Cynthia Wu on Matrixport's growth in Asia and institutional crypto services

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have cynthia wu the head of sales and business development at matrixport cynthia welcome to the show and thanks for coming on today thank you ashton for having me here at the Crypto Coin Show you're very welcome i'm excited to dive

0:22into the world of digital assets financial services and also gearing towards institutions and hearing a little a little bit of your perspective dealing with institutions very often and what that's been like but i would first love to kick off our interview if you could give an overview of matrixport sort of the focus on the solutions you've been driving into the

0:44cryptocurrency industry that would be great sounds good sure so i basically started mature sport with jihan and zhong and also daniel like three years ago it's jihan jones second venture after bimen so at that time we were very determined to start something in crypto financial services so why could the financial services because we believe that back then

1:12the market was kind of in the stage of getting more more and more mature and more people including institutions and retails are holding crypto assets so what they need is crypto financial services in one platform where they can have basically most of their needs if not all i fulfilled so that including trading lending earning yields and also various other stuff so then that's

1:36basically the reason why we started measure support as a one-stop shop for crypto financial services for both retailers and institutions so as of today i think we have more than 10 products on our platform where people can fulfill can can trade can land can earn and use crypto as a collateral to borrow money and there are also various asset engine products to cater

1:59to different yield expectations and risk appetites yeah so our slogan is make crypto easy for everyone it's a very easy slogan but the bet it's something easier than it actually is because i mean the customer needs is evolving all the time so we basically need to they always need to stay ahead of the trend to identify what is the next business of what is next opportunity

2:27what is the fulfill unfulfilled demand and try to have that available for the users on the platform definitely great intro cynthia and yeah it's great to have a one-stop shop where you can consolidate you know your assets in terms of the diff introducing different financial products to either do trading or lending or farming and whatnot but of course making it easy by

2:52also providing everything is a tough dilemma and it's great to hear that you mentioned jihan from bitmain and the bitmain guys obviously that brings credibility to having a great first venture to expanding into something like this and know there's a lot of capital flowing into the markets right now right yeah having jihad's name there is

3:16definitely helpful because i think he built his first empire beaming it's a successful business so even when we started it was really the gloom is the market condition it was the beginning of 2019 i remember bitcoin price back then was only three thousand it's definitely far away from where we see it today so back then it's very as i would say the bottom of the bearish

3:40market but i think because of japan's name and conviction a lot of investors have been giving us a very important critical backing even in that very bearish environment so yeah very interesting and what kind of target audience have you seen respond the most to matrix ports solutions is there a large

4:07leaning towards institutional investors or are you also seeing a mixture of retail investors as well sure i think as of today we have a good mix of both but it also takes time to evolve all right in the first year when we are just out in the market our first batch of clients are many miners and you probably can see that's one of the last reason and also we probably

4:34back then at that point of time understand miners needs a little better right because they need to pledge their bitcoin to borrow as a kind of working capital financing and we basically become a lender a major lender to the mine into the mining industry and they also need to trade and sell so those are the common needs that the miners need and they also need

4:58yield product on bitcoin so that they can earn bit more bitcoin it's like virtual mining right help them to hold like grow grow their crypto wealth and then the second batch of influx customers i would say are the retail and also non-mining institutions the retailers are also begin to realize that there's a lot

5:25of asset management needs they want to earn interest on stable coins they want to earn first yield on the coins they're holding so and they probably want to do leverage trading as well they want to do staking so the need for retail users are interested also growing quite significantly in the past two years so that's another batch of another type of clientele that comes

5:49down to mature sport and at the same time we also see the institutional clients getting more and more engaged into this industry so this institutional clients were not crypto native people they are like family offices hedge funds like crypto like some some kind of crypto fund maybe they are they have d5 strategies and also some like smaller asset managers and

6:16we also even see the fs brokerages get interested in the space and even corporates so that comes that part is growing a lot in the next two years especially in the last year i think given the pandemic there's a lot of mac econ economic background this group of people get interested in to become a cryptocurious and some of them start to basically

6:44start to hold and participating in various financial services in crypto or they might be building their crypto arm but that's their main main business so we definitely have seen in the past three years we definitely have seen the market evolve quite a bit and our clients have also evolved as a respect of that definitely yeah i can imagine i'm curious on the institutional side

7:12and for the bitcoin miners how different is your the business development back from when you were working in the bear market in 2019 and in 2020 and now what has changed in 2021 as we're three-quarters way through the year good question so you basically asked me like what are people's behavior and the difference of their demand in terms

7:39of products in bearish and bullish market right yeah yeah i would say that in bullish market definitely everything goes up including the appetites of risk taking and also the level of activities it's definitely multiple times of that of bearish bearish markets in bench markets normally people are looking to

8:06to have a safer type of yield i mean they probably more realistic on the yield perspective or they want to preserve their bitcoin if they are long-term believers they just want to hold on to their bitcoin and maybe accrue more bitcoin in the bearish markets and certain i think people in this market if they are there here for long enough they probably realize it's a

8:28very cyclical market so whenever it comes to the bearish market for those long-term believers or hodlers they will realize this is a good time to basically build their position again so as a as a result of that then there will be more like collateralized loan demand for example they will use their bitcoin and basically borrow crypto and they will

8:58might buy more money machines they will do more investments to make sure that they will be better positioned when the bullish market comes so it's more like a position building but because of the outlook in market outlook in or price outlook in the bench market is not that clear so people even though they're doing that they might not be doing that

9:21in a very aggressive way and when the returns when the when the basically market turns when the market bottoms out the outlook becomes more bright then people will accelerate the way they build their classroom the typical reflection of that is that a lot of people are taking leverages they take leverage in the form of leveraged trading they take

9:43leveraging in the form of cash flow is long they are going to borrow more aggressively and then invest more aggressively so that's an interesting pattern that we have seen and in bullish market of course everyone is active retails and also institutions but when it comes to a tipping point where the market looks a little bit hoppy you will see some of the more like

10:08vigilance institutions they will start to lower their leverage definitely no great explanation and yeah i can imagine you know the risk aversion goes down and people start taking riskier bets and i'm i'm curious with the suite of products that are built into matrix port as you know the price of bitcoin increases and more interest comes in

10:35how do you determine what kind of d5 products there's all these different products that are coming out with different levels of risk and reward you know some of them fairly moderate and some of them a lot riskier you know what kind of approach has your team made in delivering specific d5 products to bring in a different in a variety of products for

10:59Traders and investors on matrixport i see i see it's a good question i mean d5 product has been we call it centified product because we are centralized platform but we also kind of provide the default yield to the users on amazon since last summer actually since the device summary begins and we have seen a lot of success and traction interest both from retails

11:26and also from institutions in that product i guess the reason has been that really help people to streamline the process and they can enjoy the benefit without going through all the hassle so i think it's a very valid proposition so how do we choose like which protocols we participate and which we don't typically we look at three things

11:49first we will look at the we were not absolutely yield driven because you know in d5 there could be requisite yield but those you might not be sustainable and the liquidity and the history of operation might be very short right so in that case if you get in you with said you cannot really guess getting with sizable deposits because once you are in because the pool

12:16is quite shallow the yield goes down immediately so i think the first criteria criteria i we look at is the liquidity how good is the liquidity how accessible is that pool so that means that we might not be able to join some of the very very early stage protocols even though the yield is crazy but because it doesn't it doesn't have any sort of

12:42size yeah appetite for size at that stage so we cannot really be there the second thing we look at is the securities so we have security first is always our culture across all matrix board aspects a product and that weaves into our product offerings as well so before we can offer a protocol on our in the device pool that we

13:11offer to our users we will have our security team to audit the code as well so we will look at the if they have security audits that's great most of the protocol we work with has already been securely audited but if not for a few ones that are not we will be the security auditor for them so basically we have our team look at the code one by one and then basically to

13:37identify and to grade them and to be comfortable enough to participate then the third thing of course is yield we are helping our users to generate yield so we'll look at the yield from the year perspective that's both attractive and sustainable and we also maintain a list of i would say 30 to 20 to 30 watch list of across different d5 protocols so

14:06we will basically move funds across 15 to 20 of them at any point of time to capture the relatively high yield of that during at certain point of time so basically like a smart it's like a smart pool mechanism where we move fast smartly on behalf of our clients across 15 to 20 d5 protocols which if you are doing that as individual it's

14:33basically impossible to follow and carry out that kind of operation or bear that kind of high high cost of get sv definitely yeah great points cynthia and you know we don't have a lot of time but i want to look towards the future i know your team recently closed a series c fundraising so first of all congratulations on that's great i'd love if you could you know maybe

14:59touch on that slightly and also you know with that closed what are the next steps for matrixport in growing to in the future here sure last month we closed our cmc it's a very important milestone for us for the team because we the valuation was above one billion so put us as one of the newest unicorn in the in the space and this front was led by like dst

15:26global who is the leading like gross fund and also were some some of more influential and largest asian family offices in hong kong and singapore so that's kind of a strategic for us because hong kong and singapore are too too important market for us at this stage so having the backings from the influential family families in these two cities is very

15:54important for our growth and credibility and we're also backed by continue to be backed by our early serious a and serious b investors i think that's demonstrate their confidence in us to continue our growth so that's great yeah so coming back to how we're going to grow after the post accidency i think there is very important to use that resources in

16:24the most important area i would say the first important area is continue our r d efforts so we have recently added a lot of new hires in our development team and also product team because i think the core for a core gene or capability for us to grow so fast in the past two and a half years is the product innovation and the robust product experience and also

16:51good ui and ux so that we want to strength strengthen that capability to continue to make the user experience satisfactory or even like better so that's we're going to keep spending resources on and also securities we're going to further as our eum grow currently our is 10 billion u.s dollars that's not small if by any matter so to better safeguard that

17:21that resources were also going to further invest in and building a even bigger like security team and also always put security first so that involves constant investment and the third one is that the global footprint i was they go to market strategies we are primarily in asia with a 70 percent of our user base in asia right now but we also have planned to expand into you

17:46uk and also us so we recently hired at a new hire in london and also australia and we also are planning to apply for relevant licenses in the u.s so hopefully in the near future we could further expand our global footprint to become a truly global crypto platform great very exciting and all soundly attainable goals so all the best with that for the viewers that are

18:15looking to learn more about matrix port you know maybe there's a bunch of north american viewers looking to start that expansion outside of asia what's the best way for them to learn more and start using the platform surely i mean we are on the google store and also our store so i guess the best way is to download our app and see what's up there what's

18:39interesting to invest in we always have the hottest and the fullest range of products for your choice and also we are quite active on twitter instagram and linking so you can follow our twitter at real r e a l matrix support and we will have all sorts of updates there as well so stay tuned great cynthia i will leave those links

19:05as well in the description box below all the best with matrixport moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you for the questions and the time ashton enjoyed talking with you