专访Gate.io创始人韩林：从铭文产品的竞争，看交易所大战的变迁

In 2023, the competition on the centralized exchange (CEX) track will take on a new trend.

With the rise of new narratives such as Inscription and BRC-20, wallet-centric asset management services have become a new battleground among CEXs. Among the many CEXs entering the market, Gate.io was the first to launch BRC-20 token trading services. Later, it faced the market pain points and launched a number of products such as Inscription Navigation and Inscription Launchpad. Competitor half step.

Recently, Odaily had the honor to sit down and chat with Gate.io founder and CEO Han Lin, from the reasons why CEX are competing to deploy wallet services, to Gate.ios own industry judgment and business planning, to his personal transformation of market cycles. Forecasting, Han Lin answered every question we had in a very detailed and concrete manner.

The following is the entire content of this interview, let’s start brainstorming together.

Part 1: Behind the inscription service is the new battle for traffic entrances

Odaily: Gate.io recently officially launched the inscription platform. Regarding inscription, some people think it is just another short-term FOMO narrative, but others think it represents a new revolution in the asset issuance mechanism, and is expected to give new value to ecosystems such as Bitcoin. What is your attitude towards this? Why did Gate.io choose to enter the Inscription track at this time?

Han Lin: Gate.io is not just paying attention to inscriptions now. Almost more than a year ago, we started to pay attention to the inscription when it first appeared, but it was not too popular at that time. This year it really became popular due to the BRC-20 concept.

Gate.io is the first mainstream exchange to launch BRC-20 trading services. In May last year, we launched BRC-20 tokens such as ORDI.

Before that, the main trading venue for BRC-20 was still on the chain. Due to the relatively high threshold and wear and tear, the transaction volume was very poor, and the market urgently needed a simpler and cheaper trading channel.However, because the BRC-20 concept is relatively new and the protocol is difficult to parse, there has been no perfect solution for a long time. In the end, Gate.io was the first to overcome this problem and was the first to launch a transaction service that is more friendly to ordinary users.

As for the value of the inscription, in our opinion, there must be a certain amount of hype in the popularity of new concepts, but there is obvious long-term value in it. At least we have seen some unique attributes in Inscription that are different from the previous Ethereum ecosystem.

First, the security of the Bitcoin network is higher, and there is no problem with the trust mechanism. This cannot be achieved in any other new ecology in the short term; secondly, Inscription is innovative and unique in the distribution mechanism, which is simple and fair but does not lose its highlights. Inscription The goal is not to raise funds but to gather popularity to form a community. There are no restrictions on the participation of Inscription. Anyone can cast it on the chain. This makes it easier for Inscription to accumulate community consensus and thus have a more sustainable vitality.

Odaily: Compared with similar competitors, what are the advantages of the inscription platform provided by Gate.io? What pain points can it solve in the market?

Han Lin:Gate.ios product idea has always been demand-driven, keenly identifying problems and then solving them.

When we launched the BRC-20 trading service in May, we mainly wanted to solve the problems of too high transaction threshold and too much wear and tear on the chain. After we launched the trading service, users had to consume a certain amount of gas costs during the deposit and withdrawal process, and there was almost no loss in the transaction process. Slippage and handling fees were very low, which led to a surge in the transaction volume of the Inscription market.

Later, Gate.io launched the inscription navigation service. This is because we see that there are too many inscription-related concepts on the market. Various protocols and projects emerge in endlessly, and it is difficult for users to distinguish the differences between various concepts. So we created an information navigation service designed to analyze the positioning, characteristics, narratives, trading markets, etc. of different inscription projects to help users distinguish between them.

As for the Inscription Launchpad service, it wants to solve the problem of Inscription being too inefficient at the distribution level. We talked about the uniqueness of inscriptions in the issuance mechanism before, but this simple and crude mechanism is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The current discovery process of inscriptions is relatively inefficient. When many new projects appear, users do not know where to participate. In addition, although there are no participation conditions for inscriptions, there are certain technical or experience thresholds. For another example, in the casting process, there are often This will cause gas prices to skyrocket, and one casting may even cost hundreds of dollars worth of gas fees, which is very unfriendly to ordinary users.

Based on the above pain points, Gate.io launched the Inscription Launchpad platform. Users can query inscription projects to be released in real time on this interface, understand the specific narrative of each project, and know the release time in advance, thereby achieving a fairer and more transparent inscription issuance. In addition, the platform also supports the delayed casting function, that is, users can reserve a quota after verifying the wallet and then mint when the gas price is low, thereby saving unnecessary expenses.

Odaily: For CEX, the Inscription platform and the wallet service behind it also mean another new traffic entrance in addition to trading services. At present, more and more CEX are actively deploying wallet services. This seems to be a new battle for the future. What does Gate.io, who is in the midst of competition, think of this? Do you agree with the view that the traffic on the wallet side will exceed that on the transaction side in the future?

Han Lin:Whether it is a transaction service or a wallet service, it is essentially a war for traffic entrances. What is a traffic entrance? Essentially, the platform that users use frequently is the traffic portal.In the era when CEX was dominant, exchanges were the largest entrance to traffic; and as the Web3 ecosystem matures, wallets have naturally become the new entrance to traffic.

In Gate.io’s view, this is not so much a competition for wallets, but a more accurate description is actually a competition for the “asset management side”. The asset management side means that users need to use this as an entry point to perform various types of asset management. Operations, such as asset storage, sending and receiving, exchange, protocol interaction, etc.

In terms of asset management development, Gate.io has obvious existing advantages. On the trading side, we have supported more than 300 public chains and more than 3,000 underlying tokens. Both of these data are the first among mainstream CEXs.The infrastructure advantages of the transaction side can be easily migrated to the asset management side. Gate.ios Web3 wallet currently supports nearly 50 public chains, and will rapidly increase to hundreds in the future, covering almost all asset types of users.

In terms of token support, Gate.io has also maintained a relatively rapid development speed. For example, as mentioned earlier, we were the first to support BRC-20. For Gate.io, our purpose is to help users create an asset management terminal that is easy to use, fully functional, and rapidly updated.

Part 2: With the purpose of “reducing costs and increasing efficiency”, strategic layout across multiple fields

Odaily: In addition to transaction services and wallet services, Gate.io seems to have plans in many other areas (such as public chains). Can you briefly outline Gate.ios current business layout plan for us?

Han Lin: There are actually many things that the blockchain industry can do, but we still need to have a certain focus.At present, Gate.ios main business is still in asset management, including centralized management and decentralized management. Its main purpose is to help users reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In addition, Gate.io is also actively exploring ways to improve user services in many other aspects. For example, Gate Card allows users to directly consume cryptocurrency offline, aiming to help users access life services; in terms of public chain, GateChain also plans to further improve performance and reduce costs to better serve users on the chain; in terms of investment, Gate Ventures We are also actively active in the field of venture capital. Recently, we have invested in some new projects in the field of infrastructure and emerging banks. In short, we are happy to support any projects that are meaningful to the long-term development of blockchain or cryptocurrency.

Odaily: 2023 has just passed. How is Gate.io’s performance in various fields at the data level?

Han Lin: Most of 2023 will actually still be in a bear market. Looking at the whole year, Bitcoin may be the biggest bright spot, whether it is the outbreak of inscriptions on the ecological level or the expected hype of ETFs.

Throughout the year, Gate.io’s data has been greatly improved:In terms of traffic, we increased by 200% from January to December; in terms of asset management, we released asset reserve certificate reports at the end of 2022 and early 2024. The report data shows that our asset size has also doubled to more than 4 billion. US dollars; benefiting from the launch of more products, Gate.ios financial management business has increased tenfold during the year, from tens of millions of US dollars at the beginning of the year to nearly 700 million US dollars.

Odaily: Based on the development trend of the industry, will Gate.io focus on multi-field layout in the future? Which business sectors will you focus on for development?

Han Lin: Trading is still our core business, and there are more things Gate.io can continue to optimize in this regard.For example, the unified account function to further improve the efficiency of user fund utilization has completed the release of the first two versions, and the third version will be launched in Q1-Q2., we will continue to optimize other centralized products.

In terms of decentralized services, Gate.io’s layout in this area was later than that of trading services. Of course, this is not just Gate.io’s late layout. The entire CEX industry focused on this track later. — So there are still many areas that need to be developed and optimized.For example, the asset storage of various types of Inscription protocols. Currently, many emerging Inscription protocols are currently only supported by some relatively remote small ecological wallets. There are basically no wallets that can provide unified support. We have also analyzed this situation and found that this work does not have So simple, because it involves a lot of complex protocol analysis work.Gate.io hopes to face the pain points of the industry as it was the first to support BRC-20 transactions, and once again be the first to support all inscription protocols uniformly.

Part 3: The coming of the bull market must be driven by innovation

Odaily: 2024 has arrived. With the support of expectations such as ETFs, it seems that the market generally believes that the cyclical rotation between bulls and bears has begun, but the market trend after the adoption of ETFs does not seem to be ideal. Standing at the current time point, what is your prediction for the market outlook?

Han Lin: The market trend after the adoption of ETF is actually very reasonable, because when the benefits are not realized, everyones expectations will always be higher, but as the benefits are exhausted, the space for speculation will also shrink. However, in the long term, the impact of ETFs is still far-reaching, and will gradually change the attitude of traditional financial markets or Internet markets towards cryptocurrencies.

I personally believe that the impact of the adoption of ETFs will not be so great as to directly start a bull market. The start of a bull market must be driven by innovation.Looking back at history, the bull market in 2013 was driven by the innovation of Bitcoin; the bull market in 2016-2017 was driven by the innovation of Ethereum smart contracts (including ICO); the bull market in 2020-2021 was driven by the on-chain ecology of DeFi and NFT Innovation driven.

As for ETFs, it is certainly a good thing to open up the entry channels for traditional funds, but this does not involve the industrys own technological innovation, so I personally do not think this will directly start a new round of bull market.

Odaily: In your opinion, which track breakthroughs will drive the next bull market? In terms of currency listing strategy, will Gate.io focus on this?

Han Lin: Inscriptions used to look like a wave of attempts, but currently it seems that the magnitude is not enough.A breakthrough in the expansion solution may be the answer. Although Layer 2 has basically outperformed various expansion concepts at present, it still has not completely solved the problem. If the performance and cost of the blockchain can be greatly improved in the future, it will provide benefits to all parties. These types of applications provide solid soil to promote the next round of bull market.

As for Gate.io’s currency listing strategy, we will actively pay attention to new projects in various fields, but it mainly depends on whether individual projects have real innovation.

Odaily: What do you think of the current competitive situation on the CEX track? Product innovation, user experience, compliance level, regional focus... What do you think are the core factors that dominate the results of competition among CEXs? 

Han Lin: Users who entered the industry in the early years may still remember the scene of the thousands of groups fighting in exchanges. The reason why so many exchanges emerged at that time was mainly because the exchanges entry barriers were low at that time - the market at that time Mainly based on spot transactions, the technical difficulty is not high, and there are many white label solutions available on the market.

Now you will find that the number of active trading platforms is getting smaller and smaller. Those exchanges that only rely on white label aspects and do not have their own technical support are often the first to fail. This also proves that product technology is the most important factor for exchanges. First place.

Today, the entry threshold for exchanges is very high.Basically every exchange has dozens of product lines running at the same time (spot, contract, financial management, documentary, quantitative, wallet, etc.), which requires a lot of labor costs; and the underlying efficiency and performance of each product line The capacity has also been greatly improved, and these are all piled up with real money.

therefore,I think it is difficult for small exchanges to break out of the market now, but it is still possible for giants to enter the traditional financial field.To be honest, it is already a miracle that FTX can rise in 2019. They do have merit in terms of products and are also proficient in marketing strategies, which is why they got the opportunity to compete on the table.

Odaily: For Gate.io itself, what strategies will it adopt to advance its position?

Han Lin: Marketing publicity will bring short-term traffic and make more people know us. We must also do this. The wine is also afraid of the alley.But technology and products are the foundation for consolidating and improving status.What the exchange essentially wants to do is to provide users with a safe and efficient asset management platform to help users reduce costs and increase efficiency. We will continue to work along this route.