Binance Product Roadmap With Mayur, Head of Product
Main Takeaways
Five principles drive the product team’s decisions: Simplicity, transparency, innovation, speed, and community.
The journey to one billion users will be long, so it is essential for Binance to create products that people like using and build upon that.
Binance wants to change the world in a positive way that encourages adoption and trust, both with our users and regulators.
Mayur Kamat, Head of Product at Binance, spoke at the Ramadan Super Meet-Up on March 22, 2023. He dove deeper into the driving force behind Binance’s products and outlined the upcoming product roadmap. Please note the transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Humble Beginnings
Mayur: One of the things CZ says to my team is very simple, “Keep building.” Build stuff that our users want. Build stuff that makes the journey to crypto a lot easier and build stuff that creates this ecosystem. One where more and more people, technologies, and platforms can thrive and bring this vision of financial inclusion to everyone in the world who needs it. We’ve been doing that for the past five and a half years.
We started off as an exchange, which very soon became the largest crypto exchange in the world. But that’s just a very small portion of our product portfolio. Less than 10% of people in the world are familiar with or accessing crypto today. So the journey is a lot longer, and the journey is what makes this experience amazing for all of us because we get to do it with our community.
What Guides the Future of Binance’s Products
Mayur: In the product team, we have five principles that guide every decision that we make.
Firstly, we want to make things that are simple. If we want to get a billion people to use something, it needs to be very, very simple. The simpler we can make things, the easier we can make onboarding, the more friction we can remove, and the more adoption we will get.
The second one is on trust and transparency. Our industry has a lot of good players but also a lot of bad players. How can we prove to everybody that you should be able to trust us? We want to do that with our actions, and we want to do that with our product. So we want to build products that give you that level of trust and transparency, not just to the users but also to the industry and regulators. We want to make sure that we build this ecosystem together and trust each other on it.
The third principle is innovation. To change the world, we need to do something big, and we need to do something that may fail at times. From a product standpoint, we want to have products that get massive adoption. The only way we can do that is if we keep innovating, even if sometimes that innovation comes at the cost of cannibalizing our previous products.
The fourth is speed. We want to do things fast. In the last two to three weeks, you’ve just seen how fast the market has gone in terms of price volatility but also innovation. We want to make sure that Binance products are delivered to users alongside the pace of the industry. When we know the users love our products, we’ll go deeper and build substance behind them.
Lastly and most importantly, is that we build products for our community, with our community. We build products that make sure our community’s feedback, including user pain points, desires, and use cases of crypto, is fulfilled through our products.
Recent Product Launches
Mayur: One of the most recent features we’ve launched is a user-feedback tool, and this is a way for you to give meaningful feedback directly to the product managers on how our product can be improved. There’s now a new version that lets you see comments directly from product managers telling you whether this feature already exists or how your feedback made us better. You can also attach images and descriptions and vote on feedback given by other users. In the cases where we may not be able to address your feature requests, we will give you a reason why that is the case. This feature is going to guide how we build products in the future. We listen and read every single piece of feedback that comes from this tool. And that’s just one small facet. We, especially CZ, will still engage directly with the community on our social channels or if you contact our customer support. This is one of the key pillars that guide our product.
One other product we have is Binance Build. If you’re on Twitter, follow the hashtag #BinanceBuild. We launch a new feature every day, and that’s just the pace of innovation. So every day, we will tweet something about a new improvement. Some of them might be small, and some of them will be fairly large features, but at this pace of innovation, we want to keep going, and the best way to keep up with that is Binance Build.
With regards to Proof of Reserves with zk-SNARKs, this is a fairly new and innovative technology. In a privacy-friendly manner, we can now prove to our users whether your assets are in the Binance wallets as we say they are. We are probably the first people in the industry to do this, and we made this open source, so we encourage other players in the ecosystem to follow our path and also publish their zk-SNARKs Proof of Reserves. Once we have trust in the system, we can grow as an industry, and this is one of the first steps toward that.
But we are also an exchange, so we launched some very interesting trading tools. Users can now adjust orders by drag and drop, feedback that came specifically from a direct interaction I had with a customer. We also have others that we launched recently, like the rebalancing bot that automatically adjusts your portfolio without you having to manually do it.
Binance Pay is one of the ways to bridge the gap between the Web3 world and the real world. One of the use cases that I’m personally very excited about is remittance. Many immigrants earning a fairly low income send money back every month to their families, but a high percentage of that money just gets taken away by the system. It takes days, and it is not fully fraud-free. Binance Pay is now enabling a better way, which is seamless crypto-based transfer, as well as being able to offer them that money in fiat. Binance Pay is now in malls, physical kiosks, and car dealerships – helping users solve everyday problems.
Lastly is Binance Tax. This is our latest launch. We launched just about a month ago in France. So I’m super excited to announce that we will be launching this globally in the next couple of months. I’m super excited to bring this globally to all our users for free so you can be able to understand what your tax liabilities are and be able to satisfy them at the click of a button.
Future Product Launches
The DCA (dollar-cost average) Bot is a game-changer. You can now essentially just have the strategy bot do all the heavy lifting for you. The bot will give you financial advice and allow you to automate it the way you want. A highly requested trading feature we also have coming soon is a profit and loss analysis tool that will let you track how your portfolio is doing over time and allow you to learn to become a better trader.
Doing multi-factor authentication when you’re withdrawing your funds is never fun. It’s super secure, which is the cornerstone of interacting with a financial institution. We do want to have it, but it doesn’t have to be cumbersome. We’re making a lot of improvements in our biometrics-based product, which now lets you use secure and modern infrastructure like passkeys and Face ID to authenticate these use cases.
The last upcoming changes I want to mention are those to interaction pages and games. We’re going to make sure the deposit page process is seamless. You’ll be able to save your addresses and scan QR codes instead of copy-pasting addresses. The aim is to make day-to-day interactions easier. Our users love games and campaigns like the Bitcoin Button and the WODL game. We’ll be introducing more that allow users to bring new people to Binance and earn crypto through referrals, campaigns, and games.
Final Notes Moving Forward
We want to change the world. We want to create innovation. But we also want to do it in a positive manner that encourages adoption and trust, both with our users and our regulators. There’s a lot more product innovation and focus going on to ensure our systems’ compliance. How we’ve done anti-money laundering (AML), how we monitor transactions, how we report suspicious activity to governments, how we bring new users through different channels, and how we make sure that we are bringing them through a compliant KYC system. A lot more work is going on over here. It doesn’t sound that fun or exciting, but it’s super important for us to bring crypto to a billion users.