“Price of Bitcoin is heavily speculated and will cause fluctuations in price” An interview with MCDEX co-founder Jean Miao

Who are the typical users of your platform as of 2021?

We have both retail and institutional users who are transacting on MCDEX this year. As there is extremely low slippage due to our efficient AMM design, institutions can make large trades with minimal cost. 

What was your motivation to create a decentralized platform?

Previously we were doing professional mining and trading derivatives contracts. As we worked on the trades, we realised that trust can be a big issue and we also do not have margin. What we did was just communicate by email on the expiry date to deliver the contract. This requires mutual trust and there is high counterparty risk involved. That is when we realized by staking the margin into a smart contract, it can resolve the trust issue. This is exactly how decentralization and DeFi benefit users. 

Are decentralized platforms less secure compared to centralized ones?

Decentralized exchanges offer more protection than centralized exchanges. A considerable risk of trading with centralized crypto exchanges is hackers. They can hack the third party which uses private keys to access all the funds of the users, and users could lose all of their deposit. 

Several such incidents have occurred previously, and centralized exchanges put a lot of effort into making themselves more secure for their clients. With a decentralized exchange, there’s no risk of hacking and losing one’s funds due to such activities. 

Decentralized platforms are more secure because there’s no possibility of multiple users losing their funds due to a single cause unless it’s related to the smart contract. 

How do you think centralized and decentralized crypto platforms will change in the long term? Is there a trend towards the transition of centralized platforms to decentralized?

Personally, I think there is high possibility that in the long term, the centralized platform will transfer to decentralized ones. That could happen in several forms, for example, build another chain, like bsc.  I believe DEX and CEX will coexist for a long while.  So for centralized platforms, there will be multiple approaches in the future to explore the decentralized world.

What are your plans for the near future?

We are fully focused on executing a successful trading mining program. Thereafter we will focus on our MCDEX v4 which will have the cross margin feature and also future plans on cross-chain deployment apart from Arbitrum and Binance Smart Chain that we are currently deployed on.

How do you see the development of your platform in the long term, for example, by 2030?

By then, the decentralized exchanges should be much more mature, in terms of user base, organic adoptions, etc. MCDEX ecosystem, built upon our protocol, shall be mature as well. With many other protocol building upon our protocol, many more participants will be able to be stakeholders of MCDEX ecosystem. Currently, we have already been working on building MCDEX Ecosystem. For example, Akro, a protocol working on basis trading will launch shortly. With Akro, users can simply deposit their funds in Akro protocol and the protocol will ultilize basis trading strategy to generate profits for users. Such use cases will expand a lot in the near future.

Do you have any predictions for Bitcoin price?

$10k by the end of this year：）

In your opinion, what is the reason for the current fluctuations in Bitcoin price?

There are a lot of retail users who have entered the market and since cryptocurrency is less mature of a market compared to equities and bonds, price of Bitcoin is still heavily speculated on and will cause fluctuations in prices and high volatility.