Digital Assets in Asia: Corporate Treasury and Investment Trends | by Cointelegraph Consulting

Hello and welcome everyone to our webinar. Digital Assets in Asia, Corporate treasury and Investment Trends. I'm your moderator, Rishiram Chandani. I'm leading the charge here with BlockFi's Asia expansion and I want to start by thanking everyone in the audience for taking the time to listen in. We have a range of people dialing into this webinar from all over the world ranging from high net worth individuals, institutional investors, family offices and leaders in the financial industry. For the audience, I encourage you to please feel free to submit your questions throughout the webinar. There's a zoom Q and A at the bottom of your screen. So we already have a handful of questions that have come in by email over the last couple of days that I'll be throwing in there. And yeah, we have an amazing group of panelists here. We have Mark Robinson, the COO of SBI Digital Asset Group, Digital Asset Holdings, Ran Yee, the COO of WU Trade and Kronos Research and and Ben Zhu, the co founder and CEO of bybit. We're all very excited to discuss the investment trends that everyone here is seeing at an institutional level, specifically in Asia and dive into the corporate adoption of Bitcoin as a Treasury reserve. So I'd love to start by giving everyone on the panel the opportunity to introduce yourself to the audience. It'd be great if we hear a little bit of background on yourself, how you got into crypto and in the current firm that you're at now. So maybe we could start with Ben.

Hi everyone, this is Ben. I'm the co founder and CEO of bybit. We are a crypto derivative exchange. It's a pleasure to be on today's panel. Although the topic might be a little bit not in my familiar space, but I can obviously comment from a industrial person perspective. My background, I was running a crypto, not crypto, forex Exchange for about eight years before starting up Bybit in 2018 and got into the crypto space and really see the potential in the future of Bitcoin and the technology. And that's why I decided to come in and set up Bybit. So we are focused on the derivatives track. Glad to be here.

Thank you. Why don't we move on to Mark?

Hi guys, nice to meet you. My name's Mark Robinson. I'm the CEO of Digital Asset holdings, part of the SBI Group. We're really focused on the institutional market space globally looking to build a whole ecosystem around the institutional marketplace, particularly focusing on clients such as yourselves today. My background is I'VE been in traditional financial services for over 20 years. Starting off back in the Lehman Brothers days and then building out quantitative foreign brokerage for Nomura, moving over to JP Morgan as well and then getting into getting in on the SBI side, focusing on the traditional exchange business, the looking at the market microstructure. Then SBI started getting very heavily involved into fintechs and digital assets in general. And so I helped establish our retail crypto exchange here in Japan and then for the last two years we've been really expanding our business model out. So now we're responsible for all of the disrasada initiatives for the SBI Group globally. Very nice to meet you all.

Great.

And lastly Ran.

Hi everyone, Glad to be here. I'm Ran from Kronos Research and Wu Trade. Chronos Research is a quantitative trading firm based out here in Asia. We are primarily high frequency traders in the cryptocurrency space though now we have a variety of lower frequency type of strategies. About two years ago, slightly less than two years ago, we created an institutional trading platform called Wu Trade and Wootrade has been in operations for a while now and we have, we're trading spot and leverage spot, aiming to deliver the deepest liquidity at the cheapest cost to institutional traders. A bit of. We have 80 people in total in Asia. And a bit about me, I'm from traditional finance as well. Start off back right before the financial crisis. 06 in fixed income derivatives. So at the epicenter of the disaster. And then moved on to institutional asset management in the States and later on in China and joined the crypto space at the height of 2017 and again experienced that roller coaster. But now we have a trading business and also an institutional trading platform. Glad to be here.

Okay, great.

That's awesome. That's a really good range that we have here. We have Mark representing large corporate, Ran representing large buy side firm and Ben representing one of the largest futures platforms and myself one of the largest lenders in the digital asset space. But all of us with some traditional finance background there. So going off that, let's just drive straight into it. For the first topic I'd love to talk about what have been the key drivers of the increasing institutional attention that the digital asset industry has gotten. And we'd love to hear about what you're seeing globally and specifically what you're seeing over here in Asia. Maybe we could start with Mark.

Sure, no problem. So I think to answer this question, I mean you have to look back over the last few years and really what's been happening in this space, I think now we're entering a period within this broader digital asset world where stability and confidence into the marketplace is starting to gain momentum. Even just up to a few years ago, there was still a lot of discussions around the legitimacy of digital assets as a trading methodology and whether or not it was just a short term trend or whether this industry was actually here for the long term. And I think now you see some of the larger players, some like PayPal for example, has been very vocal about getting into this space. It adds that extra layer of legitimacy into this overall platform. One of the reasons, for example, why sbi has been very aggressive in building out digital asset holdings in Asia is because we're actually getting a lot of demand from institutional clients saying that they want to get more and more into this space. They may not necessarily, necessarily say it as publicly. However, what they do want to do is they want to deal with venues that have a strong reputation behind them, not just necessarily in the digital asset space, but in the traditional asset type space as well. Someone like sbi has. And so when they're trying to convince their internal risk management team and their compliance teams to suddenly start increasing the percentage of their total trading portfolio into digital assets, it's generally an easier conversation to have when they're saying that the counterparty would be someone like sbi versus a shop that's not quite as established as us. But I think we are still very much on that cautious verve. So one area that the industry still does need to be very careful on is the whole security element side of things. I think if you get another big hack coming in into the press, and especially now with digital custody playing more and more of a prominent role in this space, that can quickly change the comfort level that we're slowly seeing being adopted by institutional clients at the moment. So I definitely think we're heading in the right direction and we are seeing more and more momentum. We get inquiries on a regular basis in Asia for what we're looking to build and provide to our clients, but it is still at that very delicate stage right now.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think it's. You're right, it is delicate because I think we're getting more. Well, the thing is we're getting more sophisticated players coming into the space. And what we've seen over here at BlockFi was a while ago we saw a lot of HFT players come in and Ryan, I'd love to hear your view on that. Have you seen a lot of your I guess ex colleagues or your traditional finance competitors start to come into the crypto space. I know you guys early.

Yes, certainly. So one of our co founders, Mark, he came from Citadel and having traded there for 10 plus years, I guess we're considered early. But then we've seen a lot of HFT players come in, whether they're crypto native, you know, like Alameda or the traditional guys. I think guys like Tower and a bunch of the traditional HFTs are trading in crypto in a proprietary way and I think it's very natural. We're more risk takers in its prop and they'll come in and try to generate fractions of basis points trading in the markets. So we see a lot of that and obviously the past year and this year we've seen a lot of changes in the microstructure of markets where you can see some of these more institutional guys come in. And it's not just the HFTs, it's.

The.

CTAs or the larger traders, the arbitragers and such. So we've seen there's a lot of high frequency traders in the market currently and it's a much different environment than what we saw two, three years ago. But obviously liquidity has improved quite a bit. So you know, it's a better trading experience for the average trader because there's so many people making markets in crypto today.

Okay, great. And Ben, I'd love to hear about on the futures side, what are you seeing over there on the institutional, has there been interest, has it, where has it really been coming from for the future side?

Yeah, there has definitely been growing a lot of interest. I think the main driver is obviously number one, bitcoin and digital assets getting more widely accepted. So like Mark said, it's easier to convince the team to try out this area at least I remember when we first launched not too long ago, a lot of institution contact us and they want us to do many things for them including they want to know who is their counterparty, who they're trading with because they need that, that, that, that. But you know, six months, one year passed and somehow they just all came, still came in. And obviously I think we talk to them all the time and we get a lot of institutional requests. Rand work with us very closely, Kronos, you know, Wootrade and all that. So we work with pretty much all the major players because we do have one of the best liquidity for Bitcoin USD pairs. So I guess the most thing attracts them is that the Liquidity is much better than a year, two years ago. And also all the different tools are there. Also the option market is much more sophisticated, much more sufficient. And also you have different tools, bulk orders and all these type of things. So, you know, it's a different saying. And because it's getting more widely adopted, much larger size can be traded. I was also talking to Paradigm, one of the boat order guys and they, you know, they do quite a bit of volume as well and they were telling us how they work with exclusively with institutions. And a lot of these guys are coming in simply because they want to come in before, but the tools, the weapons are not ready. But now it's getting much better. So, so and also the wide adoption and I think the whole Covid is really sort of expedite the consensus on crypto and the general beliefs. I guess we will get into later on today's topic.

Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think one of the things you touched on was the counterparty. Right back a couple of years ago, everyone's asking about the counterparty risk. I think that's one of the biggest things within the digital assets space that a traditional finance especially institution looks at. We definitely get that question a lot and there's ways to address it and the ways to establish yourself better. But I'd love to kind of go off that and Mark, you talk a little bit about the risks, but maybe kind of dive into the risk from an institutional standpoint. But also what are they thinking about before they enter and some of the barriers that we will still see this year and in the next couple of years until the last space can resolve them.

Well, I mean, I'm a firm believer and from our clients that we've been speaking to, in order to get this more broadly adopted within the institutional space, you need to make sure that you're offering it, offering it in a way that isn't too different from your traditional asset types. So one thing that we've been trying very hard to do is to make sure that the onboarding process and procedures and even the protocols used to get connected are standard across the board. And very bread and butter to an IT guy that would actually need to be the guys actually getting connected into our ecosystem. So things like standard, things like fixed connectivity, being able to provide standard market data out to the clients, things like that is it's all very simple things, but doing it in a way that means that the actual implementation effort needed from an institutional client is not so different from if you're connecting to some other third party in the traditional asset class space. I think when you look at all of the players that are out there right now and all of the different opportunities that institutional clients can have access to, I don't think many of them are offering that type of connectivity in an easy adoptable manner. And the thing is, all of us on the core have been in financial services world before. You've still got to fight for those resources to get connected to to something new. So even if you're the trader, even if you're wanting to connect and have access to these assets, you're still fighting for the same IT resources to actually get you connected in the first place or do any particular development changes on your systems that you need to do. So I think that's an area that we still as an industry slowly getting there, but I don't think we're there quite yet.

Got it.

Yeah, I agree with you over there. Let's take a pivot away from this about the risk side. Let's talk about corporate Treasury. So with Tesla and microstrategies making the headlines on the new large purchases of Bitcoin, a question I have maybe for Ran is from the HFT side and others also, how has the corporate adoption of Bitcoin as a Treasury reserve impacted any of the market dynamics and how do you see it? How do you foresee this happening in the future too?

I've always thought that within a few years, possibly as long as three years, there will be widespread institutional adoption in crypto as an asset class. And it's really come through in the past year. Back when we were managing assets for pensions and sovereign wealth funds just in the traditional space, the consideration was simply what are the Sharpe ratios, What is the diversification to the existing portfolio? So it's not just about returns, it's about correlations. And, and bitcoin crypto has that right. It has negative or zero correlation to traditional asset classes, even though it'll probably get more and more correlated as time goes on because the traders and the investors in the space become more and more similar, whereas before it's completely different people. And you were seeing that happening. And as infrastructure comes into all fall into place with custodians with traditional exchanges like the CME with regulations, it's going to be guys like gradescale with their index funds. It's going to be an institutional asset class. And I think corporate treasuries buying Bitcoin is just a piece of that. I think probably a small piece of. I think it's better for the industry from a marketing and branding angle and then just general gives general credibility. But I don't think they'll trade a lot, given that they're public companies. They're just coming in and they're buying it, and they're probably going to hold for a while. I think the more interesting thing is when the guys like Vanguard or BlackRock, when they come in and offer all types of products that are more frequent in trading to their investors, I think it'll really change the industry. And then HFT is like we're just there to make a spread.

Right? Fair enough. Mark, you were nodding along there. You want to add something over here? Oh, yeah.

I mean, I agree with everything Ran's saying. I mean, I think right now, where we are on the treasury side of things, a lot of people are buying and holding in these large numbers. What we do need is some of these larger institutional firms that are a little bit more active on the bulk buying and selling side of things to really start getting this moving into what we all believe is going to be the direction that it's heading down. We are already seeing some of that, but I think we are really at the very beginning of the institutional adoption of this. I do think we've got a long way to go. We believe that it's going to still take about another two to three years before you see full adoption from institutional clients. But certainly this year alone has been a great kickstart for this. And we believe that the rest of 2021 going into 2022, we're going to start seeing a more gradual increase. And then by around 2023, I think is when you're going to start seeing larger mainstream adoption of this from an institutional point of view. Hopefully sooner, but who knows?

Yeah, I think the way I kind of saw it was two years ago, if you told me one of the largest companies in The S&P 500 is going to hold a large bitcoin reserve on that balance sheet, I would have bet against that. I just wouldn't have believed it. And now you have. Anyone who has S and P exposure suddenly has exposure to Bitcoin, because when that price moves, then so do some of these companies like Square and so forth. So to me, it came quicker than I thought. So all these predictions that I love to put out there I think are going to hit quicker, which I'm happy about. But Ben would love to hear your thoughts on the treasury side. What are you thinking?

Yeah, I think I speak through a general. Someone who believe in crypto and bitcoin, I think a company, institution or individual, we make decision based on same general rule. If you sit on a bunch of, you're pretty healthy on your cash flow, you wonder what you're going to do and save the value of your money, right? And last year alone, 30% of the total US dollar ever created was created last year. So you sit down so much cash and you're like, well, we're losing money with that cash, so where can we store it? And I think it's only a rational decision to at least put a partial of it to bitcoin. So I think this whole thing shows the consensus is already forming and it's definitely going to go even faster. And so I believe not only companies, Apple and all these companies are going to start reserving bitcoin, I think even smaller countries because whatever they print, nobody trusts it. And if everyone is starting to trust bitcoin and this online form of gold, I think this again, like Mark said, it's just starting for me. I think bitcoin eventually will get to, you know, the value of gold. So eight, ten times, you know, so that, that's my point of view. And it's already happening, like very fast. It's very rational from their side. I mean, our company, because we are a crypto company, we put a lot of our reserve on bitcoin.

So.

So I guess for me it's abnormal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I couldn't agree, I couldn't agree.

With you more about this.

The, you know, we say smaller countries, but it's the countries which have the more volatile currencies. Right, exactly. Argentina, the Nigeria. The ones with the currency is just so volatile that it makes sense. Us over here at BlockFi, we're seeing massive corporate adoption. Our wait list now on the corporate side is like two to three weeks just to get an account open. And we're seeing corporates come in, we see all the news about the public stuff, right? But it's also all the private companies. We're seeing SMEs across churches, dentists, restaurants, and everyone looking to buy Bitcoin and then hold it. And on our platform, you're earning yield, right? And it's for a number of reasons. It's for defense against inflation, like you mentioned, it's the negative interest rates.

It's also fomo.

They're seeing that these big public companies are going in and they're thinking, wait, I have it on my pa. My PA has gone up. Why isn't my company doing that? I have a bunch of Restaurants, we should put some reserves in there. So it's really interesting to see. And on that note, we actually have a good question from the audience that I'd like to kind of throw in.

Here is.

Do you see Bitcoin the only coin to be adopted by these corporates for treasury management or do you start seeing them adopt other coins? Maybe Ran, if you have any thoughts.

On this, just based on more like what's kind of too big to fail, then ETH is obviously the next one. Right. There's more and more adoption. There's the index funds, the futures that came online. So then it's kind of too big to fail. So you can see that. And then there's all this utility that comes with it, Defi and such. I can also see stablecoins. Right. So it's probably. They can certainly put more stable coins and generate yield, say blockfi for much higher than the average corporate bank account. Right. Or the average CD and even DeFi if they're adventurous. So then I can see a lot of that happening. So then it's not a volatile asset.

Mark, any thoughts over there about other coins being adopted by these corporates?

Yeah, I think it all comes down to risk exposure. And we kind of already mentioned around the liquidity side of things. I mean, I think if you're looking at it from a Treasury perspective, I believe my view is that Bitcoin and Ethereum are probably going to be the standards. I think if you start then moving on around the trading side of things from an institutional perspective, then you can start adding a few extra coins to that list. But I think in terms of where do you want to put hundreds of millions of dollars? I mean, as an institutional client, you're more likely to go with what you would consider to be lower risk. And I think that that would be Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Yeah, maybe it's consider them large caps.

Right.

That's the way some people would look at it. I've actually found it to be very interesting the same way on an individual level, people go down that rabbit hole once they get in and they start looking at. Within a few weeks or days or months, they start looking at everything. We have seen that actually happen with corporates also, which I found very interesting, where it's the same thing to go down the rabbit hole, not on a Treasury management side, but we have seen them go down that rabbit hole where they start asking about all types of coins where you just wouldn't have expected them to. And it becomes a fine line between I would Say investor in your treasury management and trading.

Yeah.

Ben, any thoughts on that? Any thoughts on these, the corporates or immune institutions getting into any of these altcoins?

And what I think any my personally thought is any serious corporation will probably only take on Bitcoin because at the end of the day I still believe Bitcoin is the only true decentralized crypto asset. All the rest you can dance around with it, but there are ways to affected and all that and it hasn't been proved as bitcoin has. So I think the first adoption wave definitely would hit Bitcoin and then maybe gradually as the rest of them get more and more decentralized or more people using it. But I think in terms of treasury strategy, it's more of a defensive strategy. It's not really if you want to go fomo, obviously you can go go crazy on altcoin on a defi. But I think as a tragedy, most corporations look at it as more defensive portfolio type of strategy. So taking on crypto assets is already a pretty bold move. I doubt that they're going to go on any altcoins.

Yeah, this leads me. There's another question from the audience which I'm going to ask now because it's somewhat related or a good angle to go from here, but they would love to hear about the level of sophistication that these traditional players coming into the space, these global macro funds, the level of sophistication they bring. Are the crypto native firms able to keep up with them? Ryan, if you have any thoughts over there.

I think the way we see it is there's certainly a lot more competition now, but then the market is growing faster than competition. So then we're not so worried about competition at this point. I think it's far from being saturated. Everything is growing very fast. The level of volume activity, market cap. So I mean we welcome a lot more, we welcome the traditional participants into this market. There's probably going to be better price discovery, less volatility and it'll mature as an asset class. So then in a way we actually look forward to that. That being said, there's also a lot of time and energy and there's a lot of idiosyncratic risks with crypto, as everyone on the panel all know. So then every exchange behaves kind of differently. The APIs are structured differently in general, it's kind of not as mature as say the traditional exchanges. APIs aren't standardized. It trades 24, 7 and there's all types of risk that comes with crypto. And these are some of the things that a lot of guys are not. It takes time for them to just even connect to all the exchanges in a proper way without the standard fix API and to just understand all the, all the risks involved. So, you know, it takes time for them.

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the biggest things that I've seen for them to wrap their heads around is that 247 Monday to Sunday, it's just that they're so used. They're also used to the Monday to Friday, you have your weekends off and it's like, wait, I gotta hire a 247 desk? Because at times you have to have someone there. You cannot afford to not have someone on the desk. And even if you're trading cme, you got to have someone there for the other stuff for the Spotlight or anything else. So I found that to be very interesting where their infrastructure isn't built for 24.7 Desk and it's hard to wrap their heads around it.

I just want to add one point is that it's actually better for the industry because a lot of the asset managers who have come in or will come in, they'll bring their clients and the capital with them. Right. It's easy for say Tiger or Bridgewater to offer something to include Bitcoin in their existing pure alpha portfolio or to offer a new product like say BlackRock and then their clients are automatically inclined to invest in this novel new capacity constraint product. So then that brings a lot of capital into the entire market. So then it's a good thing.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely a good thing. Mark, any thoughts here?

I think one of the, I think is institutional clients get on board and obviously they're professionals in the traditional space. I think one thing that the broader market needs to, needs to, needs to try and adopt is really being able to facilitate these clients on a multiple fortitude of areas. So similar to if you're an institutional client and you'd want to, for example, let's say you're trading equity, you'd go to like say a Goldman or a JP for your all in one solutions and they'd be your broker to deal with everything that you need. That that's something I think is still lacking in this market. I think right now traditional institutional clients, they're looking to kind of dip their feet in and offer subsets of the bigger, the bigger ask. But. But they're not comfortable yet to fully offer everything. And I mean this is one thing that we're doing under Dishwasher holdings is we're looking to basically work with those type of brokers as well as the high net worth and the hedge funds and HFT guys where we can kind of be the all in one solution for clients to come into. So if they need to do any type of brokerage or custody, we can facilitate that. If they need to get connectivity into the exchanges, we can work with them on that so that we can kind of bridge that gap. So that whilst their end clients are asking for a lot of these type of facilitation needs, they directly may not be able to offer it to their clients yet. And so we can work with those brokers and help facilitate their clients needs on a much broader perspective. And obviously because we have the SBI name, we have that level of trust behind us as well that they can rely on. But I think with the sophistication of institutions where they are right now will be very different in two to three years time. The way I look at it is back in the early 2000s, simple things and kind of going to Rand on the HFT side, no one was things like co location and things like that were kind of just about being asked for, but slowly getting adopted now as an equity venue you have to be able to offer co location if you want to be able to provide a proper exchange in the equity market. I don't think we're there yet with crypto and digital assets in general, but I wouldn't be surprised if we will be there in a few years time, whether that's three or five years. But I definitely think we need to get to that or we will get to that point. And I think that's just a matter of time. As you do get a wider adoption of this from institutional clients, then you're going to start seeing the more competitive landscape come in. You're going to see Bitcoin being a little bit less volatile than what it is now. But then you're going to also have people start having a greater concern than they do now on things like latencies.

Got it. And Ben, how about you on the sophistication on these traditional finance guys as they come in? Is there things that they're certainly asking you about that will help I guess develop your company into a space that the crypto native firms are not really thinking about?

Yeah, yeah, we've been asked many things. So to answer the question, I think who has got an edge? I think definitely crypto native guys have because we're a different game here. We get approached because we still label BYBIT as A more crypto native derivatives focused on crypto clients and all that. Whereas I guess some other exchange like Mark sbi, they're more in the middle, but BYBIT is over here. So I think if the traditional guys, if they want to come into the real battle world, they need to adapt. And there are many things they want us to adapt to them but we will simply not do because it will affect our efficiencies, it will affect our policy procedures and there are so many things on the crypto end that are happening extremely fast, such as DeFi. I mean you are in the whole defi business and you know, even someone in the industry don't understand what's going on in Defi a lot of times. So if you as someone from outside a traditional world and you have the mentality of all these things ready and you want to implement that into working to crypto, I don't think it will work, but I think what will drive them is the retail interest, you see the grayscale and everyone is very interested in doing. And just like What Ran said, BlackRock, whoever, if they offer a crypto type of product, although it's a little bit in their portfolio, I think a lot of people will be interested to buy just simply because that demand. They are forced to really come into this world and exam and they might have to get used to how we work here, everything fast paced and API and all of that. So yeah, I think, to be honest, when I started Bybit, I thought I would go towards the other side. I thought I'm going to build Bybit, we're going to build this whole fix API, we're going to tailor solution to all the traditional institutions. But as we run we're like, hey, the real business, the real people wants to trade is already there. So we just been forced to go that direction and we simply don't have the resources now to be able to cover both spectrum. And if I have to make a choice, I need to first satisfy my crypto users and my crypto clients. Yeah, so that's at least for Bybit.

Yeah, that's great. That's great to hear your view and I love the way you called it the battleground. I agree with you over there. I think I agree with you also in the sense that when these large, large corporates are coming in, so we're seeing a lot of large corporates come in, in the US side especially, they're looking at your bitcoin ether.

In the meanwhile, all the crypto natives.

Are like that's great, you Guys take care of that. We're going full defi. And for that you need young hungry people who are willing to stay up 247 kind of learn because it moves so quick that they just can't wrap their head around it. And hopefully that adoption will come and will come before we all think about it. But it's very interesting to see the crypto natives just continue to keep running really quickly, far farther and further away because the industry is growing so quick. So we'll move on to investors in Asia and what I want to talk about is how would we describe the existing investor profile in Asia? How are they investing, what type of trades are they putting on? And I'm going to go ahead and answer from a blockfi view first to give you guys an idea of what we're seeing. So in the US we're seeing, I think in 2018 we were seeing a lot of more crypto native. 2019, same thing, HFTs, all those guys started to come in your traditional finance. HFT guys came in end of 2019, start of 2020, we started seeing more of the traditional funds come in. The end of 2020 was basically when we saw all the global macro, the alternative asset funds and all of them piqued their interest. And in Asia specifically I think that trend hasn't followed as strongly. There's a lot of inquiries but the money hasn't followed as strongly. But what we are seeing over here in Asia are the more family offices because I think they're able to move very quickly. There's a lot of family kind of generational wealth in Asia that we're seeing over here. And the types of trades that most of these guys start by putting on other market neutral ones. So your fund arbitrage opportunities, your basis trading, the cash and carry stuff and we all see them enter into that way. So they pass through the legal and compliance and everything and get that in and then they start taking the more speculative bets. But yeah, I'd love to hear your guys thoughts on that. So basically the types of investor profile you're seeing and the types of trades they're putting on. Maybe Ryan, we can start with you.

Well, I mean if you think about who has the largest amount of crypto, a lot of it's exchanges, right? So then you can see a lot of exchanges hedging or putting on trades or investing miners. Right. So then a lot of the largest miners are out here in Asia for ETH or bitcoin and they're heavily involved in the space, whether they're Lending or investing or trading. Also very, very active in defi. And then I think it's more people like ourselves, like quantraders and large traders. So then when we go to some of the sort of VIP events by exchanges, it's sort of the same people that we run into and these are the higher volume traders or the guys who have a ton of crypto. And I think an interesting thing that I point out is a lot of investors are bitcoin maximalists or ETH maximalists. So they don't care about tether or USDC or dollars. They just want to maximize their bitcoin. So I mean the thought process is like bitcoin denominated or ether denominated, there's no dollar denominated and they could care less about the fluctuation of bitcoin. A lot of miners have that mentality, right? So then they're always wanting yield in crypto terms instead of dollar terms.

Got it. And going off that. Ben, I don't know if you're able to say who are the types of investor profiles that you see on your platform. I mean, obviously we have your whales and all.

But on the, I guess on the.

Institutional side, what are the types of clients you see trading there?

Most of the clients, I mean, first I don't see a big difference in Asia or Europe because a lot of times even the firms are in Asia and they're actually not an Asian firm. They will be a European firm or whatever or they register in some island. I mean this is very, extremely often in crypto. So you don't tell who they are from. And a lot of times what I find really funny is that whether they claim themselves to be or some people make a referral, they always say they are this Russian big firm. And I'm just like, what's up with all these Russia firms? And when you talk to them, they're not really Russian. So I don't know what's going on. Why is Russia always put this mysterical name to it and everyone just goes, whoa, okay, so but to us, a lot of the institution we work with, they use a, they're either market maker or they're pretty much market neutral. On Bybit, they're doing arbitrage, they're doing market makings. Because also Bybit, I guess our fee structure, we offer a pretty good maker fee. So a lot of these guys come here to, to help us with liquidity. In terms of clients we see, for example, Korean clients love to trade ripple and they go crazy on ripple and we have a lot of Japanese clients demanding cardano these type of coins. So you definitely see a taste in different region. But other than that, I mean we have all sorts of players on Bybit and, and yeah, I don't really see.

The difference, you know. Yeah, fair enough. That's fair. And good to hear. Mark, any thoughts on this on the investor profiles that we're seeing over here in Asia and the types of trades that they would put on?

Yeah, so I would say we see going back for the last year or two more high net worth type family offices as well. Originally getting into this space. We are now seeing a few prop desks getting involved. Obviously you have the HFT guys as well. They've always been there in terms of what type of what type of trades generally more often than not they, they're doing some type of ARB strategy. Some of them are doing even long only strategies right now and others are happy to just kind of do a buy and hold. Right now they're kind of depending on. Depending on their, on their risk tolerance will depend on how aggressive they are on these strategies. But we are slowly seeing a broader adoption of different type of algo related strategies in this marketplace. But I think once again I don't think we're there yet in terms of. I think if we ask this question in a year's time it'll be very different to what we see today.

Got it. Okay, great. Okay, so let's move on. Let's have some kind of open ended questions and this is where your personal views kind of come in and it is. Let's start with, start with you ran on what is your view on where we are currently in the market cycle? Yeah, I think the audience would love to hear everyone's view on this.

In terms of price. Yeah, it's very. Our holding periods are too short. So then I don't want to give any price estimates.

Oh no, you don't need like where are we, Are we anticipating that it's still going to be a very much bull market? I personally think that we're still in the start of a bull market. I would say that we still got plenty of room to go.

It's really difficult for us to say because our longest holding, the holding period for our longest long term strategy like the cta, the trend following it's only the max is like two weeks. So then it's just too difficult for us to answer. Yeah, but then like I'm personally a hodler. Right. So then I'm forever long in bitcoin. I think if I were to be a personal view and not for personal.

These are personal views. This is learning from you guys.

Yeah, I feel like it's a bit later stage than probably the consensus because. There's a lot of confidence and FOMO in defi and what we see in the primary markets and such. I feel like it's later stage then. It kind of reminds me of 2017. Not as yet, but I feel like it's a bit later stage than consensus.

What about you, Ben? You're somewhat a maximus too, right?

Yeah, yeah. I'm holding Bitcoin a little bit Ethereum as well, but mostly bitcoin I'll pass on for generations to something I saw. So I think eventually we'll pass gold. So I'm not too worried about.

The.

Current price and all that, but a lot of people has been asking me whether I think we are too high or too low. Tends to be all the OGs like run are a little bit chicken about this whole bull run. They are a little bit saying oh, it's lit run, you know, and most times they miss out of it. This is the general consensus. But I think at least on Viban everyone is crazy bullish on our retails. So I would still think maybe it's the middle stage, but I don't know. Market change, none of us know. What really I start to see is that when all these companies, Tesla and Square are putting on bitcoin as reserves, it sort of linked the price towards their stock as well. So as more company adopt to it, I think it gives an even stronger foundation for bitcoin. So at least I think this bull run might be more significance than the previous ones. So that's my thought.

Yeah. Yeah. It also feels like it feels a little bit. It's correlated in a way because of that. Right. Because we start seeing all these big companies come in. So it's more correlated than I think people realize and it will only get more correlated, which is going to be quite interesting to see. But mark your thoughts on where we are in the market cycle right now.

Well, I mean you've had two conflicting answers right there. So I mean for me, I think where we are right now, I think to be honest, it could go either way. I think if you start hearing more big firms publicly announcing what they're putting into bitcoin, then I think you're going to continue to see a further dramatic increase in price. I think if we don't hear anything for a while, then you'll see the current price maybe hovering up and down, give or take, but I think you'll kind of see it where it is right now. I'm not going to speculate on pricing, but I kind of agree that we're maybe towards the mid stage of this price increase potentially. But I mean, tomorrow another big company and Apple could say, right, we're going to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into this and then of course you're going to see the price shoot up again. So right now I think it's impossible to predict. It really depends what comes out.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I think we're all in the same sense of that. It's unpredictable, it's news driven right now, which is always scary. And I agree a little bit with Rand that it does feel like 2017, but I also am with Ben in the sense that I never want to miss out. All right, last question and then we'll wrap it up. Is look, we've seen trends that have come around in the last couple of years or last year even. One is treasury management, the other one is Defi that are really blown up in the space. Is there any trends that you foresee in the next few years and maybe a trend that you would like to see and why, Ben, you want to start.

A trend?

I like to see.

Okay.

I think although we are coming into crypto that we all believe in decentralized and how it's not supposed to be one player driven or two player driven, I start to see that the whole ecosystems system is becoming a little bit one or two, a few players driven, although by the product or by the personal, I don't know how to say it, the hero type of thing in the industry. I think it's good, it's necessary to. It takes that to really grow the industry. But eventually I would still like to see it become really sort of more decentralized in a way like that. And I know I'm kind of hypocrite to say that because BYBIT is completely centralized exchange, but we are also moving to that direction and hopefully by later of the year we want to also change some the structure within the company to demonstrate that we are willingly to embrace the idea of decentralized and all of that. So we're going to be announcing some big news by later the year, but this is some sauce I've been thinking and hoping that the industry are moving towards to.

Yeah, that's great to hear. We need visionaries to move it forward into the right direction. How about you, Ren?

I'm really looking forward to institutional adoption. So then Just crypto becoming a mainstream masterclass. I mean, that's what I would really like to see happen, and I think it will happen. It just takes time, and I would like to see it being integrated with DEFI as well. I think that'll be really interesting for us. We're trying to integrate DEFI and CEFI liquidity, where DEFI is really growing a lot. And we think it's very. From a yield perspective, from a trading perspective, once all these layer twos and infrastructure upgrades, it's very powerful. And it's just the beginning. Right. So we really want to see more adoption in that. And then the institutions are the ones with the large sums of capital that can really just springboard the entire industry and legitimize it. So I really want to see those trends happen.

Yeah, it's me personally too, and I know blockfi. We're definitely seeing that trend, and we want to continue seeing it grow there too. Mark, take us home.

So one area we've been spending a lot of resources on is around the tokenization side of the industry. I think right now, what you're seeing in the token space is still very early stages. We've identified a number of key areas leveraging tokenization where it has direct benefits for institutional clients. So stepping away from the traditional trading side of. Of what institutions are doing. But how can you leverage tokenization for other purposes outside of pure trading? And that. That's an area that we've spent a lot of time and energy on and that we believe we've identified a few areas that. And we're already working with a couple of very large institutional clients on this, where we can look to leverage this type of technology, not just from a trading perspective, but for other purposes as well. So I would like to see that adoption in the institutional side continue to gain momentum. We are literally at the very beginning stages of that. So over the next five years, I would certainly like to see that mature and continue to grow. I think, once again, fingers crossed, no major incidences. But I would like to see going forward that, as RAM was saying, that bitcoin digital assets, take your pick on which ones they are, are just seen as another asset type and can be more broadly adopted within the institutional community as well.

Okay, great. Okay, cool. That puts us at our time. This has been a great conversation with a lot of insights from industry leaders over here. I want to thank our panel participants for their time and sharing their knowledge with us. Most importantly, I want to thank the audience for listening in. I hope you had a great time learned something new from these guys. And I think we're all on the same page when I say we're all looking forward to the continued growth as well as the adoption by institutions. So thank you very much and take care of.