Bitcoin OKCoin: Blockchain technology, you must practice it to know it

As a high-tech with a novel concept, some people believe that blockchain will bring disruptive changes to human life. Its application has gradually extended to industries other than Bitcoin.

“A distributed ledger that solves the trust problem in the transaction process.”

This is OKCoin founder and CEO Mingxing Xu’s summary of blockchain technology.

The concept of blockchain was born from the invention of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto. After that, various digital currencies emerged, all of which were built on blockchain technology.

It is understood that blockchain has the characteristics of decentralization, openness, autonomy, information immutability, anonymity, etc. At present, it can be divided into three categories: public blockchain, joint (industry) blockchain and private blockchain. As a high-tech with a novel concept, some people believe that blockchain will bring subversive changes to human life. And its application tentacles have gradually extended to industries other than Bitcoin. For example, OKCoin has applied blockchain technology in the fields of lending, crowdfunding, remittance, etc.

Xu Mingxing, who dropped out of the Department of Mathematics at Renmin University of China while pursuing a master's degree, is a serial entrepreneur. After working at Yahoo and Alibaba for a year, he participated in the entrepreneurship of Docin.com. In six years, he worked his way up from engineer to CTO. At the end of 2012, he started another business, testing the waters of O2O and Internet finance. In 2013, Xu Mingxing founded the OKCoin Bitcoin trading platform.

“We started a bitcoin trading platform because I had bought bitcoins before and wanted to try to build one myself. I didn’t expect it to be so big.”

Xu Mingxing lamented that the most difficult thing in the process of starting a business is choosing a direction. He said frankly that there are not many industries with a lot of room for growth now, and it is very difficult to survive in the cracks between the giants of various industries.

Xu Mingxing’s accidental encounter with Bitcoin made him see the huge development potential of blockchain technology.

“The blockchain industry is currently developing rapidly. It is an emerging field that is being heavily invested and pursued by the world’s top banks and financial institutions. It is innovating the global financial infrastructure and is one of the most promising industries in the next five years.”

He predicted.

Sailing in such a blue ocean is very likely to attract the attention of capital. At the beginning of its establishment, OKCoin received a $1 million angel investment from Venture Factory and Tim Draper, a well-known Silicon Valley investor. At the end of 2013, it completed a $10 million Series A financing led by Ceyuan Ventures.

At the same time, as a serial entrepreneur, Xu Mingxing never neglects the planning of the company's development. Based on his previous experience, he believes that the speed of arrival after recharge, the liquidity of transactions, and the withdrawal speed of the trading platform are the key to the user experience of the platform. Therefore, the OKCoin platform improves the user experience around these three aspects. In order to meet these requirements and ensure the security of transactions, the OKCoin trading platform adopts some high-end technologies. For example, all data transmitted on the Internet is encrypted by the SHA256-bit encryption algorithm to ensure that the data will not be maliciously intercepted; all bitcoins are stored in offline accounts, and each user's recharge address is different, and the recharge address will never be online to ensure the safety of user funds; deploy servers in multiple data centers and do load balancing between different data centers to ensure the stability of the trading platform; real-time monitoring and arrival of Bitcoin recharges; bank-level SMS verification, etc.

In addition, the OKCoin trading platform supports planned delegation, tracking delegation, time-weighted delegation and other delegation methods. According to Xu Mingxing, OKCoin will build a global blockchain asset trading platform. In addition to Bitcoin, more blockchain assets will be injected. For example, after copyright is blockchainized, it can circulate freely in the blockchain network. Xu Mingxing said that in this way, blockchain-based copyrights can be traded all over the world, and copyright holders can find the most suitable pricing and trading parties. There are also practices of blockchain-based transactions of equity, land and other assets abroad.

It is worth noting that Xu Mingxing said that one of the great advantages of blockchain technology is that it can be settled and cleared internationally, and OKCoin also pays great attention to the deployment of international strategies. It is reported that the OKCoin International Station established in Hong Kong is operated by OKex Fintech Company Limited, which is independent of the OKCoin China Station, has different operating entities and different account systems, and has some of the same investors as the China Station. The OKCoin International Station supports US dollar and contract transactions, has users from more than 100 countries, and has occupied at least the top five market shares in the fiercely competitive international market. It is reported that the platform currently has nearly one million registered users, and the annual transaction volume reaches nearly 10 billion yuan.

The second area where blockchain technology is used is remittance and transfer. In this regard, OKCoin launched the OKLink financial network in 2016, aiming to use the medium of blockchain and digital currency to create a global value transmission network and provide safe, reliable, transparent and high-speed asset transmission solutions for online or offline parties. It is reported that OKLink is positioned as a private version of UnionPay in the world. Its business is operated by OKCoin's Hong Kong company and is aimed at overseas customers, involving more than 20 countries, mainly in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

"Under traditional methods, the cost of international private small-value remittances is very high, generally around 10%. Moreover, the efficiency is very low, and reliable cross-border partners are difficult to find." Xu Mingxing said that by using the blockchain network, the cost of remittances can be reduced to less than 3%, and through its own "magical skills" in solving trust issues, all participants in the network can transfer money to each other conveniently, safely and quickly.

Xu Mingxing believes that blockchain technology will have many uses in the future, such as identity verification, logistics, and even stock market transactions. Eliminating intermediaries, improving efficiency, reducing costs, and reconstructing the credit system are the "killer features" of blockchain. However, he also pointed out that, similar to artificial intelligence, blockchain technology is still in its early stages, and it will take several years of exploration from concept to popular application.

"Just like the Internet back then, it takes time to accumulate technology."

He emphasized that in addition to having solid basic technologies such as algorithms, programming, transaction speed and stability, practical applications require a spiral accumulation of training, correction and retraining.