Yesterday, on October 23, 2019, CEO of ZBG exchange Omar Chen held an AMA session on the topic “The war of Crypto Exchanges，Lead the Market Bear or Bull?”
The session was live broadcasted on 4 languages — Chinese, Korean, Russian and English on ZBG communities in WeChat, Telegram, Kakao talk and other communities that ZBG has worked with include Honey comb Finance, Milin Finance，etc.
Special thanks to the thousands of engaged viewers of ZBG’s first-ever AMA. Omar Chen responded to 11 questions during the 45-minute session, and we’re looking forward to make this an ongoing series, where we’ll address more of your questions with each AMA. Stay tuned.
Transcript of question-and-answer session with ZBG CEO Omar Chen.
Start of Transcript: October 23, 2019 20:00 HKT
Q1. The ZBG exchange stood out among the new first-tier exchanges in the first half of this year. However, compared with the marketing of other competitors, ZBG has received little publicity. Omar Chen, CEO of ZBG exchange, seldom appears on public occasions in the crypto industry. Before starting our sharing today, please welcome Omar Chen, CEO of ZBG exchange. You have been working in Huawei overseas for ten years. What is the reason for you to set up ZBG exchange All in blockchain area?
Omar: Hello, I’m Omar from ZBG. I majored in computer science in college. After graduate school, I went to Ericsson as a software engineer and then worked for Huawei overseas for 10 years. Spent 10 consecutive Spring Festival in different regions overseas, in the Middle East, north Africa, Europe, southeast Asia and other places. Later return to obtain funds from job seniority, made a brief VC/PE entrepreneurship, however I found the traditional enterprise who want to be on the market must go through several rounds of fundraising, at a time when the block chain industry is in a bull market in 2017, when many enterprises with the aid of block chain raise success, I found the chain block can efficiently help many entity enterprise development, so I transform block chain, and a coincidence to meet in c group. Now I am the co-founder of ZBG, and I am also working with the team to witness the rapid development of ZBG. Today, I am honored to participate in the AMA of domestic in-depth media Honeycomb finance and share something about ZBG.
Q2. Why is ZBG developing so fast? Can you illustrate it with some data? ZBG has also experienced 16 months of development. What is the current operating situation of ZBG?
Omar: ZBG has only been established for a little more than a year now, and it has covered 7 language areas in the world and over 1.8 million users. At present, ZBG ranks among the top ten in the world. Let me illustrate this with a couple of graphs of third-party data.
The data is all from third parties, such as non-smalls. Our natural traffic is always at the top of the hot list. Coingecko’s second quarter 2019 report indicates that our individual project IEO has the highest ROI in the world. Our similarweb traffic ranking is similar to OKEX’s. ZBG is also ranked 11th in global exchange day activity in a weibo data by He Yi. Other indicators in golden money’s review far outpaced mainland exchanges of the same period. I have shown you the data of independent evaluation of the third party, so that you can know more about ZBG.
Q3.The number of exchanges exploded in August and September 2019. Is the number of exchanges strongly correlated with the bear or bull market and what will happen in the future?
In fact, there was a similar exchange frenzy in July and August last year. ZBG actually had survive the bear market last year. For reference, in December 2018, Huobi cloud officially announced the birth of 118 exchanges. But by April of this year, I learned that only five or six had survived, and the Huobi exchange was quiet. So, the October of this year is very similar to the September of last year. My view is that the A massive exchange collapse could take place within two months, and the market will gradually become depressed, which will affect the entry of new users. So, it’s a cycle, the market rebound, everyone thought that the open exchange money, so a heap of new exchanges will be occurred in market, and then fails, the exchange market setback for cooling, and then turns to the low rebound, the market rebound again, the market will be like a cycle to development of financial market, but encryption industry faster. So the next bull market won’t come until the exchange boom is over, because it will take some time to repair after the money-making effect wears off. Money needs to be pooled to fuel the bull market, bitcoin can go even higher, and the entire cryptocurrency market can be resurrected.
Q4. As a survivor, ZBG should have a lot of trading data on hand. Which data indicators are relevant to the market? So, how do you think the market might develop in the future?
Omar: Like a mighty wave crashing on a sandy shore, many exchange have been winnowed out. As the exchange that survived and followed the lead, we had a lot of solid KYC users and trading data. Moreover, these users are the newly admitted users in 2018–2019.Many of them are from Southeast Asia countries, their trading preferences and purchasing habits are not the same as traditional users.
Omar: From 2018 to 2019, the proportion of new users gradually spreads to other countries, especially the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Madagascar and Ecuador. This shows that the current small bear market is approaching, and the new users in hot countries of traditional block chain are gradually declining. The market has shifted from developed regions with an average order quantity of over 1000 USD to developing countries and regions with a order quantity of less than 100 USD.
Omar:
Conclusion: small bear market shock. According to the active distribution proportion of ZBG’s historical mainstream currency trading, the current market is a volatile market. Generally, the rising proportion of BTC trading accounts for over 70%, which is an indicator of the market downturn. ZBG data also show that the current top six traded currencies are mainstream currencies such as BTC ETH EOS LTC XRP ZB and platform token. Among them, bitcoin trading account for nearly 60%, and the high proportion of BTC indicates that users have lost their enthusiasm for investment and started to seek more stable investment targets. The massive accumulation of bitcoin is also a sign that people are not optimistic about the market in the next few months. From this trend, the short-term 3-month trend is closer to a small bear market, unless there is a special event to stimulate.
Q5.An important indicator of the market is bitcoin. This year is the 11th year of the birth of the bitcoin network. At present, many investors in the bitcoin circle are optimistic about the market after the bitcoin halve in 2020. But there are a lot of people who think the opposite, Omar. What do you think? Does the logic of halving leading the rise still hold?
Omar: I’m optimistic about BTC’s future market. From the first time it was halved on November 28, 2012, to 25 BTC per 10 minutes, to the second time it was halved on July 10, 2016, to 12.5 BTC, and again to 6.25 BTC at the end of may,2020.Every half-year in bitcoin’s history has been followed by a sharp rise in the number of participants, which has become almost a rule, and I believe this time will be no exception. Because, bitcoin is currently the most successful blockchain application, is the consensus engine of the whole coin circle.
Q6. As the founder of the exchange, I am curious about your personal investment experience in digital currency. Can you share your investment philosophy and experience in coinage? Is it convenient to give some position advice? I’m sure the audience will be interested.
Omar: Actually, if the exchange has enough global users and enough information, it can get a head start on the trend. Current position recommendations need to vary from person to person, the proportion of configuration should refer to the family status of individual assets, risk tolerance, such as the assessment of individual risk tolerance to judge suitable to do sound-based investors, or radical investors.
Therefore, people generally need to download several different apps. Novice users can start with bitcoin and mainstream COINS with lower risk, and innovation COINS should be invested to control the position and make sure the stop loss and stop profit. In the future, ZBG will increase investment in mainstream COINS and join with the community to try to use an app to meet all people’s needs for asset allocation in currencies.
Q7.You just mentioned that ZBG is built by ZB’s six-year technical system. What is the relationship and difference between ZBG and ZB?How to empower each other?
Omar: ZBG was originally created with ZB as a mainstream currency market and ZBG as an innovative currency. ZBG’s early competitors were Hadax and Fcoin. Judging from the current implementation, ZBG in mining model exchange survived to become the world’s top 10, preliminary to complete the first objective ZBG based on six years of accumulated technology, currently in security is the leading, and based on this continue to optimize the multilayer risk control, our wallet also do the isolation measures, to ensure the safety of the user assets. Compared with coin security, it is more reliable to store user assets in ZBG. However, security also has a certain cost, such as high time and labor cost. Therefore, we need to spend more time on docking or upgrading many main chains than other platforms in the industry. Anyway, I still suggest here when you choose exchange APP, be sure to give priority to with security, the exchange that had stolen money can trade, but had better not deposit money for a long time inside.
Q8. Some time ago, I saw some negative articles about ZBG and ZB group on the Internet, especially the gossip about Bell Chain, such as the AE event of Bell chain of ZB; 3 projects of ZBG collapsed at the end of may. Can you elaborate on what happened?
Omar: Actually, ZB group has always been relatively low-key. I know a little about Bell Chain, but not all of it. After all, I am mainly responsible for ZBG. Probably ZB found that bell chain was suspected of money laundering, so it initiated risk control. Risk control is taken to protect the rights and interests of users, which caused dissatisfaction from the project side of Bell chain. Then, the main chain of Bell chain was upgraded. Due to the wallet upgrade, the time spent on the connection of the main chain of ZB was quite long, so there was a period of time when the coin could not be withdrawn. However, in retrospect, ZB’s awareness of risk control indirectly caused many ZB users to leave the market in advance at a high price and did not cause much loss in the investment of Bell chain. The AE event was actually an error, showing accumulated multiple borrowings rather than the current number of borrowings, and the user’s misunderstanding was clarified in a later announcement.
As for ZBG, we always serve customers steadfastly. Some negative events are actually the misunderstanding from the outside world. In January there is an event about banned user’s withdrawal when he had gain profits. That is actually the user exploited another projects’ Market Making algorithm holes to gain the extravagant profits, and that triggered the ZBG risk control system, his assets had been frozen, ZBG only acts as a third-party platform to investigate and deal with the situation during the freeze. After eliminating the case of hacker stealing the project currency, ZBG allows users to preserve their assets and restore their accounts to normal. As mentioned before, ZBG always attaches great importance to safety, so the risk control is wrongly sealed. The following procedures have been optimized and the research process has been optimized, and there is basically no false seal. Another thing, it is the end of may, three projects listed on ZBG had experienced roller-coaster boom and slump in the first opening hour, the situation was, after trading open, the project team did market making by manual operation, sell order was much less than the buyer, The price is directly higher by the user, in addition, some of the community users, mistook the USDT as QC, input the wrong price to chase the high price, that caused the price soaring in a short time. Afterwards, we urged the project side to compensate the investors and established rules to restrain the project side. In addition, we also initiated risk control procedures against the failure of the bid to ensure the smooth fluctuation of the price. Later, we raised the threshold of listing, intensified the due diligence on the project founders and the team, urged each project to provide customer service to users for 24 hours, and paid enough guaranty or listing fee, cracked down on low prices and fraudulent channels, and only the currency that met ZBG’s standard of listing, can be listed on ZBG.
Q9. The platform token is also an important indicator for the development of exchanges. People pay close attention to the several surges of BNB and HT this year. In contrast, although ZBG has a good performance in terms of users and trading, the platform ZT has a low performance and is subject to a lot of criticism and attacks.What do you think of this？
Omar: It’s true that the ZT’s price performance is not that impressive. Because our platform token is very diversified and held by a large number of individual investors. We have more than 40,000 flat currency holding addresses, among all flat currency holding addresses, including HT, OKB etc., our flat currency holding addresses rank second only to BNB.
We went public sales last year, and we didn’t do any asset allocation, which led to an 80% drop in our assets during the bear market. But even so, our token is still at 25% of the original price. At present, ZBG is still in development stage, we had reserved some assets for overseas market expansion, the team will always remember the assets raised is actually debt, and we also uses our profits to support ZT market, our goal is to make ZT return to the initial public offering price.
Of course, platform token is an important indicator of the strength of the platform. We firmly believe that ZBG has the greatest potential among so many new head exchanges and many second-tier exchanges are following us, including some of that went to Korea and Vietnam recently to expand their markets.
Despite their bragging abilities, the actual operating data and user distribution are actually more than half a year behind the international ZBG. The exchange structure has not yet been finalized, and the new first-tier exchanges have many opportunities to surpass the top exchanges. I believe that although we only have a team of more than 100 people, we have higher operating efficiency than Huobi and other companies with nearly 1,000 people. The benefits per capita will be much higher than the bloated form of the old exchange. These strengths will eventually be reflected in platform token. Because we have unique advantages that others do not have: pragmatic international team, Huawei management style and team spirit of struggle, six years of ZB technology, operation, product advantages, unique security iteration and so on. In particular, ZBG has always put the security of users’ funds as a top priority. These are the capabilities allow us to compete with first-tier exchanges like Binance.
Q10. Binance has been hacked in past two years. How is ZBG doing in hacker defense?
Omar: In terms of security, we rely on ZB’s 6 years of wallet technology accumulation and rich management process, and insist on safeguarding the security of users’ assets. In the process, we successfully fended off multiple DDOS attacks by competitors and hackers of unknown provenance. Over the course of the year, we continued to update more than 20 minor versions. Sometimes we worked overtime in the middle of the night. I would tell my colleagues that we may not be the best, but we must be the most hardworking. God rewards those who work hard.
Q11. The last question, what will ZBG platform do in the next year?
Omar: On the first anniversary of ZBG, I have revealed that we will do the following things:
1) We will strictly control project channels and strengthen project supervision;
2) We will continue to layout overseas, expand the advantages, increase the strength of overseas services;
3) We will increase brand investment, establish cooperation with media communities in China, and stop working in the dark;
4) We will open enterprise customer service and key customer service to provide more convenient KYC access and statements for key customers.
In addition, we have recently launched a new function on the APP called ZBG community. ZBG will provide a community service tool so that the traffic of various communities and ZBG traffic can converge. If you are interested, you can go to the ZBG official website to download the APP and get a new ZBG trading experience
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