Author: Wu said blockchain
Whether in the Internet industry or the cryptocurrency field, there seem to be few truly core female founders. The traditional concept of taking on family responsibilities and the low participation in STEM education may be the reasons. Rachel is the founder of the on-chain derivatives project SynFutures. She introduced us to the current progress of the project, her thoughts on the cryptocurrency industry, and her suggestions for East Asian female entrepreneurs. She believes that the most important thing is to abandon the mentality of "fear of being a weak person".
Q: Introduce yourself and how to enter the blockchain industry
I have a background in financial engineering. After graduation, I joined the traditional international investment bank Deutsche Bank to do derivatives sales and trading. Later, I studied blockchain in the Ant Financial system. I was amazed after reading the Bitcoin white paper. I went to the slums in Southeast Asia with my team to do blockchain remittances and promoted the construction of the first version of the blockchain platform.
After joining Bitmain in 2018, I participated in the establishment of Matrixport. Because I have always been interested in DeFi, I founded SynFutures in early 2021. It is the first decentralized derivatives platform with open trading pairs and the first to integrate the full-chain matching order book. It has long been ranked among the top three in Perp DEX trading volume and has received support from investors including Pantera, Polychain, Dragonfly, SIG and others.
Q: What do you think of Tokens and Tokenomics?
Yes, although we will push for further decentralization at the right time, tokens are not the goal.
Airdrops and liquidity mining are not free, they are a kind of marketing cost, similar to taxi subsidies, but products cannot rely solely on subsidies to attract users. It still depends on whether the product can support the real needs of large-scale users after excluding this incentive. Previously, we have been polishing products and increasing users.
Q: What is the real user demand for Web3 and DeFi?
It is true that many of the current active users of Web3 are “freeloaders”, but in addition to incentives, the real demand that needs to be met is sustainability.
The problem is that decentralized products cannot catch up with centralized ones in terms of user experience. Why do people still come? We have observed that the current effective demand for Web3, especially DeFi, comes from:
(1) Arbitrage. Just like the price difference between the domestic and overseas foreign exchange markets, on-chain finance is currently like the offshore market of centralized exchanges. Therefore, on the one hand, we improve the capital efficiency of the AMM model to make liquidity deep enough, and on the other hand, we insist on the independent pricing power of the platform and do not use external Oracle as the transaction price. We have observed many spontaneous arbitrage transactions.
(2) Unique assets. In the early days of Amazon and Taobao, you had to register, bind your card, wait for delivery, and then the page would fail. The experience was very poor. Why did people tolerate it? It was because you could buy things on the platform that were not available in the supermarket downstairs. Assets are the key to platform development. Therefore, our model also provides a single currency on perp. Unique asset pairs such as popular memes and LST give us a lot of traffic.
(3) Open interaction of the digital ecosystem. With the development of AI, the rise of the digital economy will further drive demand. We can now see that as long as you have the private key, you can make a transaction across the entire blockchain ecosystem, including DeFi, social networking, games, etc.
In fact, it is not that DeFi lacks large-scale applications, but that the digital economy has yet to develop on a large scale, but AI will accelerate this process. The digital world is the "real economy" of decentralized finance. If the economy is not well developed, finance will be difficult to implement. However, the development of AI will accelerate the development of the digital economy. First, the creation of the digital world does not require full manual labor but AI, and the speed of development will be greatly improved; second, with the emergence of AI agents, machines will operate on our behalf across different fields. With open demand and service supply, open, transparent, and programmable finance will be required.
Q: Having gone through several bull and bear cycles in the market since 2020, what are your experiences in sticking to building?
Our style can be described as "realistic idealism". As for the ideal part, perhaps it is precisely because we understand traditional finance that we believe from the bottom of our hearts that blockchain can reshape the entire financial system. And for the first time in our lives, we feel that we have the opportunity to leave our own mark in the tide of history and become the world's number one in the field, which is very exciting.
The second reality is that in a fast-growing industry, there is always a chance to survive. The simple formula is cash flow income + capital market financing - operating expenses.
Cash income: Do technology companies really just rely on "burning money"? Actually not. Most successful companies have found a sustainable business model in the early stage. For example, Facebook's advertising business has driven the company to take off. The developer of "Black Goku", which is very popular in the gaming industry recently, also made a profitable mobile game before focusing on 3A and earning no income. The derivatives trading we are involved in may be one of the most realistic business models in the entire Web3.
Capital market financing: My deep feeling is that our industry financing needs to keep up with the macro market trend. It is a matter of preparation rather than something that we have to do as a last resort.
Operating expenses: One thing that is easily overlooked and causes unexpected expenses is the security of financial funds. We strictly manage funds in multiple cold storages, multiple banks, multiple centralized service providers, and according to liquidity needs, so we have never suffered losses during the turmoil over the years.
Q: Were there any difficult choices during the product development process?
Yes, we have created a fully-chain derivative DEX, which is different from the current model of most perp DEXs that have their own chain and centralized matching.
We once had a heated debate internally. After all, derivatives have high performance requirements. Should we first build a stand-alone chain or a computer room chain to provide a better trading experience? Now I am particularly glad that I did not choose to completely copy the centralized route.
One is to run a separate DEX on a single chain. In essence, it is no different from a centralized exchange. Its competitors are powerful Binance, Bybit, etc. However, if it is just like CeFi and the user experience is difficult to compare with CeFi, it can only acquire customers for its own "chain" and exchange through unsustainable subsidies and short expectations.
Second, we have taken a differentiated route from competitors and centralized exchanges. While providing a centralized model comparable to capital efficiency, we can go to any public chain and sign contracts with any asset currency. We can integrate the project dividends of various public chains + ecological partners, so that as long as the industry is developing, the SynFutures model can continue to develop.
Q: You are one of the few Chinese projects that has received investment from first-tier investors in the East and the West. What do you think of the different web3 financing environments in the East and the West? There is criticism that many Eastern investors are relatively short-sighted?
First of all, there are many excellent institutions in the East, and investors’ long-term and short-term perspectives have nothing to do with the East or the West. It is essentially determined by the underlying capital structure and the maturity of the capital market.
Many Western funds take a longer-term view because (1) they have a large amount of long-term funds, such as university endowment funds, pension funds, mutual funds, etc. (2) they have a long-term and stable exit mechanism, including IPOs and active mergers and acquisitions of large companies. Everyone is used to making money in the long term.
Whether in the long or short term, venture capital is one of the most meaningful sectors in the financial sector and even in the whole society. If you look at the high and low development periods in world history, the correlation of political forms is not as great as everyone thinks. The gap between the rich and the poor and the solidification of classes are the main reasons for social stagnation. Venture capital is one of the few ways to break this solidification, allowing talented people who lack resources to get a chance to break through and move forward.
Q: As a female CEO, what are your experiences in building a team? What advice do you have for female practitioners?
SynFutures has one of the best Web3 teams in Asia that I know of, including top mathematical cryptography PhDs and senior engineers, investment banking and finance experts, and former public chain market operation talents of major institutions. But no matter who they are, I pay special attention to one question during the interview: whether everyone has faith in the blockchain industry from the bottom of their hearts and the desire to make a career. More than 30% of the SynFutures team are women, including core engineers, product managers, business personnel, etc. A prominent advantage of female CEOs may be that they can better coordinate teams with different backgrounds and firmly establish a common direction.
I think it is important for East Asian women in particular not to be "weak-fearing." This is how a Japanese socialist scholar Chizuko Ueno described it. Women, especially elite East Asian women, are particularly prone to being "weak-fearing": I am an elite, I am not a weak person, and I "determine my own path." So when something goes wrong, women will be sensitive and think it is their own fault, and that they can control it if they work hard. If others don't like me, it is my problem, and I have to please them. But "nothing is more far away from feminism than "self-determination."
If there is some truth in it, of course we can learn from it, but we have to see that many problems may be macro problems or other people’s problems. Only in this way can we know that “I” am good enough, “I” deserve to strive for better, and I want to “take a step forward”.
