Tech Talks Daily
00:08:02 · Harvey Liu
[00:08:02] S1: I think it's... Like I mentioned, it's a verifiable solvency. I think when you're trying to do that, the architectural choice, I think, for myself... I'm not fully the technical engineer for my company, but I I... Overseeing some of the the teams doing it. But I understand that it will be a balance, I will say, across security, privacy, and performance. So, basically, we want to choose the... First of we choose the Merkle tree. That... That's one of these... Basically, the users will generate it. At at the tree leaves. The users kind of look like tree leaf. The tree leaves will grow. Then that eventually is gonna build up the tree so they can show the entire assets of the platform. So that's the the crypto... The cryptology that we use that just to to actually display the proof of reserves. So that's the choice of the the mechanism that we use. And also, we we don't want really publish any privacy information. Right? So we only would say we're using... We don't display user IDs or anything. We'd only display a certain, maybe, numbers just showing the user's assets. The user, it will be a chain of... It's shell code. It was... I can put it that way. So the user... Each user will get that code, then they can go on to the Merkle Tree and verify that. Then their account is is located in in the Merkle Tree, and they can see their assets there. So this is verifiable. So... Basically. Also, it's... Also performance is never good. Actually, you you actually do a live quote out of the system. So, basically, we will do... We'll offload some of those datas to maybe, like, an intermediate server so so so the snapshots will take from there. So it will be way better lower load for the system, the whole system. So that... I think that's the way we set up to to do it. Yeah.
00:09:56 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:09:56] S0: And we started our conversation talking about your origin story. What made you want to go out there and create this? But what... I'm curious. Looking back, what did you learn from building LeveX that maybe challenged your earlier assumptions about how exchanges should handle trust and transparency. You probably set out with a certain set of beliefs and why you were doing it. Did that change? Did you learn anything along the way?
00:10:19 · Harvey Liu
[00:10:19] S1: Oh, definitely. I learned lots of... I think it's learned lots of things from the hard way, I think. From the from the experience, like, from the paper, I think back in the days, people think of centralized exchange will be, like, all of them is making good money. Right? So people from that point of view, they want to get into the business. But I think at the first day when we started, we didn't really think it's gonna be a a very smooth journey. We we had the preparation for the difficulties. But I think the the lessons I learned at the beginning, we we have put a lot of investment into tech... In the tech side to just make sure we have the best technology. We have the best security. Also, we we built... We are able to do to provide the transparency as well using proof of reserves, that kind of thing. But I think the lessons I learned, I've... We should have invested more, basically. And we invested more in the sense that we can get our products developed faster. I think time is very important for for a business like Central Access because the com... The competition is very, very, very strong. Right? So, basically, we had... One story I had is that we have this idea of, I would say, Binance Square. Like, everybody use Binance. Right? So so we had this idea back in 2022. At the beginning, we have this idea to build a Binance Square. As a product, actually, is not is not exist at the time. So... But Binance has more investment and the more development team, so so they build it faster. So we are still trying to to put our own type of square... Public square product out, but I think it will release this quarter. So we will be slow because the... Our team is is way smaller in finance. But the the story is learned as if... I think at the beginning, we should invest more on the tech side, the more product team we can develop the the product way faster ahead of the competitors. So that will give us more edge over the other exchanges. But I think it's not it's still not too late because I think we did very good investment on our infrastructures. One approve... One approve is that last year when when ten, eleven, the the crypto prices crashed, there's lots of centralized exchange experience outage. And we didn't because we had we had... Our technical team has built a lot of redundancies and extra sir... Server server capacity.
00:12:53 · Harvey Liu, Neil C. Hughes
So we made sure we didn't really experience any any outage during that time. So that's something we really think we we done it right, and we should have done it more. Yeah. [00:13:05] S0: I think you're in somewhat of a unique position here because you've worked as an investor. Now you're working as a founder. How has that changed the way that you judge whether a trading platform has a a durable business model rather than a a good growth story and and anything else that you might see differently?
00:13:22 · Harvey Liu
[00:13:22] S1: I think it it definitely changed a lot. I think from the investor point of view, you basically... When I was was working for the venture capital firms, so we basically acting as a minority investor. Basically, we go in there. We find a promising projects in maybe a minority stake, 2020% the most, maybe 10%. And we would maybe invest a similar project maybe in the same industry. We just plot our cities, right? So we wait for it to grow. And maybe quarterly, we give some guidance to them and make sure they are not they are actually they're doing the right proper business management, that kind of thing. But I think it's more relaxed as a venture capitalist than than actually go... You're going to business, run it yourself, basically. So it would rather be when we're building our own projects, I would be very concerned about... First of all, we when the product rolled out, we have to make budget, and we have to bring users. So, basically, user growth is very important. At the same time, we also need to control our budget and control our cost. So on the viable business, in the actual business world, is that you def... Definitely, at certain point, you need to have a positive cash flow. So you you don't have endless cash. So, basically, you plan your business based on your cash flow, and you're managing that. I think that's the most important part. And at the end of... Also, the last most important part is that as a founder and the CEO of the of the business, you... Eventually, you need to be responsible for what... Whatever happens to the company. And if there's end users losing any kind of assets on the platform, you have to be responsible for it. I think that's... It's totally different than you're running as a a like, a investor from a venture capital firm. So that's the major difference. Yeah.
00:15:20 · Neil C. Hughes, Harvey Liu
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