Coin98 Finance commenced operations in 2017 as a DeFi product creator focused on setting up and improving an ecosystem of DeFi apps, and protocols on several blockchains. The cross-chain liquidity protocol also has a complete suite of products which includes Coin98 Exchange, Coin98 Bridge, and Coin98 Wallet. The wallet system works as a non-custodial, multi-chain crypto wallet and gateway, and has built a solid market in Southeast Asia with more than 300,000 users.
Notably, the C98 token is the native token on the platform. The use cases for the C98 token include staking, ecosystem development, governance, and unique membership rights.
The CEO of Altcoin Buzz, Shashwat Gupta, anchored the AMA session in our Telegram channel with Coin98 Finance Founder, Lê Thanh.
We will go through a recap of the AMA with Lê Thanh, founder of Coin98 Finance to understand what Coin98 has been up to in recent days.
Q. Welcome Le, it’s great to see the first project from Vietnam going on the Binance launchpad. You guys have been doing an excellent job and deserve all the success. How is the crypto scene in Vietnam?
That’s an interesting question, as far as we know, crypto in Vietnam is still in a grey area. Like other countries we can’t use crypto to replace our currency and pay for stuff, but you can trade crypto as an asset.
Given the success of Axie recently we are seeing more and more engineers, and developers start joining this space.
Q. Vietnam is one of the biggest countries from Southeast Asia for crypto search volume, it has a lot of tech teams building there as well. Are there any other projects worth checking out from Vietnam?
Yeah. There’s several name that I think it’s worth to learn more Kyber network, Tomochain, Axie infinity, Kardiachain, Rikkei finance, MassBit, and for sure, Coin98.
Q. What’s your background before starting Coin98?
I will try to keep the long story short, so my background is an engineer. I graduated from the university of science in Vietnam. In the 3rd year, I started my first start-up with my friends who are the excellence researchers in our faculty. It was an outsourcing company that we helped the tech start-ups/companies in the US, Europe, and Australia to build wearable products like smart watches.
Our company offered a wide range of services from hardware to firmware to software development during the time that we built that company. I worked with so many partners in China who helped us to produce the hardware products since then I had a lot of time to learn more about how to build a product leverage their manufacturing power.
So, after 4 years I founded my 2nd company which is an ecommerce company we built the products in china, and sell it on amazon.
Q. How did you get started in crypto?
In 2017, BTC price went up many of my friends introduced Bitcoin to me as you can see with a strong technical background it’s not that hard for me to learn about Bitcoin, and crypto stuff.
I started Coin98 in October 2017 as a YouTube channel just for educational purpose where I shared all the researches that I did to everyone who had the same interest. Then in June 2018, when I saw a lot of people gave up the market after BTC crashed from 20k to 6k. After reading thousands of whitepapers, I knew that this is the next big thing I should start a business, or doing something big. So, I decided to start building Coin98 as a company, started to build team from June 2018 – June 2019. It took us 1 year to build Coin98 to become the biggest crypto research firm in Vietnam and from there we expanded coin98 in two different ways:
- We scaled our media arm from local (Vietnamese) to global, it turned out to become a very successful decision @coin98analytics is now one of the biggest crypto account on twitter.
- We built our product arm – Coin98 labs. Coin98 wallet was our first product launched in Jan, 2020, it took us another year to reach the first 200K users for the wallet, and our aha moment happened when we started integrating Uniswap, and Pancakeswap to our wallet; it generated $200+ million trading volume. So, I know that this is a product market fit model.
We ended up building Coin98 exchange as our second product that way and lastly when people started to trade assets inside of our wallets we noticed that our users want to convert their tokens from chain A to chain B. That’s why we decided to build space-gate: our cross-chain bridge, and that’s our story.
Q. What other products does Coin98 have? What would you recommend people to join Coin98 and do?
Currently, we are focusing on building Coin98 Exchange as an all in one DeFi platform that allow users to access any DeFi services on multiple blockchains. We supported quite a lot of liquidity sources on seven chains already and want to support more liquidity sources.
On the other side, we are working on supporting native yield farming, staking, lend & borrow, and other DeFi services on Coin98 exchange. So, our users can do pretty much everything on one platform. It’s similar to the service suite of a centralized exchange but in a non-custodial way.
Our goals is for the same user needs if you can use it on centralized exchange, then we can offer the same thing but in a non-custodial way. You don’t need to create the account or KYC, or anything, you just need to connect your wallet, and it’s all there for you.
Q. In terms of custody and DeFi, it’s always scary to see hacks and bugs when TVL gets too high. How do you ensure to be more secure and what are some of the challenges you foresee in this area for yourself, and the industry in general?
Security is our top priority when it comes to product building. In the past most of our workload is focusing on integrating more chains, so it won’t involve much with the contract level even though we did an audit with Certik already as we become bigger and start building more complex products as well as be more involved with building at a smart contract level, we plan to:
- Conduct multiple audits for upcoming products.
- Build our own insurance protocol that will be used to cover the safe of our products.
Q. So, Binance has not done a launchpad for a while. I was so excited to see them do one from Vietnam and it’s one founded by you. What is the valuation for the sale?
So currently we are doing the public sale on Binance launchpad at 75m FDV, 5% of total supply will be sold in this round.
Thanks to our traction, with 300k users, and 200M+ USD trading volume on Coin98, those traction helped us to finally persuade Binance to agree to let us do the launchpad at 75m FDV.
Q. What are the use cases of the C98 token?
After the launchpad, we plan to activate the use case of C98 step-by-step. There will be several use cases that we want to apply for C98:
Buy back and make -> use the platform revenue to buy back C98
Governance: hold and use C98 to vote in our governance system
Unique membership rights: this is where we will segment our holders by tiers at let them access different type of services on coin98 exchange and other product in our ecosystem.
Q. It’s tough to get a ticker on Twitter with numbers on it, do you plan to keep the ticker to C98?
Yes, you’re right. Currently it’s hard to mention $C98 ticker on twitter but Coin98 and C98 is a meaningful name for us so we hope that it won’t be a problem for our beloved community members.
Q. Thoughts on the current market?
Current market is perfect for builders; more time to build; less distraction. In the long-term, Bitcoin still has a tremendous upside so, play long-term.
Q. Future of blockchain gaming?
Axie infinity proved that play-to-earn is going to be the next big thing, so I think it’s a big upside for blockchain gaming.
Q. Future of DeFi?
DeFi is still early. we will see:
- More institutions start using DeFi or even build their own DeFi products.
- We need more success case study beside dex and lending & borrowing.
We don’t have the winner yet for many categories so it will be the opportunities for the new teams.
Q. Favorite low cap altcoins?
Favorite low cap altcoins: this is a tough one haha. Everyone has their own criteria when it comes to standardize how low is a low cap but considering the projects with a valuation less than 100m…
I think VISOR & HOTCROSS are my favorite, in my personal view.
Q. Thoughts on Altcoin Buzz?
Altcoin Buzz is awesome. thank you for having me today.
The Altcoin Buzz community gratefully thanks Lê Thanh for taking part in the Coin98 Finance AMA on 20th July in our Telegram channel.
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