Five Questions with Ben Yorke from WOO X

Ben Yorke: I began working with some projects in late 2017, mostly on the research and content side. When I met WOO Network in mid-2020, it was preparing to have a public launch after operating as an institutional liquidity network for around a year. It was clear that the team had a strong vision, experience, and sense of ethics so it was a great fit. We’ve come a long way and now are well-positioned following the dramatic market events of 2022 to be a serious contender to take our place as one of the next market leaders. 

Ben Yorke: Obviously the digital asset exchange space is highly competitive and many projects are able to leverage unsustainable marketing tactics and business practices to maintain market share. As our products mature, we are also noticing major changes in how users evaluate their trading behaviors, which gives us a big edge. We’ve always catered to a more sophisticated and experienced user niche, which continues to grow. 

Ben Yorke: Transparency is probably the largest theme, and although we’ve always prioritized it, we’ve now adopted a lot of new practices, such as Merkle tree proofs of reserves and liabilities in our transparency dashboard. We’ve also learned that while price execution is important to traders, simplicity is also key. We’ve always been very strong in the liquidity space, but now we are exploring better ways to let traders act upon their trading ideas and capture value from the market. Having integrations like HaasOnline is another example of this, and we expect this to be a growth driver in the upcoming cycle.

Ben Yorke: Well even though more and more traders use perpetual swaps as a primary instrument, regulations in CeFi are becoming tighter, and derivatives products are naturally becoming more scrutinized. There’s a fine balance between giving users more leverage and digging holes with regulators that ultimately harm the industry. One way is making sure that WOO X is transparent and compliant, so that users can trade and invest with confidence. We’ve completed a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registration in Poland, and we hope to continue demonstrating to both users and regulators that we are doing things the right way. We are also working on more tools like self-custody solutions on WOOFi Swap and our order book DEX, paving the way for the next wave of DeFi innovations.

Ben Yorke: We love the penguins – they are one of the first NFT projects to show a commitment to growing the IP and they are also well-loved in many trading communities, making it a natural synergy. Not sure about an NFT marketplace, but trading products are constantly being explored. We now believe we have a top platform that can better satisfy the needs of traders, but along with that we need more exposure to spread the message and add credibility as we grow our user base and volumes. Our DeFi teams are also constantly shipping new products, with an added focus of cross-chain and multi-chain experience, while still offering the best liquidity and fee structure that is synonymous with WOO the brand.