BlockTalks x Woo Trade AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Woo Trade, on 8th October, at 3PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Jack Tan Co-Founder & Ran Yi, COO at Woo Network. So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
Ran Yi— I am Ran. I have over 14 years of experience in global asset management. I have seeded top quantitative funds since 2014, but I am now the proud COO of Wootrade.
Jack Tan — I’m Jack (obviously) and before I co-founded a quant trading firm called Kronos Research, I was working at BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank for more than a decade.
Introduction Questions Asked By BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce Wootrade to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — Ran — To describe it as easily as possible, and skip all the crypto jargon. It’s like a large liquidity pool that serves trading platforms and large traders. Exchanges link to our platform for the deepest liquidity there is. This will instantly boost their liquidity, which enables them to focus on other things that matter for their users. Not only do we aggregate liquidity, but we also have internal liquidity providers (market makers) and make use of deep pools! That’s how we can offer this game changing liquidity. Big active traders on our platform can then trade with the lowest spread, against zero trade fees. In the future we will also serve retail traders. The key thing to remember is that Wootrade is not only about volume. It’s also about execution quality.
Jack — Yeah I think its important to address the fact that we are aimed at B2B clients (exchanges, OTC desks, institutions, professional trading teams); and will release a more retail-friendly platform further down the road. I’m sure everyone has had a poor trading experience at some point in their trading lives, where they go to a platform that has half-filled order books and can’t get a decent price on whatever asset they want to buy or sell.
Q2. What are the advantages of Wootrade to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — Jack — Do we have an alternative? Right now the alternative is traditional market making firms. They fill order books for exchanges and demand a hefty fee for their services, which can be unreliable and a bit of a gamble. They also give exchanges a bad name because it looks like wash trading and price manipulation, we can provide the same service for zero fees, so in many ways, especially for tier 2 and 3 exchanges, joining the Woo network is a no-brainer.
Ran — Haha yes, another “alternative” would be AMM exchanges such as Uniswap. But when liquidity pools are small, the slippage is huge. And don’t forget about the impermanent loss issue
Jack — And like Ran said, decentralized exchanges and DeFi apps are another potential user, but we will release more about that down the road.
Q3. What are the major milestones Wootrade achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — Jack — Since going online, Wootrade has gone from about 30k in daily volume to already over $7mn per day, let me share a photo of what our live order book looks like.
Ran — Haha we’ve got an excellent working product, and a great team. Investors recognized that when they funded us. Perhaps you have read the Cointelegraph article covering us:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/institutional-crypto-platform-wootrade-raises-10m-in-investment-round
Those are the major milestones we have achieved.
Jack —
here’s our live order book, you can see the depth and how tight the spreads are, any exchange could have full-access to that by joining our network.
Questions Asked on Twitter For Woo Trade Team!
Q1. On your website it days that enterprise clients holding a certain amount of tokens are eligible to earn WOO tokens for every dollar of flow traded. How much is that minimum amount that clients must hold?
Ans — 5 million WOO tokens. That’s what flow providers such as exchanges or trading communities should stake to become eligible to achieve PRIME status. Our PRIME status nodes will be major liquidity flow providers, who will generate a lot of traffic and value for the WOO network.
Q2. Does Woo Network currently have alliances with other exchanges in the market? Are more alliances coming in the near future? Are you currently working on one?
Ans — We do! It was ridiculously tough to onboard the first customer because instead of us trusting exchanges, the reverse had to happen, they are required to put full collateral on Wootrade in order to boost their liquidity. But by the time we upgraded Wootrade 1.0 to 2.0, exchanges were already queueing. The only exchange we can disclose right now is Hoo. But there are many more, and we will disclose them in the nearby future. We are currently working on more partnerships. We want to provide roughly 40% of the market’s liquidity, so we’ll have to! But things are going extremely well
Q3. As a trader like me, the security of my funds is my first priority before choosing any exchange for trading. How much secure Wootrade is? What programmable technology & security developed by your team to build the platform very secure?
Ans — Good question! We understand the importance of safety as no other. As traders by nature we understand the risks involved and have been doing this for more than two years in crypto, and more than a decade in traditional markets.
But first we should point out that we arent an exchange, we are a liquidity pool that is accessed by exchanges, so the users like mhasan7777 don’t have to worry
Still, we do have other assets under management, and we don’t mess around with those. Wootrade is currently working with multiple Custodians to keep assets safe. We will later provide a list of partner custodians for users to choose from during the onboarding process. We have many layers of risk controls internally not only for the safety of assets, but also for all types of market risk, including API risk, asset price risk, margin liquidation risk.
Q4. Can you please briefly illustrate what are the top landmarks that the wootraders team aims to accomplish before the end of this year or in future and are all targets in accordance with the current road map?
Ans — Our timeline can be found in our litepaper, which can be found here: https://woo.network/token on our website.
But let me cover it a bit more in this AMA :) At the moment we’re focused on the public sale. But we have no time to rest, as our trading platform will launch next year Q1. In Q2 we will launch our futures trading. And we have many more milestones. Our overarching landmark, however, is to provide 40% of the market’s liquidity. Is this target in accordance? I dare say yes, the volumes we’re trading are growing exponentially. Currently only exchanges and quantitative trading teams can use Wootrade via API so right now we are doing about $7m USD in trades a day, which is up from the $30k USD a day we started with a few months ago. With the launch of margin and futures, we expect much bigger numbers in future AMA’s
Q5. to create the $woo financial ecosystem, will there be a buyback or burning of a token supply?
Ans — Either Mary read our litepaper, or she’s just a really lucky guesser, speaking of which, you can find the litepaper over on our website: https://woo.network. but yeah, a BNB style buy back is definitely on the cards. We will use revenue flows to decrease the supply via buybacks, keeping a more even market, and offsetting any token unlocks that are listed on the website.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Woo Trade Team!!
Q1. Many Project talks only about their Strenghts, Can You talk about the weak point that You project is Currently Dealing With?
Ans —I like this question. Because indeed. We’re boasting about our strengths 24/7. With good reason! We’re about to disrupt the markets. But every project stumbles upon difficulties as well.
I would say we have 2 weaknesses at the moment:
1) our project is rather difficult to explain. The concepts of market makers and deep pools seem daunting to people. Luckily, people are starting to read more about market makers. And the necessity of having great liquidity.
2) we have global ambitions. And although we have a great team and hire new people every week, we have to move fast! This puts a big strain on the team. Luckily we feel happy to go to work every day. That makes it a happy challenge. One we can manage
Q2. Wootrade doesn’t charge any trading fees on its platform,
Then where does Wootrade gets its funds and revenue? How does Wootrade manage and distribute those revenue for its platform developments?
Ans — When users generate revenue from staking into various products, we could take an asset management fee. On the trading side, we do charge margin fees like all platforms even though there is no trading commissions.
We also get rebates from market-makers such as Kronos Research. Wootrade could route its orders to the big exchanges OR could route to the alpha-based true market-makers, it really depends on who will give Wootrade the best price but typically market-makers offer better prices than exchanges.
In this way, Wootrade earns from the market-makers and uses those revenues to incentivize other flow providers to route orders here. We may also have a flat monthly service fee for a premium app but those details aren’t fully hashed out yet.
Q3. Are you a global project or local project? Can anybody anywhere use Your project without any restrictions?
Ans — We do have a global focus! The markets we currently focus on most are Greater China, Southeast Asia and the EU. We also have our eyes on the Japanese and Korean markets. These last two especially are a bit more tricky to enter, but we’ve have a great product and an amazing team so we feel confident that we can achieve this.
Q4. Most of the users only care about immediate benefits rather than the real value of the project in the long-term. How can you convince users to invest your platform in the long-term?
Ans — Well our main users, such as PRIME nodes and exchanges, otc desks, institutions, and pro-traders will have to hold the WOO token long-term to maintain functionality such as discounted or zero-free trading. We expect the number of these type of users to grow over time, which should take care of the ‘long term’ issue.
And just to be clear, this isn’t just a theory of ours, we already have a growing list of clients, so we are fairly confident that the Wootrade network will be adopted.
Q5. Do you plan to build partnerships with local cryptocurrency developers and local project in each country to make the use of WOO more global?
Ans — We will definitely be working with projects and platforms all over, as our liquidity pools are intended to disrupt all markets by connecting everyone. Exchanges will be a main beneficiary of this, we’ve already seen localized exchanges in specific regions being necessary to get past local regulations, this is something we’ve seen in regions like the US, China, Taiwan, India, Korea, etc… they have specific exchanges that tend to cater specific to those users. The result is that its impossible to maintain efficient liquidity on separate platforms tailored to a specific region, all over the world.
Connecting to our liquidity solves this by allowing them to focus on the regulatory side, plus things like user acquisition, while we handle the backend tech side.
Here are some important links of Woo Network👇
Official Website — https://woo.network/
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/Wootrade
Twitter — https://twitter.com/wootraderS
Telegram Chat — https://t.me/wootrade
Medium — https://medium.com/@wootrade
Instagram —https://www.instagram.com/wootrade
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/wootrade
