Interview: Joe, Foresight News
Content compiled by: Hazel Gong
During Singapore TOKEN 2049, WOO COO Willy was interviewed by Foresight News.
During this conversation, Willy shared in depth WOO's product and market strategies, including the combination of Crypto trading and AI in product interaction, as well as Willy's insights into the European market.
He mentioned that WOO hopes to improve the user experience of its products through AI technology. This year, the biggest changes in WOO products are CeFi's social trading and reverse copy functions. In addition, WooFi will be deployed on Solana next month. Willy hopes that future Crypto applications will be simpler and easier to use, solving users' pain points in information asymmetry, difficulty in getting started, and security.
The opportunity to start Crypto: Web3 makes money flat
Foresight News: How did you first get involved with Crypto? What was the opportunity that led you to connect with WOO?
Willy: I have lived and studied in many places, such as Taiwan, Canada, and Beijing. Perhaps this experience has made me more willing to try new things, and crypto assets are one of them. At that time, some people around me were already in the Crypto industry, and I also met many good friends through Crypto. I believe in this industry because if we say that Web2 is to flatten information, then I think Web3 is to flatten money, that is, wealth can be stored and transferred without any institutional permission. Web2 makes information no longer indispensable. I think Crypto is completing its next mission, and its development period will be ten years or even longer.
It was also a coincidence that I met WOO. My college roommate and WOO Co-Founder were friends. We got along well after we met and found that we were driven by a common vision: First, we believe that DeFi and CeFi will tend to converge in the future, and traders no longer need to weigh between the two. While enjoying the simplicity and efficiency of CeFi and the decentralization of DeFi, they no longer have to pay for DeFi's gas, cross-chain, and CeFi's centralization. Second, we believe that we should continue to focus on our own application level at this stage; third, we believe that AI will be integrated into our applications, abstracting complex and cumbersome financial products so that traders can use them conveniently and quickly. With this, we began to cooperate, and I gradually began to manage the entire WOO's products and business.
Foresight News: Is there anything particularly difficult but rewarding that you’ve experienced in entrepreneurship?
Willy: Starting a business is difficult, but I don’t think one thing is more difficult than another. Maybe it’s because as a serial entrepreneur, I have experienced different stages of business growth from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and 10 to 50, so I have already encountered all the pitfalls that may be encountered in starting a business. Also, after being an entrepreneur for a long time, I will simplify things, focus on the key points, and think more and more about the direction.
Foresight News: Please introduce the background, composition and member distribution of the WOO team.
Willy: Our products and partners are all traders. The entire team currently has more than 200 people. Due to business needs, we have been continuously expanding the team size in the near future. WOO consists of WOO X (CeFi) and WOOFi (DeFi). The WOOFi team has about dozens of people. One-third of the team is in Europe, and they are responsible for marketing, branding, and operations. This year, we have added a lot of resources on the original basis, and also onboarded many more professional people, such as experts in the AI vertical field.
Using AI to solve the pain points of Crypto user experience
Foresight News: What pain points do you think current Crypto users have in trading? What solutions does WOO have?
Willy: I found that the three biggest pain points in the large-scale application of Crypto are information asymmetry, difficulty in getting started, and easy to be deceived. Therefore, Crypto should become simpler in the future so that everyone can use it better. Many of the things we are doing now are related to DeFi, especially the combination of DeFi and AI, specifically the combination of trading and AI.
AI may be used in Crypto in areas such as data, privacy computing, and Agents, so we hope to make Crypto easier to use through the intervention of AI. For example, improving UI/UX, providing users with natural language interaction, assisting users in processing transactions, Market Intelligence, risk management, order management, portfolio management, and transaction log analysis, etc. The abstraction of AI can make the Crypto services we use in daily life simpler and more convenient, which is what I want to achieve.
Foresight News: What attempts has WOO made to integrate with AI?
Willy: We have formed a professional team from the Web2 AI team and are currently developing products, such as the AI trading assistant related to transactions mentioned earlier. In terms of relatively cross-border expertise, we hope to find people with more vertical field experience. However, I don’t think the progress of the product will be fast when combined with AI, because it takes some time to make the interactive experience smooth. I don’t want to take advantage of the AI hotspot, but I hope that every product WOO brings out is really practical and easy to use.
Foresight News: I find that everyone is very optimistic about AI. However, everyone also believes that it will take a long time for AI to bring about major changes to the industry. At present, there seems to be no particularly clear point for integration with products.
Willy: The combination of AI and trading is actually a very natural thing. If we remove the word AI, then this is automated trading, from the most basic grids, various trading robots, whether it is DCA (fixed investment), grid trading, or high-frequency trading, these have become more and more mature in the past decade or so, and are all institutionalized.
Next, we will first improve Market Intelligence. Now many traders need Twitter, TradingView and other different analytical data, but in fact users do not need overly complex information, but need to organize concise information related to their own trading history. At the same time, I think users do not need natural language input at present, because it is difficult to write prompt words. Push is more commonly used in products to analyze existing assets and trading habits, especially social sentiment analysis. We have predicted that if all the data and signals from Twitter are integrated into a strategy for trading today, there is a high probability of loss, because most of them are retail investors' emotions. So, how to combine these signals and data into a strategy for users in need is a topic of AI combined with Crypto.
The second is related to DeFi in the future. Many links in DeFi are difficult to handle, such as the inconsistency of assets, cross-chain, signatures, and Gas on different chains. From the user's perspective, if I have asset A and want to reach B, the simpler the links in the middle, the better. AI can simplify and abstract these links. At present, AI Agents can handle 70% to 80% of these problems, and it will take some time to solve 100%. Now the cooperation process between Agents is relatively fixed, and the error rate can be very small.
From WOO's perspective, we always focus on applications and do not get involved in infrastructure. Therefore, we will focus on providing the most direct user experience.
Design CEX and DEX products based on first principles
Foresight News: What interesting updates or changes are there in WOO’s products this year?
Willy: The biggest change is our CeFi Social Trading and the reverse copy trading. You will usually find that most traders are right in choosing the direction of the transaction, but there is a problem in the execution of the coin trading. The pain points that our copy trading product wants to solve are: (1) We hope that professional traders who have been strictly reviewed on the platform can lead some users with insufficient trading experience to trade; (2) Transparency: In fact, many exchanges have this function, but we found that their transparency is not high. For example, some traders may be long here and short on another platform. The copy trader can only follow one direction. So we saw the pain point and launched another product, reverse copy trading, which allows you to reversely follow all the positions of this trader.
Secondly, we will deploy WooFi on Solana next month. WOOFi currently supports 11 different EVMs, and there will be more EVM chains in the future, but Solana is a very important step for us because Solana has a good ecosystem. And our sPMM (synthetic active market making) cross-chain products and contract exchanges are relatively competitive in the Solana ecosystem. So I think we can achieve good growth after deploying on Solana. Currently, WooFi cannot support Solana's Deposit and Swap, but it may be in the future. Our other products (such as Strategy Vaults and Earn Products) may include assets on Solana. Secondly, WOO tokens will also have more applications on Solana (lending, etc.), and we will cooperate with Solana in lending and providing liquidity.
Foresight News: Currently, most exchanges have CEX and DEX, and different companies have different product strategies. OKX puts DEX in a very important position in the APP, but Binance puts it in a corner, and Bitget divides it into two independent parts. What is your strategy for WOO X and WOOFi? How is WOOFi operating at present?
Willy: We did not intend to directly connect the two parts of the product. The two products are designed according to the first principles. CeFi is for relatively professional traders; DeFi is for DeFi native users and some aggregator platforms. Therefore, we will not interfere with the core mission of each product. If we merge them, there may be good or bad results. We hope that they can develop independently. At that time, we also considered combining them. The most important point was to copy the experience and liquidity capabilities of CeFi products to DeFi.
WOOFi has been in business for a year and a half, and its current trading volume is stable in the top ten, and there are also incremental users. Currently, spot accounts for about 10-20% of the trading volume, and contracts account for less than 10%, but the overall curve is on an upward trend. The spot trading volume of DEX and CEX is about 1:8.5. Most of our trading volume comes from contracts, because the turnover rate of contracts is higher and the operating cost is lower than that of spot. On the current basis, we are more concerned about profitability in the next three to four years.
Foresight News: Solana was mentioned just now. So what is WOO’s layout in the BTCFi, Base, TON and other ecosystems?
Willy: We at BTCFi started relatively early, and we supported the development of Merlin and did a lot of cooperation with them. In terms of listing coins, our support was not that aggressive, so we may have some dividends.
As for Telegram, because we are a transaction-driven product, many Telegram users may be holding tokens for the first time, and they do not have a strong distinction between DeFi and CeFi, and they can accept semi-decentralization. At present, these Telegram users may not be fully matched with our products, so we will participate more in the Listing of the Telegram ecosystem.
For us, what is more important is to return to the product, rather than necessarily focus on any one ecosystem.
Foresight News: Compared with other exchanges, what are your preferences in listing?
Willy: Because WOO is currently a relatively small CEX, we have adopted another approach, which is to work closely with the project parties. The project parties will ask us to do event operations, publicity and trading competitions. Whether it is a combination of centralized or decentralized products, our strategy is to differentiate. We will deeply bind the project parties, from investment to future listings. Now many exchanges can find good listings, and they may not come to us, but if we are deeply bound to the project parties, there will be differentiation, and everyone will be willing to participate.
At present, we are still starting from several large ecosystems, including BTCFi, TON, and Solana. We do not start from a specific ecosystem, but we will look for projects that can be deeply bound, which is the application-level project that we have always emphasized.
Found better product fit in the European market
Foresight News: In which regions is WOO’s CEX business currently deployed and where is its market growth?
Willy: About 70-80% of our users come from Europe, and we are also working hard to expand into the Asia-Pacific market. However, based on current product analysis, our PMF (product market fit) is better in Europe, and WOO's products are more suitable for the European market. At the same time, we are also looking for more localized solutions in the Asia-Pacific market.
Foresight News: What licenses have you obtained so far in terms of compliance? Are you moving towards compliance?
Willy: Licenses are infrastructure and should be operated in accordance with regulations. We have completed registration in Poland and will strive for global compliance in the future. The biggest task at present is Europe's MiCA (which will take effect on December 31), which is the direction of future compliance.
Because European users not only care about the results, but also the process, we need to communicate with users transparently, telling them what we are doing, why this happened, and what will happen in the future. For example, why our tokens and tokenomics are designed in this way, the reasons should be stated. We have done a lot of such work in the community, and they are also very willing to participate deeply and build a community with us.
Foresight News: Will the European market be divided into different countries? Which country will have a larger market size?
Willy: I think Western Europe and Northern Europe are pretty good overall, with strong user stickiness, higher transaction frequency, and a deep understanding of transactions. For example, the Netherlands is particularly good, French and German users are very good at trading, and British users are also very professional. Southern and Eastern Europe have a large number of users, fierce competition, and different product demands. Not to mention the Russian-speaking region, there are many Telegram users there.
