WOOTRADE — CRYPTOVERSE AMA
DATE : 9th October 2020
Guest : Jack Tan : Co — Founder
Ran Yi : COO
Q: Please briefly introduce yourselves and #WOOTRADE to our community?
Ran Yi : Certainly, so I am Ran. I have over 14 years of experience in global asset management. I have seeded top quantitative funds since 2014, but I am now the proud COO of Wootrade. Also, Jack and I met back when we were students at Carnegie Mellon University. So we go way back.
Jack Tan :My name is Jack, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Wootrade and it’s initiating company Kronos Research. Like Ran said, we grew up in the US and went to school together. (Our other co-founder also did as well). I spent a decade at BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank so I know the traditional finance industry inside and out.
About Wootrade : To describe Wootrade as easily as possible to the community, and skip all the crypto jargon. It’s like a large liquidity pool that serves trading platforms and large traders. Exchanges link to our platform for the deepest liquidity there is. This will instantly boost their liquidity, which enables them to attract new users and retain existing ones. Not only do we aggregate liquidity, but we also have internal liquidity providers (market makers) and make use of deep pools! That’s how we can offer this game changing liquidity. Big active traders on our platform can then trade with the lowest spread, against zero trade fees. In the future we will also serve retail traders. The key thing to remember is that Wootrade is not only about volume. It’s also about execution quality.
I think it’s important to address the fact that we are aimed at B2B clients (exchanges, OTC desks, institutions, professional trading teams); so we are quite unique in that regard.
Q: Can you briefly explain how the Top milestones that the Woo Trade team aims to execute before the end of this year or going to execute in future, will help them succeed and What Woo Trade may look like in 2020 and beyond ?
A: First I wish to start with the milestones we have already achieved! We’ve got an excellent working product, and a great team. Investors recognized that when they funded us. Perhaps you have read the Cointelegraph article covering us:
Those are the major milestones we have achieved.
Regarding future milestones! At this moment we’re focused on the public sale probably end of October. But we have no time to rest, as our trading platform will launch next year Q1. In Q2 we will launch our futures trading. And we have many more milestones. Our overarching landmark, however, is to provide 40% of the market’s liquidity. Is this target in accordance? I dare say yes, the volumes we’re trading are growing exponentially. Currently only exchanges and quantitative trading teams can use Wootrade via API so right now we are doing about $7m USD in trades a day, which is up from the $30k USD a day we started with a few months ago. With the launch of margin and futures, we expect much bigger numbers in future AMA’s
Btw, our timeline can be found in our litepaper on our website:
Q: Wootrade didn’t charge any transaction fees on it platform, My question is, where does Wootrade earn funds to run its platform if you didn’t charge any fee to your users?
A: Basically, we have a ton of features and assets under management, so there are a large number of ways that Wootrade earns revenue.When users generate revenue from staking into various products, we could take an asset management fee. On the trading side, we do charge margin fees like all platforms even though there is no trading commissions.
A main one is that we also get rebates from market-makers such as Kronos Research. Wootrade could route its orders to the big exchanges OR could route to the alpha-based true market-makers, it really depends on who will give Wootrade the best price but typically market-makers offer better prices than exchanges.
In this way, Wootrade earns from the market-makers and uses those revenues to incentivize other flow providers to route orders here. We may also have a flat monthly service fee for a premium app but those details aren’t fully hashed out yet.
In case anyone is wondering, Kronos Research, which I’m also the founder of, is one of the largest traders in the world, we do about $1 billion a day in volume; so we can leverage that liquidity to do a lot of things without relying on fees from the end users.
Thats one of the reasons why our business model is so unique — others in the space just dont have access to that kind of liquidity.
Q: What prompt you and your team to built up WOO? How the project is named as WOO? Any specific reason ?
A: Although this is mostly Jack’s story haha! But He has told me the story a dozen times when he tried to get me to work for Wootrade. I can easily recollect the story. The story behind Wootrade is that Jack was getting fed up with the current trading platforms out there and having to make multiple accounts just to get more liquidity or trade tokens that aren’t listed widely. Once Kronos Research became well known, exchanges started asking them to market-make for them to help boost liquidity. They really wanted to help them out as they had interesting products and services which differentiated them from current exchanges but they didn’t have the time to connect to each one via API and tailor a solution for them. so they created this unified liquidity pool so that they can all plug into to get the best executions for their clients and remove their need to find their own market-makers
that’s how it started and then they realized they could achieve much more than just that initial goal. Regarding the name….That’s the sound Jack makes when he makes a good trade!
Q: All project’s coins have their main Utilities & real-life use! So, Can you tell us what are the main role of your coin in your ecosystem? Explain its Utilities & Real-Life use cases? and Why should i invest in your #Woo coin for long term?
A: There are 5 use cases for the WOO token:
The first one is Payment — The token can be used to eliminate or reduce fees, similar to a standard exchange token. Regular traders have zero fees but trading teams using our advanced API tools will have fees which can be reduced by using and holding WOO tokens.
The second one is Staking — Users can have access to highly coveted trading strategies (copy trading or direct investment) by staking WOO tokens and other cryptocurrency pairs on another top-performing trader of your choosing.
The third one is Reverse liquidity mining — get paid to trade and take away liquidity from the platform as a PRIME node. Flow providers such as exchanges or trading communities can stake 5M WOO tokens to become eligible to achieve PRIME status and get paid for every dollar of trading from their community.
The fourth one is Collateral — WOO can be used as collateral to trade derivative products on the platform with reduced fees and other incentives.
The fifth one is for our Partners — Our client and partner exchanges which do not have their own token can adopt WOO as their platform token to encourage higher trading volume.
And that last one is a big one, we have a quickly growing list of partners who are already using the platform.
Q: If anybody thinks your project really likes a scam project, and they can’t trust this project. How do you make them believe in your project?
A: All crypto traders know there are a lot of scams out there. Mostly there are good projects with innovative ideas, but they lack the resources to turn it into a success. The things you have to ask yourself every time you learn of a new crypto project is: what is their proposition? how is the team behind the project? do they have a working product? do they already have clients using it? In our case, we’re incubated by Kronos Research, trades on average more than $2 Billion USD / day just in crypto volume alone. We have a great team, you can find more about our past work experience on our website. Don’t forget to check Mark, Wootrade is also his brainchild. We already have a working product which has proven to work and clients using it! On average, exchanges linked to Wootrade saw their volume increase by a factor of 3.5.
We have everything that it takes to succeed.
Q: While you build your project, do you take into account community feed backs and demands?
A: We do! Actually, building a community is still one of our biggest priorities. Considering we already have investors, working product, clients. Our efforts, for example sharing about Wootrade on AMAs like these, pay off. We see our community growing. We also had some early adopters that have read many of our in-depth Medium articles :
and as a result we have some hardcore supporters now, both on Twitter and on Telegram. They learned quite early about the importance of liquidity and the problems faced by centralized and decentralized exchanges, but also by AMM exchanges like Uniswap (where spreads can be huge if the liquidity pools are small). We got a lot of great feedback from them. But lately there’s definitely an influx of new community members. Actually, we welcomed our 2000th member on TG earlier yesterday. We’re very happy about that, as projects thrive on strong communities.
We also want to actively cooperate with people from our community. We have an ecosystem program that’s meant for long-term cooperation. If you feel like you can help us on the long term, please check out our Medium article about this partner program. We’re now also exploring ways to incentivize our community members to help us on the short-term. For example, we will incentivize TG members to double-check all our content (website/ news articles/ litepaper) before the listing. We’ll reward them if they spot any typos and ambiguities. But we’re open for any other suggestions. We strive for perfection. If a community member has a good idea to help us achieve that we’re all ears.
Q: What is the GAP you are addressing in the market? What is the opportunity you are exploring? What is the problem you are trying to solve?
A: This is a very basic question but I guess we didn’t explain it well enough, so I’ll do it now! The gap is simple: Most Tier-2 exchanges, OTC desks, Institutional clients, professional traders, and DeFi platforms don’t have a suitable place to trade on, because of major issues with liquidity (not enough orders), slippage (the way the price moves with a big order), and fees! We allow those clients to “plug in” to our liquidity, which means their users can access it without ever realizing that the liquidity belongs to the Wootrade network. And because of the zero-fee model, the clients can actually offer their users the lowest trading price possible, meaning the user gets a great overall trading experience. Thats a win-win-win for the end user, the clients, and Wootrade.
Q: Token burn” is beneficial for any project, in being able to control the number of token circulation and to provide greater incentives to investors. Does your great project have a plan about token burn?
A: Good question. As a team of professional traders, we are very well aware of the way buying and selling pressure affects the price. And as you can see on our website, the token supply will gradually expand as investors unlock (vested for 2 years). To counteract that, we plan to use revenues to buy back and burn the token, similar to the BNB model.
Q: What is difficulties and chances that You face right now while crypto/blockchain market is still young and need time to grow?
A: It’s difficult that the sector does not have a coherent regulatory framework yet in some of the largest markets. Another challenge is that we still need to educate most people about the importance of liquidity, market makers, and deep pools. Although as I just said in my previous answer, more and more people are aware of those things as a result of AMM exchanges. Regarding opportunities, well there is no direct competitor. Add up the the fact that it’s extremely difficult to create a platform like Wootrade tech wise, and we’re in a very comfortable position.
Q: Wootrade aims to build the best liquidity pool so that both centralized and decentralized exchanges can develop on top of their foundation, but will exchanges be able to access freely or it’s a paid service? Also, what form of rewards will you offer your end users for usage?
A: Thanks for taking the time to understand our project, Arya. Exchanges will be able to access freely, provided they buy/stake the tokens, a major source of token demand. See the thing is — most exchanges spend a lot of money on market makers, companies that fill order books with orders so that organic users can have a better trading experience. These are costly, and give exchanges a bad name since it often looks like wash trading and price manipulation. So not only is Wootrade free, but they can save the exchanges money because they don’t need to pay for market makers. On top of that, our biggest stakeholders, the PRIME nodes, will actually be entitled to token rewards for creating large liquidity flows.
So we really believe, and have seen from personal experience, that exchanges using us are a no-brainer.
Q: Could you explain about Prime nodes in WoodTrade platform? Is there any chance regular user be nodes? And what is the requirements?
A: Prime node status is something B2B clients can achieve by staking at least 5 million WOO tokens.Its not something just anyone get, but they are going to be major drivers of liquidity and value on the Wootrade Network. Retail users will also be able to stake to gain access and to decrease fees paid to trading teams in asset management products .
And that’s why we believe our token model has certain advantages over so many others in this space — we have the product, we have the clients, we have the partners, and we have the liquidity thanks to Kronos Research . So we are extremely confident about the success of the platform.
For more information, and to learn about our upcoming WOO token presale, go to our website or follow our channels on Twitter and Telegram.
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