Interview with Shenyu: Industry Opportunities After the Crisis and Cobo's "New Weapon"
In 2022, the encryption market is surging, and many leading institutions have suffered heavy losses one after another, and are on the verge of bankruptcy and liquidation, exposing the limitations of risk management. However, some institutions have resisted the pressure and survived the crisis with their risk control capabilities and efficient risk control tools. The encrypted asset custody platform Cobo is one of them.
"On the one hand, the rich DeFi experience in the past two years has provided us with various experiences; on the other hand, we have built a mature DeFi decision-making process and risk control management internally to filter layer by layer to avoid systemic risks." Cobo Co-founder Shenyu explained that Cobo internally uses theCobo ArgusThe tools are used to divide the roles and form a workflow that is more in line with the efficient governance of encrypted finance.
In the past five years, Cobo has continued to deepen the encryption security infrastructure, and has gradually grown from zero to one to become the largest cryptocurrency custody institution in the Asia-Pacific region, with assets under custody exceeding US$3 billion. More than 500 institutional clients have chosen Cobo, becoming a famous A veritable "institutional crypto safe haven". Cobo Argus has also undergone brand upgrades and functional iterations, and has come out with a new image.
What has Cobo learned in the ups and downs of the encryption market after the ups and downs? Why should we target institutional clients after productizing the experience of using DeFi internally? Behind the transformation of the business model, is Cobo aware of the future trend changes and structural opportunities of Crypto in advance? What new actions will Cobo have in the future?
To this end, Odaily interviewed Shenyu to discuss the above issues one by one.
Odaily: In the past six months, Sanjian has been in debt, Voyager has gone bankrupt and reorganized, BlockFi is facing a liquidity crisis, AEX, PayPal, and Hufu are also in the public opinion whirlpool of bankruptcy... Many institutions have been thundered one after another, and the professionalism of institutional players in the encryption market Sex is questioned. What are the internal connections and common root causes of these accidents?
God fish:The core reason for frequent accidents is that many Crypto institutions do not have a sound governance structure, and the internal decision-making process is chaotic, which is prone to single point failures; especially when extreme market conditions break out, the chaotic process choices further lead to risk accumulation; in addition, these institutions The company has a single anti-risk method and has not established a sound and perfect risk control mechanism. Under the influence of multiple factors, systemic risks finally broke out and were cleared out by the market.
Odaily: Not only are there frequent problems with CeFi, but the DeFi field has also been looted repeatedly. What are the risks associated with DeFi?
God fish:DeFi behaviors are roughly divided into two types, transactions and lending. However, there are many risks in such operations, such as wrongly authorized links, liquidation caused by market conditions, hacker attacks on the protocol, internal personnel running away with money, and extreme market conditions that make users unable to withdraw funds due to cumbersome operations.
Odaily: Every crypto bear market is a reshuffle of the entire industry structure. In terms of institutional management and market hedging, Cobo has ample say. Can you introduce how Cobo faced and overcome this round of crisis?
God fish:On the one hand, the rich DeFi experience of the past two years has provided us with various experiences. On the other hand, we have built a mature DeFi decision-making process and risk control management internally to filter layer by layer to avoid systemic risks.
With the help of the internal management tool Cobo Argus, it is possible to decentralize the roles of team members and realize decentralized management while maintaining high efficiency. Through Cobo Argus, we will also block a large number of risky DeFi protocols, filtering most of the risks. So in this round of decline, we have not been greatly implicated.
After the crisis, we still maintained a good cash flow and a healthy investment portfolio.
Odaily: In addition to decentralization, what specific functions can Cobo Argus achieve? You can introduce how to resist DeFi-related risks.
God fish:Cobo Argus was originally designed to meet the needs of the Cobo team for interacting with DeFi protocols. In the 2020 DeFi Summer, we actively participated in the top mines of various popular projects. With the increase in interaction, the needs of the Cobo team and I have also been upgraded. For example, re-investment and high-frequency operations are often required, and some automation tools and scripts are required; in addition, the team needs to control the wallet. Multi-signature settings, but at the same time also need to take into account efficiency .
At that time, there was a lack of specialized tools in the market, so the team set out to design a set of infrastructure to meet the needs of institutional cryptocurrency, and finally developed the world's first DeFi Argus solution. After two years of precipitation, various functions of Cobo Argus have been gradually improved, forming a workflow that completely conforms to the DeFi form, including pre-investment research, team due diligence, chain code audit, decentralization and decision management during the event, and post-event review. disk, tracking of assets after extreme security incidents, etc.
Odaily: Cobo Argus was called Cobo DaaS (DeFi as a servise) when it was only used internally. What is the difference in positioning between the two? Is there any difference in function?
God fish:Recently, encryption institutions have frequently suffered heavy losses. We decided to upgrade our self-use tool Cobo DaaS and launch the protocol tool Cobo Argus to provide other institutions and teams with tools to access blockchain protocols safely and efficiently. Institutions and teams can use Cobo Argus for efficient team collaboration, role decentralization, on-chain risk warnings, and asset management.
To expand, during the rapid market fluctuations in the past few months, I found that many peers (institutions) actually have relatively large security risks in risk management and internal WorkFlow (workflow). Therefore, we sorted out our own system and introduced it to the market in the form of productization to help institutional users better manage internal assets and reduce risks. At the same time, we also hope to capture some traditional financial customers outside the circle.
Odaily: So, the target users of Cobo Argus are crypto-native institutions and traditional financial institutions? What special needs do they have? Can Cobo use this service to fully tap and expand the 2B market?
God fish:Yes. Taking traditional institutions as an example, there are two main types of demand for encrypted assets: one is traditional art institutions that prefer NFT. They have a large number of IP resources, but security accidents are prone to occur when it involves the encryption field. The role of Cobo Argus is to To help these traditional art institutions better manage assets on the chain; the second is traditional financial management institutions, who have a strong interest in DeFi protocols and encrypted finance. Cobo Argus can help them switch and arbitrage in the two worlds of Tradfi and DeFI. By serving traditional institutions, it is also introducing increments to the entire encryption industry.
Cobo Argus essentially wants to create a one-stop open platform, lower the threshold, help institutions and teams to divide labor, better manage assets on the chain, and provide value-added services and better risk control mechanisms.
Odaily: As far as we know, there are many encrypted financial services on the market that mainly target institutional clients. For example, various wallet manufacturers have security solutions for institutions, and many data companies have launched professional panels and tools. In the past two years, crypto-native companies have also developed their own asset management systems. Compared with competing products, how is Cobo Argus better?
God fish:In a nutshell, the outstanding advantages of Cobo Argus are: high security, high scalability, value-added services, and efficient team collaboration support.
To be honest, the security of some self-developed asset management systems on the market is worrying. They are just some simple scripts, and even the private keys are stored hot on the server side. The hot and cold wallets are not separated, and some even directly connect to smart contracts without authorization The tested DeFi protocol has a large security risk exposure. This kind of system is difficult to carry hundreds of millions of funds.
Since its establishment, the Cobo team has been deeply cultivating the wallet track, implementing a three-tier system wallet architecture of cold, warm and hot; especially in terms of private key management, a three-tier private key storage architecture has been adopted for global distributed storage. Over the past five years, Cobo has safely managed more than $3 billion in encrypted assets.
On this basis, Cobo Argus carried out modular development and developed a multi-person and multi-authority system to achieve high scalability, including multi-signature system, role system, and risk control system.
The third is rich value-added services. For example, tools to enhance user benefits, including accommodating large amounts of funds and mature trading strategies, are suitable for institutional users who are not deeply involved in the DeFi protocol. For another example, we have conducted a lot of data mining on the chain, and some key data will also be organized into Kanban and provided to relevant users for auxiliary decision-making. There is also the aggregation of various project information, including project security ratings, important community news updates, real-time security information updates, upstream and downstream cooperation project smart contract audits, and project-related in-depth research reports, etc., to comprehensively improve users’ perception in DeFi and quick response capabilities.
Currently, Cobo Argus has launched an early trial version to the market (trial link), the top 50 institutions have the opportunity to experience Cobo Argus services for three months for free.
Odaily: I feel that with this set of combinations, the services of Cobo Argus can basically effectively meet the diverse needs of encrypted native institutions and traditional institutions. In actual business development, have institutional customers been leveraged? Can you publish some overall statistics of Cobo?
God fish:On August 4th, the multi-sig wallet Gnosis Safe reached an in-depth cooperation with Cobo, and officially recommended the Cobo Safe App, the core component of Cobo Argus, on its official website. Martin Köppelmann, founder of Gnosis, said: "The cooperation between Gnosis and Cobo has great synergy, and I believe that Cobo Argus products can help solve many pain points in the decentralization of institutions and the process of smart contract invocation."
In addition to Gnosis Safe, in the past five years, Cobo has been trusted by more than 500 institutions and high-net-worth individuals around the world, with cumulative assets under custody exceeding US$3 billion and transaction volume exceeding US$100 billion. Moreover, Cobo has already developed from the initial wallet business to a Web3 comprehensive group integrating custody (Cobo Custody), SaaS service (Cobo SaaS), institutional-level DeFi service (Cobo Argus) and investment (Cobo Ventures).
Odaily: We found that Cobo's slogan has also changed from the original "value circulation, mission currency up" to "power your crypto ambitions". The launch of Cobo Argus also seems to reflect the transformation of Cobo's focus, starting to focus on empowering institutions. Where will Cobo's next big hit be headed?
God fish:It can be revealed that after conducting in-depth research on on-chain contracts and assets in the past two years, our team has also discovered some industry opportunities that may explode in the future, and is developing some new products with "big brains" in the near future. will be officially released.
Odaily: Now that we have talked about "possibly explosive industry opportunities", please let Shenyu predict the future development direction of the encryption market.
God fish:Currently, the market is in a state of return. In the next five to ten years, blockchain-based applications may usher in a big explosion, but there are two prerequisites: First, the underlying performance of the blockchain must be able to carry tens of millions of daily activities. Solve the scalability problem; second, blockchain products need to be easier to use, be able to carry the influx of large-scale users, and realize the imperceptible entry into the blockchain world.
This is exactly the direction Cobo Argus is trying to save the writing of smart contracts, and users only need to drag and drop to perform some complex on-chain interactions, thereby lowering the entry barrier for DeFi.
Cobo Argus has launched an early trial version to the market, and the top 50 institutions have the opportunity to experience Cobo Argus services for three months for free (click the link to try:https://argus-trial.cobo.com/）。
