OKX Lennix Hong Kong Web3 Summit Speech: Maintain Faith in the Crypto Industry and Continue to Lead the Industry with Openness and Transparency

Author: OKX

On January 9, Lennix, Managing Director of OKX's Global Institutional Business, was invited to attend the "POW'ER 2023 Hong Kong Web3 Innovators Summit" and delivered a keynote speech titled "Looking at the World from Hong Kong: How to Seize Opportunities in the Web3 Era."

Here is the full text of the speech:

As Taleb said in "The Black Swan," history does not crawl slowly; it suddenly leaps from one fault line to another, with very few bumps in between, yet we only believe in those small evolutions that we can predict. Web3 may be one such fault line of the internet, a sudden leap from Web2.

The internet is a data-driven world. Starting from the 1990s, Web2 flourished due to the flow of data but cooled down because of data monopolies. Web2 tech companies, represented by Google, Amazon, and Apple, achieved data monopolies through free strategies and covert data collection, thereby indiscriminately leveraging capital to harvest other industries, suppressing innovation and leading to a bottleneck in internet development.

Since 1976, the gradual awakening of individual sovereignty consciousness, represented by figures like Hayek and Satoshi Nakamoto, along with the development of Bitcoin's underlying technology, blockchain, has given birth to Web3. As a decentralized and trustworthy value internet built on technologies like blockchain, Web3 advocates returning data ownership and identity autonomy from large platforms back to users, opening up new imaginative spaces and attractions for the internet, and initiating a major transformation in data, finance, and trust globally.

Hong Kong has keenly captured the opportunities of Web3.

On October 31, 2022, Hong Kong officially released the "Policy Declaration on the Development of Virtual Assets in Hong Kong," determined to compete as a global virtual asset center, taking a key step in the global crypto space and boosting the confidence of all Web3 practitioners.

Looking back at Hong Kong's development journey, it took a century to transform from a small fishing village into one of the Four Asian Tigers, and another twenty years to evolve from an Asian financial center to an international financial center. Now, with the wave from Web2 to Web3, the internet is undergoing a new round of transformation. Hong Kong stands once again at a historical crossroads, choosing to bet on the value of Web3. With a solid historical foundation, it is believed that Hong Kong's vision of becoming a global virtual asset center is not far off. In the future, OKX will focus on deepening its presence in Hong Kong, continuously increasing investment and expanding recruitment.

However, there are not only opportunities; the process of Web3 from 0 to 1 and from 1 to N is not smooth sailing but rather a winding path amidst cyclical risks, black swan risks, and systemic risks. Events represented by FTX, 3Commas, and LUNA have not only caused significant losses for investors but also severely impacted the confidence of Web3 practitioners and damaged the industry's reputation. Currently, safety and transparency have become the top priorities for industry development.

OKX effectively avoids the risks of centralized auditing through Proof of Reserves (PoR) based on Merkle trees and independent custody address functions, achieving asset transparency comparable to traditional finance. All users can view the results of two PoR audits on the OKX official website and can use self-verification features and open-source tools for validation. Additionally, users can check the cleanliness of OKX's reserves through Defillama.com, achieving a top industry standard of 100%. Through technological enhancements, the transparency of PoR can reach traditional financial audit standards.

In addition to regularly publishing PoR reports, OKX will also leverage technologies like zero-knowledge proofs in the future to continuously improve transparency and prevent the occurrence of black swan events like FTX, striving to protect user asset security.

OKX has never misappropriated user assets in the past, and it absolutely will not now or in the future.

After decades of ups and downs, the crypto industry has struggled to survive from the brink of collapse, transforming from desolation to flourishing, from reckless growth to meticulous cultivation. Regardless of the setbacks and chaos faced, it continues to move forward. It is against this backdrop that OKX firmly believes that Crypto will change the world, focusing on technological innovation, continuously iterating and transforming through crises and opportunities, becoming stronger.

Since its establishment in 2017, OKX's products have been operating safely and stably for over six years, weathering multiple storms in the industry and becoming the leading crypto trading platform for global contract trading. Entering 2022, OKX successfully transformed into a Web3 technology company, launching numerous decentralized flagship products such as NFT markets, DEX, and Wallet, continuously achieving new breakthroughs in the Web3 field. As of now, OKX's centralized and decentralized businesses have covered over 200 countries and regions globally, providing services to more than 50 million users worldwide.

As a steadfast builder in the Web3 industry, OKX is committed to creating top-notch crypto ecological infrastructure services, promoting blockchain and digital assets into the lives of billions of users, making the world more transparent and better.