Interview: Micky, PANews
Author: Joy, PANews
During Token2049 in Singapore recently, PANews interviewed Willy, COO of WOO. Facing fierce competition in the crypto market, WOO has chosen a path of differentiation through innovation, especially in its latest social trading product Social Trading, which introduces unique features such as reverse copy, aiming to provide users with more flexible risk management and profit distribution solutions. In addition, WOO has also demonstrated its determination to promote the healthy development of the market by adjusting its token economic model and improving its liquidity solutions.
In the interview, Willy emphasized the simplification of DeFi operations by combining AI technology, making it easier for users to accept and improving user experience. He believes that the integration of AI and cryptocurrency should not only remain at the level of conceptual hype, but should become one of the forces driving the progress of the industry. However, he also pointed out that the balance between centralization and decentralization faced by the combination of AI and the crypto world will be a major challenge in the future.
The following is the main content of the interview:
PANews: First of all, please briefly introduce yourself and WOOâs business layout?
Willy: Iâm Willy, and Iâm the COO at WOO. WOO has two products, WOO X and WOOFi, which are respectively a centralized and a decentralized exchange. Together, the daily trading volume of the two is about US$700-800 million to US$1 billion.
WOO X focuses on social trading and is aimed at professional traders. WOOFi focuses on cross-chain Swap and currently supports 11 EVM chains and will soon support the Solana chain. In addition to Swap, our decentralized contract trading has been doing very well in the past six months, and now accounts for about 3% of the market share. We also have a WOO token, which has been online for more than three years and is basically available on all mainstream exchanges.
I personally started out in Web2 and founded two companies, one of which I sold. After that, I started to get into Crypto. The founder of Woo is a friend of a friend. After we started working together, I gradually began to manage the entire WOO's products and businesses. I have been in WOO for almost two and a half years.
PANews: You just mentioned that WOO X, an exchange under WOO, recently launched a social trading product called Social Trading. What is the reason for launching this feature? Compared with other CEXs that have launched similar features, what features and advantages does your product have to attract users and traders to participate?
Willy: When we were making products, we didnât want to copy other competitors, because in terms of resources, scale, and brand, we would not be more advantageous than the current centralized exchanges and other large platforms. Therefore, when looking for differentiation, we looked at the pain points of users. SocialTrading is a two-sided platform, with copycats and order takers. We found a big pain point on the order taker side. In fact, many traders have very good trading capabilities, but when they are order takers, they feel a lot of pressure in their hearts, because they are expected to have a good PNL and a good sharp ratio 24*7, and reduce their maximum drawdown, regardless of whether the market is good or bad. Everyone expects him to be needed, and you must perform well! This puts a lot of pressure on the order taker. As a result, good traders in the market are unwilling to take orders, so only those who are more willing to "show off" can take orders.
The second pain point comes from the followers. The vision of our platform is that we hope to provide traders with all the tools that can improve their winning rate. On some platforms, the lead trader is long or short, and the followers can only follow suit, without any choice. So based on this pain point, we built the "reverse copy" function.
We believe that reverse copying does not necessarily lead to a very large trading volume. But just like a nuclear weapon, it has a deterrent effect, and it has a great impact on the psychology of the people who copy and lead the order. For example, the follower now knows that I just follow my own transactions, and if I donât do well, you can reverse copy. Then the lead does not need to be under pressure 24*7 to have a good performance. Then the follower can also target the market environment, such as interest rate cuts and elections, and can follow the market environment and judge according to my basis for this lead. So we found this user pain point and then made this product, and it must be very differentiated. So far, the feedback is very good.
PANews: As you mentioned, many exchanges also have similar products. What do you think is your competitive advantage? What is the difference between SocialTrading and Copy trading?
Willy: I think the first point is our reverse copying capability that I just shared. This is definitely our biggest difference from all other major trading platforms. The second is that we have risk control. For example, when following orders, users can choose each of their different positions to adjust. They may like the BTC Long of the order-leader, but not his memecoin transaction. Then the user can adjust it by himself. Then we can set StopLoss, which can help the follower to control their own risks and avoid extreme fluctuations if the user wants to reduce fluctuations.
The third is that we have a profit sharing mechanism. Some platforms seem to make a lot of money for a certain person who leads an order at the moment, but the money is shared after this stage. Our strategy is to compare the last PNL of the person who leads an order with the next one, and we will take a value and then share the profit. This ensures that the person who follows the order will not make a lot of money and share it in the last second, but the strategy may lose money in the next second, so we will make this profit sharing mechanism very fair.
The differences between Social Trading and Copy Trading are quite subtle. This is how I understand it. Copy Trading is simply following orders, while social trading is a group of people completing a goal, which happens in the community. It can actually become a social game. It seems that during the GameStop incident during the epidemic, many young people believed in Roaring Kitten and followed his positions to buy. They were willing to make money with him, and were also willing to lose money with him, although it was not necessarily a good thing. Social trading must have a social element. This element is in addition to the rational analysis of the market and the market, and there are some irrational elements for traders, such as targeting KOLs or order takers, but it does not necessarily mean that they will make money or lose money, but this still needs to be practiced in the future.
PANews: We noticed that WOO locked about 20% of the WOO token supply in the treasury some time ago. What is the reason? What do you think of the current situation where the token inflation cycle cannot match the project development?
Willy: There are many new coins in the market now with high full circulation market value, low circulation rate, and high selling pressure, and there are many VC projects. WOO has never had this problem because we started earlier, 3 and a half years ago. We think the market is polarized now. The left side may be meme, but it is best if meme has nothing to do with fundamentals. The right side may have fundamentals, income, and a healthy token economic model, a stable team, and great room for future growth. We hope to stand on the side with fundamentals. So when we saw this, we felt that we needed to make some fine-tuning to the economic model. The first is that we hope to reduce the inflation rate again. In 2025, inflation will basically be less than 4%. Secondly, we hope to let the community see our instructions. We put a lot of tokens in our wallets. In fact, we have set up several smart contracts. Only when the FDV reaches a certain level will these tokens be issued. So we also need to tell the community that our goal is to go in that direction.
Then how to go there, such as the fundamentals and income I just mentioned, so this is the original intention of us saying we want to do this, and we also want everyone to know that we are a project that pays great attention to fundamentals.
PANews: In addition to the adjustment of the economic model, what measures has WOO implemented to address the current liquidity difficulties in the crypto market?
Willy: In terms of liquidity, we have more than half of the top 15 MMs. We have a DMM Program on WOOX. There are no major problems with large currencies, small currencies, and contracts, but I think it is not perfect. In my mind, I give myself about 80 points. On WOOFi, we have made a lot of technical optimizations in liquidity. For example, SPMM supports multiple chains. WOOFiPRO has in-depth cooperation with Orderly. Orderly's liquidity and technical facilities are excellent, and we rely on them to provide better services.
In the final analysis, I think that social trading can bring better growth to our liquidity. To be honest, the flow of social trading is still good for market makers. This is the direction and curve that I think liquidity will develop.
PANews: Which areas of development do you think will be promising in the future? What will be WOOâs business focus and development direction?
Willy: I personally think there are three tracks: DeFi, AI, and Social. Needless to say, DeFi is what we are doing. I think the biggest benefit of AI is not to hype its concept or have new tokens. I think AI can make Crypto easier. It is too difficult to get started now. The threshold is a bit high when you talk to someone outside the industry about DeFi. But the most important thing about Crypto being able to combine with AI is how to make things easier. We have made it as easy as possible for getting started, trading, cross-chain, standards for different assets, and so on.
There may be a strong debate here. I have said before that there will be a strong debate. To do AI well, many things are centralized, so we will face a debate on whether AI is centralized or decentralized. I think AI can provide us with the next possible growth point in the future.
Social I think the current Web2 social networking is already very good. It is meaningless to do it again with Web3, even if SocialFi is added. I think the form of social interaction has evolved from human-to-human interaction to human-to-computer interaction to machine-to-machine interaction. This machine-to-machine interaction is somewhat related to AI. A person will have many agents of his own in the future. Now web2 has projects like character AI. But in the end, I found that the churn rate of this companion AI was particularly high, because I donât think there is a very clear positive feedback to users.
I think the next step is that agents will have their own wallets and their own transaction capabilities, for example, they will have their own missions in a blockchain environment. A person can have many AI agents, and these agents will interact with other AI agents, and then there will be a lot of positive feedback or negative feedback. At that time, there will be social situations in the interaction between AI and AI. For example, I donât necessarily have to deal with you only in terms of money, but there may be other things that we can accomplish for a common goal, and it will become a community.
I think the next generation of social networking may be based on this. It is not about swiping pictures or watching videos now, but more about machine interaction, and then the new social form that will be generated will have financial feedback and some social feedback. This is my personal imagination.
PANews: What is WOO's next plan? What do you think of the future market trend? When do you think the market turning point will appear?
Willy: We will continue to make social trading more thorough and in-depth. Then we will improve the DeFi trading experience, onboarding experience, and more cross-chain capabilities. Finally, we will reuse AI capabilities in our trading products, make DeFi simpler, and use AI to form market intelligence and provide data to traders. These have already begun, and we will see some products soon.
The market is the most difficult. I really canât say the trend, because if I know, it would be really amazing. But there is something we are paying attention to. We think whether the market is good or bad, especially in crypto, ultimately depends on technological innovation. If we donât see continuous technological innovation and innovation in product experience, then I donât think the market will be too good. If we can find technological innovation and innovation in experience, then I think the market will grow higher. We are actually very concerned about this matter. If there is, I will be very bullish. But now I think there is a good thing in the market, which is the so-called "homogeneous competition", which will force everyone to differentiate and optimize. If there is technological and experience innovation. I think we can see growth, and ultimately the most important thing is the fundamentals.
