Hong Fang, CEO of Okcoin, maintains her target of $100k Bitcoin by year-end. Speaking to David Lin, anchor for Kitco News, Fang said that the adoption rate of Bitcoin has steadily increased, and the price is bouncing back from its consolidating period.
The upcoming future blockchain summit coverage is brought to you by cook finance or revolution in data asset management. We're speaking with Hong Fang CEO of okay. Coin one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. Huh? Welcome back. Great to be back. Great to have you back now. Okay. Cohen has a number of new listings and offerings that are very exciting.
We'll talk about that today. First, let's talk about the, uh, crypto markets Bitcoin, as we speak today, it's up 9%. So huge jump for cryptocurrencies all across the board. It's had a bit of a pullback earlier in the summer, but it's rebounded since then. Bitcoin has actually, uh, recovered all his losses.
Since I would say July. Um, if you hear him has not though. So I want to ask you about, uh, sort of the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of, in terms of their performance in the past, whenever we had a bull cycle in Bitcoin, Ethereum tends to outperform, hasn't been doing that this summer.
Why do you think that is? Yeah. Uh, so I'll give you a, what I think, uh, I think this again is going back to the fundamentals. Uh, there are two sides of the story on the one side. Um, the Bitcoin, uh, evolution perspective. We see that, uh, over the last six months, it has been in a quote unquote, a pool backward consolidation mode from a price perspective.
Uh, but if you look deeper into the ecosystem, there are actually a lot of positive things going on for Bitcoin. There is further the risking for the network. Uh, if you think about the minor asset, uh, accidents from China, Uh, which send a huge wave of shock, uh, through Bitcoin ecosystem and further to the whole crypto world, uh, in, uh, earlier this year around may ish, I believe.
Oh, April. Uh, that seems to have been over the Bitcoin network has recovered from that hash rate actually got back to almost the, uh, all time high without any third party intervening. It, it just naturally go back that shows the reasoning of the network. And then also you see recently there are a lot of regulatory, uh, uncertainty around the crypto space, but Bitcoin is the only, uh, almost quote unquote.
Quite out there that is, uh, there's not much, uh, regulatory concern or uncertainty, at least in us, uh, fed both fed and came out recently saying that they're not going to ban they coin and is truly descent decentralized. So from that perspective, I think that level of de-risking for Bitcoin continues over the last, uh, five months, very quietly in the background, which is playing with strength.
The other side of the story for Bitcoin is that there also. Further, uh, development of that. It's a value proposition as well. In the background, we talked about the coin as a store of value playing out in 2020, and that continues to play out this year. Right? When you see the money. Pelosi, uh, continues with various jurisdictions.
You see the macro economy and the price actually increases, uh, in U S as well. People start to feel it, so that still holds at the same time. There's also a, um, money, uh, opposition developing for Bitcoin. When you see the first, uh, sovereign adoption by El Salvador, which followed by a couple of other countries and most recently, including.
That is interesting because that basically opens the door for the much anticipated usage of Bitcoin as the real money as the unit of account. Exchange medium of exchange happening. And then on the technological side, in that same sense, lightening network is actually scaling very nicely over the last year since, uh, since, uh, starting in 2021.
So there are a couple of technical, um, KPIs you want to look at, uh, for lightning. Uh, you look at the number of nodes. You look at the number of channels and you will also look at the capacity in the. Uh, all those, uh, three metrics, the number of nodes, uh, almost doubled since January, 2021. The number of, uh, channels also almost doubled, uh, actually more than double, uh, this year.
And then the capacity, uh, in, uh, channels, uh, reaches about 3000 BDC. Most recently that is, I think, three times increase in this year, so that speak to the exponential growth of the lightning network as the potential. Uh, a competitor will alternative to visa, MasterCard, all the legacy payment, uh, system that is being built on top of the settlement network, which is the big one.
I think the platform could compete. Yeah. The platform definitely could compete with visa, but we'll still need higher adoption rates of Bitcoin. Not everybody has Bitcoin ready to use for their credit purchases. Yeah, but we're seeing that playing out for Bitcoin and that's why we're seeing it recovering.
Uh, most recently then on the other side side, when we look at the theory, uh, uh, the trading unit generally has been between, uh, so one is Yurman is generally between 0.1 to 0.3. Uh, the coin, uh, between two end of 2013 to, uh, uh, I would say, uh, March. Uh, and then when you look at the, uh, after March, uh, this year, uh, if your room's started to pick up, uh, in its exchange rate to Bitcoin, sorry, I shouldn't be saying two point.
Wine is 0.01 to your point. And now it's, uh, last six months it's between 0.0. Uh, I want to say five to 0.07, and that was mostly driven by the, uh, Uh, uh, rise and NFT rights, which a lot of what happens on Ethereum, but to back to your point of why, uh, over the last month, if you haven't seem to be underperforming the coin on the one hand, you see the coin coming out of that quote unquote consolidation period, because of all the fundamental positive trends, uh, On the other hand for theorem, uh, is your M in 2017, 18, and even 19 up to summer of 2020, that has been the only smart contract platform.
But, uh, starting from the end of last year to this year, there have been a couple of emerging alternatives to Ethereum by including ever launch, including polygon, including Solana, which is kind of new, any even including Stax, which is a, basically a smart contract build on top of the coin. So there are alternatives now and they're actually solid alternatives.
And then also regulatory uncertainties, a little bit higher, uh, for, for, uh, Ethereum, uh, compared to. So I think there is that playing out as well. So, so that competitive landscape and the regulatory uncertainty is playing out. When you think about the corn, there's really no alternative. That's the global.
Uh, money network or huge network Curium faces more competition than, than Bitcoin in their use cases. Okay. That makes sense. So this is a chart that illustrates your point here. I've rebased the two series to a hundred starting from exactly a year ago, Hong. So you can see the. Uh, since 12 months ago, if your name has still greatly outperformed Bitcoin.
Um, interestingly, like I pointed out earlier, uh, in, see the blue line BTC has recovered from most of its losses early in the summer, Ethereum is still not, uh, has not yet peaked its uh, or breached is August highs. So if someone were to say to you, well I think if theory is going to flip Bitcoin in terms of marketing.
Uh, are you seeing data to support that conclusion? Are you seeing trading volume for Ethereum higher on let's say, okay. Coin for example. Uh, I don't think that's totally impossible, but over the longterm, I, I, my personal view is that I have a clearer, uh, I see a clearer path forward for Bitcoin as well.
Uh, if you're in, there's a lot of upside with your room too, and for all the other alternative, uh, alternatives to Ethereum, uh, and, and particularly when you see game-ify, uh, coming up as a real interesting use case, a metaverse, I think it's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out. So I think there are possibilities out there.
Um, but, but we'll see. I have to ask you before we move on to okay. Coin, because Bitcoin is having a fantastic run in the last couple of days. Do you still think a hundred thousand dollars as possible this year? Uh, I hope my position. Yeah, by the way, I'm a boring modeler, so I don't trade. I don't target specific timeframe, but I'm.
Uh, it's yeah, let's talk about the psychology. It's very tempting to trade cryptos because you see these big volatile swinging and you think I got to do something right now, but you could just huddle, right? Tell us you've got some, uh, tell us about, okay. Coins, uh, uh, products, your earned products, because somebody could just leave it there.
And if you are long-term bullish, assuming your long-term bullish thesis is correct. People can just leave it there, like a bank account and earn interest on their products. Tell us about. Yeah. So I, I do think people are complicated. Uh, people probably have different portfolio and some allocation is probably for huddling and some are probably for trading and some are for investing in different, have different people have different mix, no not platform.
You can do anything you want. You can trade, you can Hoddle. You can invest. You can also participate in the future. Hopefully we can offer more optionality for that. The F on the earn out earn is directly connected with. Protocols out there. We don't, we don't touch your money. Uh, it's basically offering different protocol holes that you can actually both through us and go directly into them and yield whatever market yield is out there.
Um, and, uh, some of the popular, uh, offerings are stacks and recent, uh, recently listed Miami. We also have a backs. We have a couple of others, including compound and, and, uh, uh, urine. Um, so, uh, that product is quite popular. People like it. Um, it's always good to give people optionality, right? That's very, depending on the price is very market driven.
We don't know what they would be. It's really very much, uh, very by political and within each protocol. Each product, they, uh, it varies on a daily basis. I see, and just in the price, I've heard from several analysts who are more technical in nature. They, they tell me that, uh, if you, if you consider previous price cycles of Bitcoin, 2013 and 2017, each of these cycles have seen Bitcoin rise to a top, uh, hit a double bottom and then fall down.
And then Flay flat for years are saying, well, this could happen again. I mean, it could, it also could not, but basically they're drawing parallels to previous price cycles. Do you have any comments? I tend to think that there are cycles from the coin to just because it's naturally designed as a four year having cycles.
So I think that plays into the supply and demand a story. The other side of things is I think the adoption mainstream adoption, that Bitcoin either a store of value, whereas money as the kind of a cheap exchange takes time. It comes in waves, right? Also mentally, psychologically, we are not rational animal.
We are emotional. So we tend to get over excited about some things. And then once we see that we are overexcited, we tend to pull back and we'll download that. So there's just natural cycles. Uh, so yeah, I tend to believe that there are cycles and, and coin probably there. If you zoom out a little bit more, if history tells us anything closer to truth, then it's probably a four year.
Four-year cycle, but a hundred thousand first before it collapses. Right.
But again, I'm not betting on. That's true. That's true. All right. Let's talk about, okay. Coins, newest offerings, Miami coin, the only exchange where we can buy Miami coin. What is Miami Quinn first and foremost. And why did you decide to pick up on this project? Um, Miami quinine is a project built on stacks.
It's driven by a community who really believes. Uh, it's a extreme experiment like this that can give the citizen, uh, in a city, a tool for participating in a policymaking. It's a civic exchanged, uh, alternative. We, uh, we really like it because we think that it's, uh, very much reflecting the ASOS of crypto, the ethos of the coin, letting the community decide and.
Different participants in the ecosystem, uh, act on their own, uh, interest by somehow, uh, hopefully can, uh, help, uh, the policymaker in making the right quality. Uh, because that will reflect, gets reflected in, uh, how many people will be following the coin, how many people will be, uh, which will be reflected in the market price of the coin.
Right. And also on the sideline, the city actually get, uh, uh, a, a portion of the reserve political reserve of Miami. In, uh, in the pool that they can use as a quote unquote income, uh, to, to, to, to fund their activities. So I think it's a very interesting, it's a very interesting community driven project, very, uh, very much a crypto, so, uh, driven and, uh, it's very early stage to be honest.
And we don't know just like in early days of. Probably very few people know what that this will say a success or not. And similarly here, we don't know whether they will succeed or not. It's very much deciding depending on how the community will evolve around it. Uh, and how much more, um, mechanism will be built into that.
Uh, driven all the developers on the community. And this leads to my broader question as to how you pick projects to list there's thousands and thousands of altcoins, obviously not all of them are listed on your exchange. How do you pick coins? Yeah, we do have our own policy process and that is incomplete.
With, uh, the general requirement of a, uh, listing process. I E we don't want to list a security, obviously. So we have, uh, uh, a team that would look at all the kind of projects out there, make decisions on, uh, where to start with based on how we see the, uh, use case of certain project, uh, where we see the community, uh, both the.
Uh, the, uh, user community, as well as the developer community, how valid it is, how active people are, how genuinely people are feeling about the decentralized application of that. And also how decentralized it, that that project is, uh, where, where it is heading to toward. Then we'll put us through a legal and compliance review, uh, that would look at all kinds of aspects, uh, of.
Um, part of it is, is to manage that risk, manage the legal and compliance risks, make sure that it's not a security, but then part of it is also to make sure that we feel that we are supporting a, uh, asset or a crypto community that is truly decentralized in its nature. And then the committee will make a decision based on different inputs, uh, and, and some, some tokens pass some token stoked.
Okay. Interesting. And you're expanding your, uh, For print on gamify. Tell us about that. We are, we are, uh, I think this is something that is very interesting on you in 2021, and we are keeping a very close eye on it. I think we talked about this briefly. Maybe when we talk about the overall crypto space, I always see this as a development by stages.
Right? At first you see the monetary layer, uh, forming. Shape, which is the coin. And then, uh, right on top of the UC financial system, a decentralized financial system are taking shape, which is defined that we started to see end of last year. And then, uh, what is the, the critical next step is really developing use case, developing real utility, uh, on top of all of those two, two fundamental layers.
Uh, only in that way, we don't end up having a financial system playing with itself that you actually have real use cases. And I think for NFT, it started as almost like the art collectible, right. And digital art collectible, where artists can actually help, uh, Get their own value ascribed, uh, and, and, and that can be easily, uh, um, transmitted one to, uh, uh, peer to peer digital globally.
But I think that's only a starting point and I think that, uh, just like real life collectible, it's going to be a very niche market. That's my personal understanding. Uh, however, when it comes to game fly and NFT application in game five, Brings up a whole new world of possibility where you actually can have a virtual reality.
And, uh, and, and there's our, uh, native, uh, um, tokens governance tokens that people can use and can carry from game to game, you know, in, in V in original game. Uh, the, one of the challenges that distribution of a game is, could not control it by a game creator. And some of those tokens in different games cannot be carried, uh, between games, but in, uh, in, in game fine.
Now the crypto enabled game finance ETF that is possible. Uh, so I think that is going to be really interesting. Uh, we started to see a real use case being developed now on defense market and, uh, Solana, if the. I just want to say, uh, that I was born in the wrong decade. If I was 10, 15 years younger, I will be earning cryptos, playing video games.
And then my mother would probably let me play games more than she did before. But, uh, I want to ask you about the mechanics on how that way it's not too late. Maybe my parents would finally be proud of me. It's a combination game, fight the combination of defy and NFTs. Okay. Can you tell us about the mechanics of how this works?
Because you could presumably. Play video games. Like I explained, earn passive income, doing that. How does. Yeah. Uh, look, we, we actually have a access listed on our platform and that is the first one. Uh, and I know that it's actually a, a pretty pricey to enter. I think it's a kind of a hun a hundred bucks or a thousand buses getting into the game.
But once you were in the game, you can actually use that as a govern. Uh, and to make votes for the, for the games and also use it to buy, uh, different, uh, pieces in the game. Right. And, and, and there are different pieces of different value and that can be actually a sold it to another individual. So I think that they definitely increases the fungibility of the, of the total.
And also it carries the token itself, becomes its own distribution channel. It's amazing how quick access has been exited. Infinity has been able to, to increase the game itself has been able to, uh, grow its, uh, user base. It's only two years old game and now it's like 2 million. Yeah. Reasonably had a valuation round as well.
I think at three, two to 3 billion by 16 Z. So that tells you the ability for a token economy, economics to actually disrupt, or the original business model of a, a, of the gaming industry. Uh, basically the token itself because of its pies. It carries as a distribution, uh, Don't don't you see exchanges like yourself, potentially partnering with game studios down the line, making a game that will include some, uh, some aspects of, uh, of NFTs that, that people can actually, you know, trade on and earn the direction we are exploring.
We're a huge fan of interoperability and we believe that, uh, yes, we, we are, uh, historically, uh, a quote-unquote. But we'd like to think ourselves as a platform, as a place where people actually come, they can either buy and hold and, uh, crypto assets, uh, earn crypto assets where they use it to participate in what they want to participate in.
And there's a possibility of working with, uh, different game projects, uh, to allow them to use the token. They buy it on our platform and easily get into the games to do those activities is something that we are exploring actively. People have told me about the metaverse, it's a, it's an idea where our lives are more intertwined, where it become more intertwined with virtual reality.
So instead of getting up to go to work, we just stay home and we work virtually in, in virtual reality to talk and to talk to me about different possible currencies for this metaverse what do you think those currencies will be in digital form of the dollar? Could they be NFTs? Could they be another virtual in game currency that we haven't seen yet?
I think, uh, it can be different things. I think, uh, either in call it NFL teams or, uh, uh, game currencies or other digital currencies, it's really a token that you use in a certain quote unquote economy, um, to interact with other people. Right. Uh, and, uh, historical. When we talk about economy, that economy is politically defined.
I think what we're seeing as the possibilities that with crypto, that economy is not no longer defined confined by political realms, but more by people's interest by people's, uh, activities. And I am a firm believer in interoperability. I think ultimately, uh, all these different, uh, smart chain contracts, uh, platform.
Where all the different use cases are going to build on. We need to have a opera, uh, interoperability between these chains and also between these chains and, uh, the coin so that everything ultimately can anchor to the only, uh, global internet native money, which has Bitcoin. Uh, but in those economies, um, the quote unquote money of that economy is probably a no.
Yeah, that makes sense. Finally, let's talk about a new initiative that you're launching streaming. So you're, you're moving into more of the media side. You're going to be live streaming, um, every Friday at noon, starting on October 8th. Tell us about this initiative. Why you're, why are you doing this? And some of the, some of the guests you plan to have.
Sure. Yeah, no, we're not getting into the media business, David. We don't have that. It's more, I think it's more a way for us to interact with our community, with the customer. And, uh, and one thing that we realized is that, uh, in the crypto space, it's very important to. Uh, um, keep that educational piece and, and fun element there.
Um, and that level of community interaction is very important. Um, so we have a recent initiative to start a, uh, quote-unquote a live stream show called opaque Hawaiian life that comes on every Friday at noon Pacific time. Uh, we are actually going to have, uh, some very, uh, Prominent guests on, uh, including there, Sarah was from Miami, including the founder of doge and including doc doctor, professor who I believe you have met before.
Yes. You've been on a panel with them on Keiko. So great. I'm looking forward to watching this, uh, will they be well, we'll put the link down below for people who want to access this. So, uh, we'll put that in the video description, Hong, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Great thoughts as always.
Thank you. And good luck on your new initiatives. And thank you for watching kiszko news. I'm David Lin, the upcoming future blockchain summit coverage is brought to you by cook finance, a revolution and defy asset management. .