In honor of newsteem, I wanted to try something new: posting unique content to Steem that could have been sold to magazines or websites for money. I want to show authors that they can gain more by posting to Steem because they can earn a stake in this undervalued protocol, and build a loyal community at the same time.

That’s why today I am happy to bring you this exclusive interview with the Chief Operating Officer of OKEx, Andy Cheung, from their recent Summit. OKEx offers a STEEM trading pair and is one of the top Chinese exchanges in terms of real volume.

This article was never posted anywhere before, even on my crypto blog and is fully exclusive to Steem/Steemit. If anyone wants to copy or mention it, it should add Steemit link to this post.

Tell us who you are and what do you do in OKEx?

I’m Andy Cheung, Head of Operations of OKEx. I’m based out of Hong Kong, OKEx headquarter is based here in Malta. We have a small team here in Malta.
I pretty much run the entire operations across international market. Marketing, PR, so everything about sales.

OK. And how long are you in cryptocurrency?

A little more than three years.

So what’s your background from before?

My background is more on the technology side. So, I started my own business related to internet businesses. With experience working for Alibaba and my internet-related businesses, I have extensive experience in E-commerce.
Moving on from Alibaba, I also started again with setting up an e-commerce website in Hong-Kong. Later we successfully sold it to Groupon in the US and stayed for another few years.
We didn’t stop there, I also did pitch door marketing, prop tech, so pretty much everything about internet.
So then I came across blockchain technology, and people talking about Bitcoin.
This interested me a lot and I am glad to have a chance speaking to the founding team of OKEx, after the chat, I started my OKEx journey three years ago.
Then we started expanding, not just in the Asian market but in different regions such as Europe, Latin America, Africa…

I’ve noticed when one of your colleagues was having presentation on the summit that he showed a map that you have not only OKEx China, but also Korea, that I knew before. But I saw that you also have the India branch, Netherlands and Poland. So I wanted to hear more about your expansion to Europe..

Yes, so we started from Malta as the European hub, and we also expand to UK from here. We also have people in France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia. In many countries we have for big corporate clients and we are always pleased to welcome any people who are interested in cryptocurrency.

What’s your plan with your own top-end OKB. I mean, it’s in the news already but what are your future plans for the token and its usage?

OKB has been used for more than one year already. We are always committed to bringing in innovation and we’ve been looking into using the OKB to do payments in shops.
Like, I was talking to a big merchant just now, that people can use and apply OKB, maybe a chain of a restaurant or grocery shopping, maybe not everywhere but certain countries with guideline and framework. Each country serves with different demands and we are to cater in different ways, so let’s say in Latin America. Countries like Venezuela and Argentina, pretty much everyone has crypto in Venezuela and are actually using it. On the other hand in Argentina, the situation is totally different even just with short distance. They might not be fully aware how crypto can help with their currency fluctuation. I would say, even daily there could be a 50% difference. So those guys need crypto.
And we go in to educate them. So that’s how we use it. By using the OKB we can do education, applications, that’s our plan.

Alright. And you are big in perpetual markets futures, right? So what’s the plan of expansion. Are you planning to put bigger leverage or add options ?

We are at a top position in terms of derivatives market. There are lots of products within derivatives and futures trading is just one of them.
We are constantly looking into developing different kind of products, especially for derivatives. Trades are usually very familiar in trading spot on our platform and derivatives traders are usually more professional, with that said, it is essential for us to keep looking into our existing offerings to keep enhancing, at the same time to bring new elements to the party.

And futures are now getting really popular, so…

But right now, there are only two or three key players in the world.

Yeah, exactly. The banks and corporate investors join the party with futures, because this is for them, the big players like futures.

Because they believe it’s comfortable. I would say yes, I’ll agree but it’s not easy to operate such a platform. I mean your technology at back end must be very good and supportive. Your team must monitor, like surveillance 24 hours to minimize claw-back. Any one single trader could manually play the market. So we have to be on top of this. To make sure that nobody can come to the platform and try to crash the market or whatever.

On the summit we learned about OkDEX. Tell us more about plans for it.

We announced this and we are working hard on this. The plan would be by the end of the year. We’ve been planning this for quite some time. So even we stated here, we were scheduled to launch in this year. But you never know given this ever-changing market environment, opportunities and challenges arise every minute, like Libra, being the talk of the town but people started to move on from such topic. Anyways, we will keep developing OKDex, and maybe there would be new things in between as well. Let’s say the ICO then became the IEO. So new things come up, and we are always welcome to embrace.

Okay, because when the crypto started, you didn’t need KYC or AML, you just registered anywhere and trade, right? And now almost all exchanges need KYC. So maybe DEX’es are the thing that will take us back where this all started. So possibly they are stil the initial way crypto was created ?

Yeah, things always change in this market, right? So we must sustain our top position and adjust our strategy accordingly to fit the market. Therefore, we have the OKDEX plan and be ready to create a wave in the market.

Thanks for the Chat!

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