Haider Rafique – OKCoin Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey Rob McNealy here. And today we are talking to Hyder Rafiq, he is the global Chief Marketing Officer of oak a coin, which is an American based cryptocurrency exchange. And you don’t hear a lot about American exchanges too often, because they’re just frankly, aren’t many of them. But I wanted to get his take on the crypto world. And so well, let’s welcome to the show. Hi, there. How are you today?
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
I am. Well, thanks for having me, too.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I appreciate you coming on the show today. I think based on some of our earlier talks, you got a lot of really, really good insights. And I wanted to share some of those their audience. Before we kind of jump into that though, can you give us a little bit about your background? How did you get into the crypto space? And how did you join the ok coin team.
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
My experience with crypto started when I left Microsoft, I believe it was 2014. And I was playing around with an e commerce idea that we had with a two engineers from Microsoft, we ran into a payments problem. Most of our customers were coming from China, South Korea, India and those markets. And by allowing Bitcoin as a form of payment, we were able to increase the amount of orders we were able to fulfill on on our e commerce platform. So that was my first exposure to crypto and Bitcoin. I ended up working for a few years in enterprise enterprise Product Marketing, b2b product marketing for a software company, only to find myself in 2017, like most of us and the sense of urgency that hey, I should actually go work in crypto, it’s more exciting than than what I’m doing. I got fortunate I ended up becoming the first head of growth@blockchain.com spend two years they’re building out their growth function, their their marketing function, and also their monetization while I was there, and I was hooked, I was in the rabbit hole deep. When I decided to leave blockchain I was looking for the next gig I wanted to take on was something ideally at an exchange. And I came across Okay, coin long with a few others and Okay, coin was fairly unique in what they were trying to build. And, and the leadership was was, you know, one that I really resonated with. So that’s, that’s how I ended up at Ok, coin. There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on here.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what would you say differentiates Okay, coin from some of its other competitors, both globally, and you know, domestically?
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
So we are a Global Exchange? A lot, oftentimes, the question I get is, are you guys the US entity of because you’re now headquartered in the US? Are you a US entity? For Okay, coin? Are you similar to say, for example, by Nance us, and we’re not, we’re actually truly a global exchange. And the difference is, we’re actually headquartered in the US, in San Francisco, the way we differentiate ourselves is ultimately at a very macro level. The reality is Rob, we all have a lot of choices. When you think about buying crypto, whether you buy crypto through a wallet product, or you buy through an exchange, there’s just so many brands out there for anyone to choose from, what we try to do differently is we try and ultimately create an experience that is going to be really meaningful for the customers. We’re on that journey. Are we there hundred percent? Not yet. But we’re working really hard towards essentially differentiating on customer experience. So part of that means we’re not going to maliciously charge customers, fees, high fees you’re seeing that happen in the industry. So our fees are very competitive in the industry. We’re about one of the lowest fees exchanges out there. We’re also Fiat based exchange for for retail investors who don’t know that language, it’s essentially the ability for anyone to link their USD account, most say your chase or your Wells Fargo account very easily with the crypto exchange just like you would with any traditional brokerage firm like TD Ameritrade or fidelity, and being able to make a deposit and use that deposit to buy and sell and trade crypto. So in addition to that, we’re constantly adding new high quality projects and assets on our exchange, we’re giving investors and traders exposure to those to those emerging investment opportunities. Generally, when we step back from all of this, I think the ultimate goal for okay coin is to be the best customer service and customer experience. And like I said, we have a we have a long way to go.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So one of the things that you know, I see is has been a barrier to adoption of cryptocurrency. It has been the difficulty Using crypto the on ramps to user experience user interface, what are some of the things that you’re doing with ok coin that maybe helps that out a little bit and simplifies that for more unsophisticated investors or people that are new to cryptocurrency?
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
Yeah, the relationship I would share with you is when you think back 20 years ago, and there weren’t any digital brokerage products, or if there were very few people used it. Typically an investor with some disposable income and savings, and a portfolio would go through a financial adviser that called him up and say, hey, how should I How should I get exposure to the markets? What should I invest in? You know, that kind of thing. And that financial advisor would tell you how to allocate your you know, how to allocate your your savings, essentially, with digital brokerage firms, that sort of paradigm changed a little bit. People want to believe that they can actually take ownership of their investment decisions. So now you’re seeing this over the last two decades, you’re seeing a wave of retail investors, people with disposable income and savings, signing up for these brokerage platforms, and learning about what are bonds? How do I buy stock really easily? How do I get exposure to x company or that company? How do I read earnings reports, so on and so forth. So the user now the customer now is a lot more savvy than the customers a generation or two ago, they’re more familiar with these financial tools than they were previously. crypto is hard. There are a couple of aspects of crypto that have been really challenging for us onboarding, a big wave of customers with disposable income with an appetite for investment exposure. The reasons are like You teased up. Historically, it’s been really hard because of regulations and compliance and what have you to work with banks that that world has changed a little bit. Now you have products like plaid, you can integrate with and it’s really easy for anyone to use their credit card or their bank account acth rather, to fund their account. This is as simple as, say, downloading the Uber app and linking your your bank account to it. So you can start using that app on a regular basis. So the world looks much easier now than it was say back in 2017, when it was really hard to get get to, you know, purchasing crypto somewhere. And even if you did it, the trust factor wasn’t there. So a lot of people kind of shied away from it. So that has become easier. I think the part that really still needs a lot of work is oftentimes what I see having worked at Now, second, crypto company and advisor view in the middle is we are still using nomenclature and language as if we’re speaking to engineers, as if we’re speaking to people who actually understand crypto already have been in it since since its formation. But what we’re not doing a great job of is rewriting the way we we talk to our customers in a way that they understand. And customer you know their way, okay, coin looks at customers is a couple of different ways. We look at customers as folks who have not had any exposure to crypto, they’ve heard about it at family dinners or to a friend or to their financial advisor. And they’re intrigued. They wanted to sign up for a trusted platform, one that they feel secure, their money’s not just going to evaporate, somebody is going to just you know, get off the radar and their money’s gone. And then there’s another segment of people which, which is, you know, essentially people who’ve actually been trading a little bit here and there. They’re not professional traders, they have a full time job. But they like the aspect of trading. They’re a little more savvy. And even for them. This crypto language that we have, is sort of new and intimidating oftentimes. And then you’ve got the third category, which is like folks that are just day traders. This is what they do and live in breed. And what we’re finding is even those folks, that segment of people who haven’t traded crypto previously come into the crypto ecosystems and they’re kind of lost, they have to spend a lot of time educating themselves on you know, what does defy mean? ledger mean, or what is an explorer, all this kind of stuff. So a lot of the things that we’re trying to do at ok coin are not there yet, is fundamentally create a product create an experience that welcomes everyone. Any investor any trader, not just the crypto traders or investors who’ve been in it, and have high conviction and understand some of these things.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think one of the things you, I think are kind of alluding to is is the ease of use and that abstraction I agree with you, most of us in the crypto industry, we take for granted that our audience understands, you know, all these weird nuanced things about the technology and the language. But I think if we look at how we can abstract that away, I think that’s important. And I think, you know, crypto projects would be best served if they tried to figure out how not to educate people, I think that’s really difficult, right? To try to educate people on a new technology. People, for instance, don’t know how credit card work, you know, they don’t know all the middlemen, the swift technology and all that kind of stuff. We don’t when people don’t know that, they just know their credit card works. And I think that’s one of the things that I see it been missing from the conversation with dealing with the masses, is, you know, not about how we educate. But I think we need to focus on, you know, how do we abstract all that technical stuff that people really don’t need to know, in order to leverage and use the technology? What do you think?
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
I agree with you, I think a lot of the early projects that start that actually are trying to build or have a great utility or a use case, are often creating the project or the product in a way that captures the network that’s really fully sold in and knee deep in this stuff, because it’s easier for them, to onboard into a product, give them feedback, so on and so forth. So you have these like pockets of networks, and and communities that are being built around each of these protocols or assets or projects. And those folks are not your retail investor. So you keep seeing a shift of like these 3040 50 million, you know, crypto users around the world who go from project to project, what I’m not seeing is this like high velocity of increase in adoption. We have a lot of people in the world, not just 3040 50 million people. And I think that that onboarding new customers and new retail is not happening. My fear, oftentimes, maybe fear is not the right word is competitively speaking, we don’t necessarily focus on competition, we focus on customer experience. But as a marketer, I don’t worry about you know, other exchanges or other wallets and what they’re going to do or what have, you might sometimes oftentimes, my worry is that we’re in crypto, we’re doing all the hard work from an engineering standpoint and technology standpoint. And here comes traditional brokerage firms or consumer apps that have the trust of consumers. And they’re going to come in and turn on the knobs and now offer really easy exposure into crypto. And when majority of the market share that’s there to be had for us in crypto. I think that’s I think that’s the biggest risk to crypto industry is traditional finance and FinTech coming in and reaping the benefits of what crypto engineers have been building over the last 10 years or so.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you know, I think crypto is doing it to itself, though, to be honest. And I’ve been in this space for more than three years now, which is in dog years is a long time. Right? And, but as a project, you know, I I’m always looking at what other projects are doing or not doing, as far as you know, doing outreach to other communities outside of the existing crypto community. And at least with us, we’ve tried to focus on with TUSC to not cannibalize. I’m not trying to steal people’s I’m not trying to steal people from Bitcoin, right? I’m not trying to steal a theory of people into our and bring them in our community. That’s not our focus, our focus is bringing in people that aren’t already not in crypto, and and I think one of the reasons people aren’t doing it is hard. Okay, it’s hard to go and do that marketing. It’s hard to go knock on doors and do traditional sales. And I think I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. I think one of the reasons is developers and engineers hate those activities. They don’t typically like to do business development and sales and marketing. And so they don’t, but I think the other thing is that going out and going out and knocking on doors, kind of goes against the ethos of decentralization, because now you have a centralized sales and marketing function. And a lot of people don’t like doing it. It’s hard. And I think, and I do believe long term, the projects that exist now that start focusing on those activities are going to be the long term winners. And I agree with you, I think is is it’s inevitable that traditional finances coming into the space, the question is, who’s going to be left standing after they do? And I think that those are things that people in the crypto world probably really need to think about.
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
Agree, I absolutely agree with you. I think it’s gonna be an interesting next few years. There’s so much opportunity for all of us, I think, to to get out of our comfort zone and, and, you know, see what we’ve not typically been comfortable with doing. I think there’s this sentiment in Silicon Valley or in tech or even in crypto. If you build they will come. Well, the reality with that that notion is, if you build and they will come takes you to a certain point in your product, then you hit a saturation point, take a look at Uber, they were running marketing campaigns, meaning they were creating flyers and shipping them to people at their homes at a certain period of time. And eventually, Uber was doing out of home billboard ads, they did all kinds of marketing to get to becoming a household brand name. All products do. eBay did it. PayPal has done it. I think I think my hope is that crypto is, you know, not just that, okay, coin, but the entire industry gets out of that comfort zone and realizes that if any of us want to become a household brand name, we’re gonna have to look at the playbooks of previous consumer brands who’ve done it really successfully. And what have they done that were reluctant to do? And, you know, how can we learn from them?
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s interesting, I read an article not too long ago, about that exact thing, like what are the top crypto or sorry, what are the top tech companies do to get their first you know, 10,000 users. And it’s pretty interesting to see all the all the little legwork that those guys had to do. And and you wouldn’t even think that those guys were hustling. But every one of those guys hustle, they’d been even watching what Etsy did and Uber and Airbnb and some of these projects, it’s a really good good little historical research project, if you or anybody in the audience has time to look at it. And we have, because we believe that is going to be important. And you have to have a plan to do that. Because I you know, I am like, I’m not a developer. So I think of things a little differently. I’m more of a marketer, like you. And when you go and look at, you know, I view crypto, even a decentralized crypto projects, they’re still a product, right? They’re still a service and used and they’re not somehow above the laws of marketing or supply and demand. And this is where that like, it’s, it’s interesting, because there’s a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley, they get this right, these tech engineers and these tech companies get that. And it seems like there’s it just hasn’t really translated yet to the crypto projects. And I really don’t know why that is yet. But I still think that there’s a lot of opportunity there for the the crypto products that do do that. And I think in the next probably five years or so, I think the projects that do focus on those things are going to be coming out in front after the hype and, and what I was saying earlier is about crypto is doing it to itself is that we’re getting all excited about you know, I would argue a lot of these defy projects and Ico kind of projects, they take away from the attention from the you know, the more legitimate, you know, projects that are doing the dirty work and focusing on just, you know, wheels down kind of stuff, but and I think we we’re cutting our own legs off, so to speak, because we’re focusing on just getting rich quick in these really obnoxious, you know, ROI of yield farming and things like that. And that takes all the excitement away from like, Oh, you guys are actually building something long term. And I don’t know what to do about that. Like, I can’t control that, of course. But I mean, what do you think? I mean, you’re an exchange, I know, you guys have been listing a lot of defy projects lately as well. And is this something that’s gonna be a permanent thing? Or is this just you know, the fact is, you know, we’re writing other hype cycle.
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
It’s a bit of both, I think, but don’t quote me on this, because I’m not an economist. I think the way I look at it is the other day, I got an ad in, in Gmail, my gmail account, which was from Marcus by Goldman Sachs, and it had this interesting message, which was, you know, get the highest yield on your savings, if you deposit to Marcus. And we we offer a yield higher than national average. So I went on their website, and the yield that they were offering on deposits was point 6%, I believe. And, you know, it occurred to me having been deepened, defied now, especially the last like month or so, going through our listing process. We have crazy numbers and defy reality is again, what does defy even mean to a regular person? Do we even need to say that it’s a defy product when we market this stuff? Or do we actually focus on the utility we focus on, hey, if you put x money in, here’s the API you can earn. And here’s why it’s important. You know, we’re in an economic downturn, there’s that really high unemployment rate, people are depleting their savings. You know, the markets sort of really volatile. So people are looking at other instruments in which they can protect their investment and their savings and in dire times, Have an outlet where they’re able to creatively earn, earn money for the lack of better term. We offer and defy their protocols offering 60% APR even more than that, right? And sure, there’s a volatility in that number. But the reality is a way I think about it as a marketer is, this is not about defy, if we go out there, if and when we launch our own earn product. And we go out there and we position our earn products, as Hey, you know, participated in our defi ecosystem or what have you, we’ve failed because again, we’re going after capturing that, that crypto user, not the folks that actually really, really need this stuff that have taken a hit because of COVID, the last six months or so. So if this is true, and how do we position this stuff? Ultimately, the utility is you have exposure to higher API, a ridiculously higher API than what you would find through traditional banks. Mark is being an example. So why don’t we go out there and not include any defy language and just say, subscribe to this or opt into this or put your deposit into this into this product? And you get between this and this percentage API, which is much higher than what you would find in traditional markets? Now, the obvious question, anybody who’s not in crypto among my network asks is, well, what’s the risk? Because crypto has this, you know, the optics and perception that it’s, it’s a, it’s a tulipmania? You know, it’s the Wild West? You know, there’s no regulation, your money can just completely evaporate. I think that world has changed. I think it is a lot more trusted now. For example, okay, coin, all your USD deposits are FDIC insured. So things are things are happening in terms of winning trust from customers, but ultimately, any yield product, high yield product, even if you look at markets, they have this like long, ugly legal disclaimer at the bottom of their landing page of their website, which says something along the lines of this is a really high risk instrument. Be aware. And that’s how we should educate people, retail investors and crypto users about these crypto instruments. Every every crypto asset has its own risk level, I think the best part we can do is a humanize the language focus on our utility, because people largely speaking outside crypto really don’t care about 99.9% of the stuff we talked about. So if I go and tell my mother and father or my uncle or somebody in my family, hey, if you put $10,000 in this instrument, you will you will have the potential to get exposed to 50% plus KPI. Suddenly I have their attention. Okay, great. Now I’ve done the first part. The second part is I need to warn them hey, by the way, this is a high risk instrument, don’t put all your savings in it be responsible, get the right level of exposure, I never go tell my friends, hey, buy bitcoin and just spend everything you have and just buy bitcoin and just keep buying Bitcoin. I don’t say that I what I tell people in my network is if you have a portfolio and you’re building a portfolio, make sure you have exposure to crypto, and I tell them about the high value assets and the thesis behind them. And then it’s up to you and your risk appetite, how much exposure you want. Is it 5%? Is it 10% maybe you have higher conviction, you want to go a little higher, but I think that’s generally how we should all explain this stuff if we really want to attract the broader market.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I agree and so I you know, personal financial literacy is kind of one of my little you know, pet peeves in the United States and, and when I see people saying I’m all in on crypto that scares me To be honest, because I think that’s how people get really, really wrecked. And, and and definitely I’m very pro crypto. But I also am very pro This is super high risk in a lot of these projects. And and I don’t think a lot of people are good at assessing risk. And I don’t think a lot of projects, kind of point that out. But I think that’s one of the things that I see as a kind of a thread that weaves through the crypto world is that you get a lot of people that are not financially literate, that are investing or mal investing or investing too much in things. And and ultimately, I don’t like seeing people get hurt because of that. And I wish more crypto projects would say what you’re saying is figure out a port, you know, you should have savings outside of crypto In other words, and you should have investments outside of crypto, it’s prudent to do that. And I’m glad to hear that you at least philosophically also agree with that. And I think I think it’s important and I think you’re right. I think we need humanize that language. Um, I know we’re getting close on time but….
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
Banks By the way, are not not doing it any or traditional brokerage firms are also not like the you know, the North Star you want to look at, for example, if you sign up for TD Ameritrade or any of the brokerage firms out there, and you have to see $100,000 deposit in your account and you’re day trading, you’re going in and out of positions. Eventually, very quickly, TD Ameritrade will say, hey, by the way, Rob, you know, we see you have 100,000, how about we give you margin, how about your five for margin, so you can trade more. And I think like, getting it back quickly, and I speak, I say this from experience, there was a time that I had some disposable income. And I started day trading. And it was scary how quickly I started to get that five x 10 x leverage from from one of the brokerage firms that I was trading on. So my point is here, it’s not that crypto needs to take that responsibility. These tools have now become consumerized, you now don’t have the financial advisor or the middleman warning you. Hey, Rob, be careful what you’re doing here. So now you have access to these really complex instruments that typically were, you know, designed for professional traders or investors. Now people like you and I can sign up for it. And within a couple of minutes, we’re off to a start. So I think the responsibilities across the board and finance we all need to do a better job of driving responsible investing behavior.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
You know, I couldn’t agree with you more on that either. I really, I’m really glad to hear you say that. So Hyder, where can people find out more about you? And okay, coin?
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
So, my Twitter is HaiderSF, it’s pretty easy to find me. But I think more importantly, for your audience, I would I would want them to come on. OKCoin and give us a try. We do have the lowest fees. Unlike the challenges that other exchanges are facing in crypto, we have really low downtime, most of our downtime is related to announced maintenances. So what will not happen is the market is hot and you’re trying to place a trade. And suddenly you can claim as I say that worlds are locked and your deposits are locked or you know, the fees are like just ridiculous. We’re we’re trying to build a trusted platform we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of high quality assets to add. We have a lot to improved in terms of our user experience. But I can assure everyone that we pay attention to every customer. We’re looking at everyone’s experience and we’re trying to make it better. So if you’re ultimately looking for an experience that’s trusted, and you’re gonna you’re going to be heard. I think I would give Okay, quite a trial,
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
either. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know you’re busy and I do appreciate your time.
Haider Rafique – OKCoin
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Talk to you soon.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And folks, I’ll have all those links up at Rob McNealy calm and make sure you hit that subscribe button. We got a lot of other great shows coming up and you’re gonna want to stick around and thank you so much and you have a great day.
