what I’m going to want to know.

Wei Zhou 

I retired. So in Taipei, I know there’s… at least 5 or 6 years ago, there’s a club called Electra and Mist were pretty popular that I’ve been there. And then I think in Hong Kong, Dragon Eye has been a legend. Dragon Eye, that place opened when I was still an Analyst at Goldman in Hong Kong. And then definitely later Volar, but Hong Kong’s venues are too small; that’s the problem. And then in Korea, I think Arena had these like mega clubs, like 4 floors that go on until like 10 a.m. Tokyo lesser, in China I think Shanghai and Beijing are probably the 2 best cities to go out. But I think there’s a lot more lounges that’s opening up, it’s sort of like because once you get to my age, you start sort of like I can’t. There’s only about 30… I can take about 30 minutes or an hour of techno music before my head starts to hurt and my ears are going numb. So I stick to more like sort of like more casual lounges, because then you can actually talk to people, really have conversations than bigger venues. But Taipei is definitely one of the more definitely Top 3 Party City in Asia. So a great place to have a conference; good food and cheap as well. The food there is really good, really authentic and really cheap. And the street stores there are awesome.

Joyce Yang  

When is the next Binance conference?

Wei Zhou 

We’re hoping to do something near the end of this year. And we’ll give everybody at least like a 3 to 4 months notice. The last conference we had was in Singapore in January of this year, but that was in the dead crypto winter. So we tried to be as uplifting as we can. And it worked in the need for people to get together and talk about real issues and building real things. I think that was sort of the gist or the theme of that conference back then. But I think now, a lot of the speculative fever is back on with Bitcoin price hovering comfortably at above 10,000 now. And then also sort of Binance hitting like you know, on our top day, we hit $5 billion in volume for spot trading which is amazing. So I opened it up for you. Any questions? It’s going on, hit me. 

Joyce Yang 

I’m just curious, what do you think are the some of the underrated, kind of under the radar countries that folks haven’t been paying attention to, but are very active, very promising for exchanges as well, kind of projects to go to?

Wei Zhou 

One of the countries that I’ve been… not spending time but, sort of have been learning about it, I’ve actually been very pleasantly surprised by Australia. Australia has a very advanced crypto regulation, they have very good regulations on crowdfunding. So that I think, taking that and mixing that with sort of the crypto AML rules, so sort of like there needs to be a mix down the road in terms of banking laws and security laws. I think that’s sort of the crossroads. And I think also derivative laws. I think that’s sort of the 3 crosses roads. And then for banking laws, it’s primarily focused there on anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing. On security laws its mainly disclosure and enforcement actions based on sort of the issuance of securities, and also qualification of the investors. And then on derivatives, it is basically how do you conduct a fair marketplace, and then how do you prevent manipulation? And I think there needs to be a sort of some kind of mix of those 3. And one of one of the countries; or not just the countries, but actually general jurisdictions that’s kind of interesting is there are actually Commonwealth countries. These are all sort of former British colonies that all share…. First of all, they all use the English language, and second of all, the legal framework is all based on common law; that’s about 40-50 countries around the world that sort of sits under this Commonwealth system. And I think if there is some kind of portability amongst these 40 or 50 countries until one standardized system, that would create like the regulatory formal effect to get other countries to sign in to that framework. And then you have portability in terms of cryptocurrency laws, I mean, that’s the most important thing, which is portability. Because one of the biggest challenges for me in what I do is like every country’s law is different. And so anytime you actually land and start building the regulatory business, you have to start all over again because the laws are completely different. It’s like a 30-minute train ride and all of a sudden your laws have changed. You hop on a plane, you take a nap for 2 hours, you land, and then all of a sudden, the laws are different. Whereas everything else is constant, right; technology is constant, blockchain is constant, bitcoin is constant, Binance is constant, but the laws is changed just because you traveled from one place to another. And that makes how you operate and how the users or how the people in that country operate completely different and face different consequences in terms of what they do. So I think with portable or a common system, we will be will go a long way.

Joyce Yang 

Yeah, I’m very curious of…. What do you think will happen in the next few years between Asia and kind of the rest of the world in its development?

Wei Zhou 

Like in our industry I mean, we’re not…. In this industry, there’s 2 things. It is one industry where you do have to work really really really hard. So I think whoever works harder is going to get ahead more. Whoever sees farther ahead instead of looking behind is going to get ahead more. And because this is one industry or one group that’s growing you know, it’s hasn’t stopped growing in terms of number of people who are into crypto and into blockchain and believe in sort of like this fundamental difference that you can make in world working in this industry. And I don’t see that momentum stopping anytime soon. And then it’s just a numbers game. And Asia just has more people.

Joyce Yang 

Alright. I talked to a group of Europeans at the Zcash conference last weekend when I was giving a presentation about helping folks understand what’s going on in Asia. And I told them you know, the Chinese community has the largest number of people in crypto and also the most geographically diverse. So you really have to go understand it and really you know, there’s just no way to go around it. And it really would be more helpful if you try to engage with them and try to understand them, and it’ll be super helpful in navigating the space.

Wei Zhou 

I actually see a lot of opportunity to in Europe as well. Just because the talent base is really extremely strong, and euro has negative interest rate, in our business, if we keep our money in the bank in euros, the bank would actually take money from my account every month because of negative interest rate. That’s terrible. I don’t know what kind of policies put in motion that have this. And it’s been in place for I don’t know, like for 5 or 6 years now. There’s negative interest rate environment that currently exist in the Eurozone. And I just think that’ll just drive people more, like it’s just sort of how do you lower the threshold for them to enter into crypto. It’s like the bank’s not only not giving you interest on your money, but is actually taking, like is negative interest rates, it’s going to deduct 2% or 1% from your bank account every month.

Joyce Yang 

Yeah. So I’m curious, do you think for example, like Europe has more potential for crypto adoption or at least and a higher or faster adoption speed potential than in third world countries like Africa or Latin America?

Wei Zhou 

Short term answer, the quick answer is “Yes.” I do believe so. 

Joyce Yang 

Yeah. That’s very Interesting.

Wei Zhou 

Yeah, because of launching our business in Europe, I’ve been going to several conferences in Europe in the last 6 months in. In Paris, in Amsterdam and in Malta, and I’ve done sort of meetups and engaged with the Binance community there and I think the interest is extremely hot. I just think the energy is really good, but I do think what’s sort of holding your back a little bit on this is actually language. They all speak their own their native language. And whereas the standard language for the crypto industry is English. The second language for crypto is just Chinese, from an influence level; just from a level of influence. And I think there’s lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding just because some of this stuff just gets lost in translation. I mean, that being said, fundamentally English is the common language within Europe as well. And I think France is coming out with pretty supportive laws for ICOs. Obviously, Malta has been a leader from a regulatory perspective in this industry by far, and those are both European Union countries. And I think, whenever the Brexit thing shakes out, I think UK is going to jump into the fray because they don’t want to lose their FinTech leadership position in Europe as well. So yeah, I’m actually quite bullish on Europe.

Joyce Yang  

Yeah, that’s super cool. I think we should start expanding to Europe as well for Global Coin since which we want to preach them. We’re going to focus on not just in Asia eventually, but also the rest of the world. And my last question is you know, what should we be excited about in the next next one from Binance? I know you guys are working on a lot of different things. What can we expect on the product side, as well kind of like geographic expansion? 

Wei Zhou 

I mean, I think geographical expansion is something that CZ has talked about at least since I’ve joined the company. In terms of landing fiat businesses in every single continent. I think that’s something that’s been in motion for a while. But I think some of the things that I’m actually really excited about is actually how does Binance help to sort of grow the total addressable market for cryptocurrency. Like for example, what we’re doing with the DAX and with Trust Wallet. I’m not sure if you use Trust Wallet or not, but I think it’s probably one of the best, if not the best-decentralized wallet in crypto right now. And it’s enabled that you can use the wallet to trade the DAX directly. So that you have your own custody, you don’t have to store your currency or your assets within a third party.

And I think that’s sort of the next iteration. I think you know, maybe not few years, but at least in 3-5 years, that type of product will be key I think in terms of driving innovation industries. That’s sort of number one; the second one, I think just general more things to do to get adoption. Like for example, I don’t want to promote our own businesses, but we actually invested in a company in Australia called Travel by Bit, where you can book travel in crypto, they want to build blockchain’s Expedia. But what you can also do is you can actually earn rewards and crypto when you book travel there in fiat. You know, how like different things give you different rebates on things and then you get airline miles or hotel points. What if you get Bitcoin or BNB in return for those things? And I think that’s something that they’re trying to get, because then you basically get Bitcoin into people’s pockets more directly when they spend fiat. I think that’ll be really cool. So I’m actually really looking forward to seeing how they can grow that business.

Joyce Yang  

Yeah, is that the Bitcoin pegged stable coin that was announced recently?

Wei Zhou 

No, no. The so the Bitcoin pegged stable coin, that’s just like BTCB, that’s just a DAX product, that’s a pretty simple one.

Joyce Yang 

Got you. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to Binance launching a stable coin, because then everyone would want to use it.

Wei Zhou  

Yeah, be patient. No comment there. 

Joyce Yang 

No comment. Okay, good. Got you.

Wei Zhou 

No comment there. 

Cool, I got to run. So thanks Joyce. Thanks for the call.

Joyce Yang 

Yeah, thank you.

Wei Zhou 

Thank you very much to Joyce Yang from Global Coin Research, to have this really awesome chat about everything from what they do to the Asia Blockchain Summit. The rumble in Taipei between Roubini and an Arthur Hayes, and then also the clubing scene in Asia, and then giving everyone a little bit more detail about what’s been going on at Binance. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Binance podcast, and we look forward to seeing you soon.