The main point
Five principles drive product team decisions: Simplicity, transparency, innovation, speed, and community.
The journey to one billion users will be a long one, so it's important for Binance to create a product that people love and continue to develop it.
Binance wants to change the world in a positive way that drives adoption and trust, both with our users and regulators.
Mayur Kamat, Head of Product at Binance, spoke at the Ramadan Super Meet-Up event on March 22, 2023. He went into depth on the driving forces behind Binance products and outlined the upcoming product roadmap. Please note that the transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Humble Beginnings
Mayur: One of the things CZ said to my team was very simple, “Keep building.” Build something our users want. Make something that makes the journey to crypto easier and make something to create that ecosystem. An ecosystem that enables more people, technologies and platforms to thrive and bring the vision of financial inclusion to everyone in the world. We've been doing that for the last five and a half years.
We started as an exchange, which soon became the largest crypto exchange in the world. However, that is only a small part of our product portfolio. Currently, less than 10% of people in the world know or access crypto. So, there's still a long way to go. This journey is what makes this experience so extraordinary for us because it can be done together with our community.
Future Drivers of Binance Products
Mayur: The product team has five principles that guide every decision we make.
First, we want to keep things simple. If we want to get a billion people using something, then it has to be very, very simple. The simpler something is, the easier we make the onboarding process, the more barriers we can remove, and the more adoption we get.
The second principle is about trust and transparency. Our industry has many good players, but also many bad players. How can we prove to everyone that you can trust us? We want to prove it with our actions and products. Therefore, we wanted to build a product that provides a level of trust and transparency, not only to users but also to the industry and regulators. We want to ensure that this ecosystem is built together and trusts each other.
The third principle is innovation. To change the world, we need to do something big, and sometimes we need to do something that may fail. From a product standpoint, we want to have a product that gets massive adoption. The only way to do this is to continue to innovate, even though sometimes this innovation is done at the expense of previous products.
The fourth principle is speed. We want to do things quickly. In the last two or three weeks, you've just seen how quickly the market moves in terms of price volatility and also innovation. We want to ensure that Binance products are available to users as the industry moves forward. When we know users like our product, we go deeper and build the substance behind it.
Lastly and most importantly, is that we build products for our community, with our community. We build products that ensure community feedback, including user pain points, desires, and uses for crypto, is met through our products.
Latest Product Launch
Mayur: One of the newest features we launched is the user feedback feature. This is a way to provide useful feedback directly to product managers about what needs to be improved for our products. Now there's a new version where you can see comments directly from product managers telling you whether these features already exist or the impact your feedback has had on making us better. You can also attach images and descriptions and vote on feedback provided by other users. If we may not be able to fulfill your feature request, we will provide a reason for this. These features will guide how we build products in the future. We listen and read every feedback that comes in through this feature. And that's just one small aspect. We, especially CZ, will still engage directly with the community on our social channels or if you contact our customer support. This is one of the main pillars that guides our products.
One other product we have is Binance Build. If you use Twitter, follow the hashtag #BinanceBuild. We launch new features every day, and this is our pace of innovation. Every day, we'll tweet something about a new improvement. Some of these may be simple features and some may be quite important features, but at this pace of innovation, we want to continue to grow. The best way to keep doing this is with Binance Build.
Proof of Reserves with zk-SNARK is a fairly new and innovative technology. Through privacy-friendly means, we can now prove to users that their assets in their Binance wallet are where we say they are. We were probably the first in the industry to do it and open source it. Therefore, we encourage other players in this ecosystem to follow our lead and also publish their zk-SNARK Proof of Reserves. Once we gain confidence in the system, we can grow as an industry. This is one of the first steps to achieving this.
However, we are also an exchange, so we launched some very interesting trading tools. Users can now customize orders by dragging and dropping. This feedback specifically comes from direct interactions I have with customers. We also have other features that launched recently, such as a rebalancing bot that automatically adjusts your portfolio without having to do it manually.
Binance Pay is one way to connect the Web3 world and the real world. One use that I personally like is sending money. Many low-income immigrants send money each month to their families, but a high percentage of that money is withheld by the system. The process takes several days and is not completely free of fraud. Binance Pay provides a better way, namely seamless crypto-based transfers, as well as being able to offer money in fiat. Binance Pay can now be found in malls, brick-and-mortar kiosks and car dealerships – helping users solve everyday problems.
Lastly is Binance Tax. This is our newest product. We launched it about a month ago in France. I'm excited to announce that we will be launching globally in the next few months. I'm truly excited to bring this product globally to all our users for free so you can understand your tax obligations and be able to meet them with just one click.
Future Product Launches
The DCA (dollar-cost averaging) bot is a breakthrough. Nowadays, you can have strategy bots do all the heavy lifting for you. The bot will give you financial advice and allow you to automate it as you wish. A much requested trading feature that we will also be introducing soon is a profit and loss analysis tool that will allow you to track your portfolio performance over time and allow you to learn to become a better trader.
Performing multi-factor authentication when you withdraw funds is a hassle. This feature is very safe. This is the basis for interacting with financial institutions. We'd love to have them, but these features don't have to be complicated. We've made many improvements to our biometric-based products that now allow you to use secure, modern infrastructure like passkey and Face ID to authenticate in these applications.
The final upcoming change I want to mention is a change to the interaction and game pages. We will ensure the deposit page process runs smoothly. You'll be able to save addresses and scan QR codes instead of having to copy and paste addresses. The goal is to make everyday interactions easier. Our users love games and campaigns like Bitcoin Button and WODL games. We will introduce more products that allow users to invite others to join Binance and earn crypto through referrals, campaigns and games.
Final Notes on Moving Forward
We want to change the world. We want to create innovation. However, we also want to do it in a positive way that drives adoption and trust, both with our users and regulators. There will be even more product innovation and focus placed on ensuring our systems comply. For example, how we perform anti-money laundering (AML), how we monitor transactions, how we report suspicious activity to the government, how we bring in new users through various channels, and how we ensure that we bring in those users through a compliant KYC system . There's a lot more to do here. It doesn't sound very fun or exciting, but it's very important for us to bring crypto to a billion users.
Further Reading
Hear from the Binance Product Team: Answering Your Top Questions
A Builder: How Binance's Head of Product Mayur Kamat Helps Build Web3's Future
Recap: Product AMA with CZ and Mayur