1. Please introduce yourself and your company.
My name is Gino, and I am the Director of the BitWind liquidity product of ChainUP, a leading blockchain technology service provider that has formed 8 mature product lines, including cryptocurrency exchanges, liquidity support, public and alliance chains, wallet, mining pool, situational awareness, blockchain cloud media as well as broker services.
To date, we have served more than 300 exchange clients, more than 100 digital wallet clients, more than 150 liquidity service clients, which include more than 50 million users in over 20 countries from Asia, Europe, America, and Oceania. The team members behind ChainUP have worked in top blockchain or internet companies and institutions in technological development and operation management, and are highly experienced in the blockchain industry. ChainUP has obtained several rounds of investments from well-known top institutions in the industry, such as Morningside Venture Capital, Joy Capital, Node Capital, Albatross Venture, Taoshi capital, amongst others.
2. Tell us more about BitWind.
The BitWind product was conceived sometime in the second half of 2019, as an answer to the liquidity challenges that exchanges were facing. We were servicing many exchanges and the typical feedback from them when they began operations, was the crucial role of liquidity on their platforms.
When small and medium exchanges lack users and trading volumes, they will not survive in the industry. By integrating the liquidity of over 300 exchanges served by ChainUP from all over the world, the BitWind liquidity brand creates a liquidity experience that is comparable to those of top exchanges, thereby helping exchanges to increase transaction volumes.
The BitWind brand has taken more than half a year to hone before it was launched. The goal is to provide the best market depth and trading experience, helping exchanges implement operations smoothly. While created for B2B businesses, BitWind can cater to the range of novice exchange teams, operating exchanges, wallet dealers, brokers, institutional traders and more.
To provide trading services to their end-users, exchanges only need to add a trading entry on their platforms. With that, they can access the shared liquidity and aggregation market of the underlying trading network.
3. What sets BitWind apart from other liquidity brands?
Millions of users from our hundreds of exchange clients, liquidity clients, and others contribute to the huge aggregated user volume which naturally creates liquidity. BitWind can service all the mainstream currencies in the market. It supports spot liquidity, the privatized ETF liquidity of ChainUP as well as platform currency liquidity, etc.
Our dedicated network price aggregator can provide the fastest price quotes as well as ultra-low delay orders. Other features include one-click trading, one-second price comparisons, and low-buying and high-selling.
Emerging exchanges can access optimal quotes, sufficient traffic, the best market depth, lower spreads and avoid the risk of arbitrage losses while increasing trading volume. It can leverage operating and capital value in a bear market, and maintain its competitive edge in a bull market. The instant liquidity access can save new exchanges from a cold start and allow them to focus instead on customer retention, avoiding the risks in market making.
In addition, the core technical team of ChainUP hail from BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) backgrounds. Our founder Zhong Gengfa previously served as the Technical Director of the Baidu SNS Division, founding its technical team. He also served as the CTO at China’s well-known P2P car rental platform, START. Other founding team members like Jun Du, Hu Donghai, and others possess deep and professional industry knowledge and experience. Moreover, ChainUP has always maintained its position as a dedicated technical service provider, not branching off into other areas that might cause conflicts of interest for our customers. These factors have contributed to our differentiated competitive advantage.
4. BitWind has combined liquidity of more than 300 exchanges. CoinMarketCap now has a relatively new category where they rank exchanges according to liquidity levels. How do your exchanges fare over there?
Not too badly, we are happy to say. Our exchanges BiKi.com and Coineal are normally included among the Top 30 on that list.
5. What is dark pool liquidity and what are your thoughts on that?
Called the “upstairs market”, “dark pool” or “dark liquidity” because the trade details are concealed from the public until after execution, dark pool liquidity has raised eyebrows and been called “unfair” by some traders.
Basically dark pool liquidity is the trading volume generated by institutional orders, carried out on private exchanges. These orders are represented by block trades facilitated away from central exchanges and are mostly inaccessible to the public.
Dark pools emerged when high-frequency trading (HFT) came to dominate daily trading volumes. Supercomputers executing algorithms in milliseconds became the norm and HFT institutional traders capitalized on the technology to execute orders of multimillion-share blocks ahead of other investors, then instantly closing out positions upon obtaining profits. These large HFT orders had to be spread across multiple exchanges which alerted competitors who could get in front of the order and drive up prices, all within milliseconds of the initial order placement.
To prevent such situations and ensure liquidity for large block trades, several investment banks established private exchanges – “dark pools” that provide a market of buyers and sellers with the liquidity to execute the trade. This institutional practice has carried over to the cryptocurrency space, with practitioners defending it, insisting that dark pools provide essential liquidity that allows markets to operate more efficiently while others have denounced the lack of transparency in dark pools.
At BitWind, we do not have dark pools. We believe in being fair to all traders and do not distinguish between institutional and retail traders.
6. What is the impact of COVID-19 fears on crypto markets as opposed to traditional markets?
COVID-19 came rather unexpectedly but its impact has been seen across economies, industries, and governmental policies, destabilizing well-established systems right down to the lives of families and individuals.
When it comes to the markets, while the initial uncertainty and fear impacted both traditional and crypto markets negatively at the start of the pandemic, I believe the similarities will not continue.
In traditional markets, Trump’s 3-year gains have been wiped out and Europe saw stocks fall to their lowest levels since 2012. While there were unprecedented fluctuations and price swings for BTC and other cryptocurrencies (BTC fell under $4K and ETH, XRP, and LTC experienced double-digit falls) at the start of the pandemic, the past 2-3 weeks have seen volume growth in the digital assets market, indicating that investor interest has picked up.
Long before COVID-19, the digital assets economy has been slowly maturing. Before Bitcoin, there was no alternative to the centralized currency system. The BTC protocol offers a decentralized store and transfer of value in a currency resistant to manipulation by central banks and global financial institutions. With the current economic situation of massive government bailouts and helicopter money, investors need to search for better investment instruments from a long-term perspective.
Even precious metals like gold and silver will be prone to supply disruptions and logistics issues in times like these. Meanwhile, digital currencies exist in cyberspace, unconstrained by state borders or transportation challenges.
In fact, if you look at it, cryptocurrencies are decentralized, peer-to-peer and borderless payment mechanisms that have been designed perfectly for situations like the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The more people are restricted in movements to conduct business, the more useful cryptocurrencies become as they can be sent and received in the safety of people’s homes. Stablecoins, especially dollar-backed digital currencies have seen an influx of funds as traders and investors move funds into stable assets as risky assets collapse.
Billionaire Tim Draper has stated that “when the world comes back, it will be Bitcoin, not banks and governments that save the day.”
7. Anything else you’d like us to know about BitWind?
Besides providing high-quality liquidity for currency, contract and ETF, BitWind can help customers access and develop liquidity systems. Without possessing developer capabilities, customers can provide risk management modules to professional traders.
BitWind has indeed managed to meet the needs of many different levels of customers and their users.
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