At the CONF3RENCE event in Dortmund, we had a chance to talk with Dorian Vincileoni, Head of Business Development for Europe at KuCoin, a leading cryptocurrency exchange. In this discussion, Vincileoni discussed the coins’ listing, community engagement, post-halving market, regional trading disparities, and the convergence of traditional finance with the crypto ecosystem, providing a compelling glimpse into the industry’s future.
Can you tell us more about the listing process? What are you focusing on?
There are projects that we spotlight more than others. There are other projects that are not only listed but actually participate in our spotlight program. So, when a project is particularly interesting, we tend to emphasise it and create better campaigns around it when launching. That’s the case right now for the LFT token project that is going live.
As the campaign is ongoing right now, I encourage users to take a look at it. They can find it very easily on our official social media channels, official website, or app.
We are heavily focusing on the narratives of this cycle. We’ve already focused on AI, RWA, and DePin. We have listed many projects related to each of them, and we will continue to do so.
Which narrative do you think will be more successful?
I believe RWA is going to be a narrative that will probably take off, especially with the arrival of institutional investors and institutions in the US that are very interested in the opportunity of tokenising assets. There will be more adoption than we initially thought.
Then, the other narratives do exist. On this side, there are obviously meme coins that will continue to aggregate and create communities as we’ve always seen them do.
Do you have any rewards for the users who acquire coins in the initial stages of listing?
It’s more campaign-based, so it depends on what the project wants to organise with us. It can be a trading competition or a burning drop, meaning you stake KCS, for example, on the platform, and you’ll get rewards for the token that is being listed. It can also be an activity-based event, and you have a couple of activities and actions to do to be rewarded with the project’s token. Overall, it really depends on what kind of relationship we have.
If we are focusing on NotCoin, the campaign will be ongoing at the moment. With the arrival of the USDT on the TON blockchain, we also participated in their wallet-based activity, which was letting people and still letting people get around 50% APY if they come and get USDT on the TON blockchain, on their wallet, on Telegram. We are doing a lot of activities, and I suspect we will do much more with the later projects that will draw the same kind of attention as NotCoin.
Why is it important for the exchanges to engage with the community?
All exchanges at a certain point are community-driven. It’s especially true for KuCoin since we have this tendency to give a larger chance to smaller projects who want to get listed and have access to a larger market but already have an organic community that they can show, that they can show us, and they can show others.
Actually, we have a functionality that’s called GenVote. You can vote for the projects that you want to see listed on KuCoin thanks to this. Our user base can also participate and all the user bases of projects can actually register and start to participate as well to show us there is an actual organic interest. That’s kind of a way to be community-driven.
One practical aspect of why we need to listen to our communities is to know when you have scammers who try to speak in your name. We are not going to be looking around for scammers that impersonate us, but it’s good when users come to us and say, you know, these guys are pretending to be KuCoin support. Then we can take action and actually out them for what they are: scammers or hackers.
How do you see the post-halving market? Have you noticed any positive/negative changes in the user’s behaviour?
If we look at the history, it has been indicative of a kind of the start of a bull run or a more volatile bull run. We are not seeing its effects for now. It’s not really surprising since there is always a bit of lag between this market, I would say, market change of parameters.
We will see the results of the halving throughout this year. Now, the important thing about the halving is actually not its impact on the price. The important thing about halving, in my personal opinion, is that it exists and works. It has become something as sure as death and taxes, as they say.
Is there something else that can influence the market other than halving?
This year, the arrival of institutions is definitely something that will probably have more impact than the halving. We always had institutions in the crypto market. Some were more early adopters than others, some were latecomers to the party, etc.
This time, it’s different, for once, because a large percentage of these institutions now have access to crypto markets through ETFs and products that they already know. They’re not as afraid of tiptoeing as they used to be, regarding Bitcoin especially, but it might be other products as well.
You start with Bitcoin in crypto, but people, most of the time, don’t stay only there. Then they investigate more about the technologies, the projects that are already there, etc. So, if we see this happening also with institutions, this will have a much more massive impact on the market than the halving.
What are the most noticeable differences between users and their trading experience in different regions (Asia, Europe, US)?
I would say there are differences between the profiles of investors and the profiles of users of the products that we offer at KuCoin. The approach to crypto by itself, overall, the openness to it is a bit different. As traders, we also see different risk tolerance trading attitudes.
When you look at Europe, you tend to have markets where the proportion of people who actually invest tends to be lower than in Asia. But obviously, the volumes that we are observing in Europe, especially in some countries, are much larger than what we see, especially volume per user. There is a tendency among people in countries that are more in the developing stage and phase to be more open to these new opportunities and new technologies.
In Asia, it’s very common to have many platforms and use as many as you can and try lots of types of different products. Whereas in Europe, there is a tendency for users to focus on a couple of platforms, even one platform sometimes, and to use products in a more moderate way.
How do you see the technological development in the DACH region? Do you think that this region will be the leading one in Europe in terms of technological growth?
The German-speaking region in Europe, in general, has strong organic arguments for remaining a leader in terms of technological growth. Especially due to past experience and the investments in technological development.
Crypto is just one aspect of it, obviously. There is much more to it than that. But these industries tend to be quite capital intensive, meaning that if you’ve not invested enough in the past, it tends to cost even more to catch up.
Also, there is a very high level of educated population with a good standard of science, technology, engineering, and maths. That’s one of the elements that can be relied on. Investors, in general, are quite open to new technologies in this zone.
Switzerland is seen as the crypto hub of Europe, and for good reasons. Even in Germany, an investment fund like Rocket Internet could take advantage of the whole internet development. This is a unicorn example in Europe. There have not been many funds that have done exactly that.
What results do you expect to achieve from the upcoming Conf3rence event in Dortmund?
The event in Dortmund is a great opportunity for us to learn more about this specific crypto ecosystem, like local projects. Moreover, we need to listen to our German-speaking users and their feedback on their issues with the platform, what they like, and what they are interested in seeing us develop. We tend to have this localised approach since we are, once again, community-driven, and we want to be sure that we stay in touch with our local users.
This event will include speakers from the Web3 space and the “traditional” financial and technological sector. How do you foresee the further coexistence of these spheres?
We are witnessing the traditional financial sector finally converging towards us. Since we are now officially competing in the crypto industry with the traditional finance sector, we are also being brought towards them in some aspects.
The approval of Bitcoin ETFs earlier this year has become a hot topic. Then, the real-world asset tokenisation process becomes very popular in the traditional financial sector. As we’ve witnessed, BlackRock has been heavily investing in this segment.
It’s interesting for us because this sector, traditional finance, didn’t have any competition for a long time. We brought competition to this sector to the point where we are now a legitimate component of the technological sector, one of its most innovative and attractive components.
We hope this tendency will continue and that new technological solutions will be integrated into the traditional finance segment. That’s how we get mass adoption, with penetration in other segments without even them focusing on it, just being a new standout.
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