From an engineer to Coin98 Founder - Unicorn of Vietnam

Mr. Thanh Le was the first Vietnamese being invited to be in a podcast with Multicoin Capital which is one of the most successful Venture Capitals in the crypto-verse. In the podcast with Mable Jiang - host of 51% Podcast, he shared about the development and the future vision of Coin98.

In this article, we will break down the podcast to get an in-depth perspective. Therefore, we can further understand the ultimate goal Coin98 is heading to.

Introduction

1. Coin98 has been developing at a fast pace to reach out to global users. As the founder of Coin98, would like to introduce a bit about yourself?

Thanh Le was an embedded system engineer, his first start-up was a research lab at university. He, with friends at the lab, co-founded a business to provide services related to software engineering to other companies in Europe, the Middle East, etc. His second start-up was an e-commerce brand to work with Alibaba and sell products on Amazon. 

In 2017, Thanh was into the crypto market and started finding opportunities. Initially, Coin98 was just a research team to find investment opportunities. Over time, the market went down, many left the market, but he and the team believed in blockchain technology. He switched part-time to full-time, focusing on developing the Coin98 company until today.

2. You have multiple products under your Coin98 brand such as Wallet, Insights, Analytics, DeFi applications incubated by your Coin98 Venture. How do they work with each other?

Coin98 has 3 primarily strong arms.

Coin98 Labs it’s like a manufacturing factory where there are talented researchers and engineers. They look for the existing problems in the market and solve them for users.

Coin98 Network (Media) focuses on educating and marketing Coin98 products. Coin98 is a startup from Vietnam so the hard part here is to make a product to acquire a large user base. Therefore, Coin98 Network plays a very important role to attract more users come to our ecosystem.

Furthermore, users give feedback for Coin98 products to us so we react as fast as possible to improve our products. For example, at the beginning of Coin98 Wallet development, users gave feedback to us to add/edit multiple features that were far from our plans.

Coin98 Venture is focusing on bootstrapping new projects and supporting builders. How everything is built in this industry, exposure of Coin98 Wallet because more projects integrate Coin98 Wallet with their protocols and DeFi products. At first, our partners didn’t know about Coin98 Ventures. As time goes on, we understand each other and have very close relationships with other partners.

Overall, we are building an ecosystem on top of blockchain where users with our products will have to go nowhere else.

See Also: Introducing Coin98 - An Overview of the Coin98 Ecosystem

Global Customers of Coin98

3. Where do Coin98 users mostly come from and how can you communicate and support that amount of customers?

Back in the day, 60%-80% were from Vietnam. Now it is quite diversified:

• 30% from Vietnam.
• 40% from Asian countries.
• 10% from the United States and developed countries.
• 20% from Turkey, Brazil, etc.

In the beginning, the team was small and we listened to people on Twitter and Email. Then we got bigger and we needed to support users via Live Chat. 

Live chat box is available 24/7 in the Coin98 Wallet App and on the Coin98 website for locals and globals. 

• In the app, click the Coin98 logo on the main screen to get support
• On the Coin98 website, click the chat box in the right bottom corner to get support.

With this live chatbox, we can track every problem and listen to our users.

4. What is the different behavior between South East Asia vs Turkey or the US?

Vietnam, Turkey, Brazil, and other Southeast Asian countries,... are quite short-term investment opportunities, they can take high risks but they want to exchange high rewards in a very short time. 

Other developed countries like Australia, prefer much safer products like farmings or low-risk investment opportunities. Those investments will generate a fair amount of returns while having low risks of investment loss.

They can do it, we can too

5. What are the features of Coin98 Wallet? Besides your products, are there any interesting products on blockchain in South East Asia?

Band protocol, Alpha, Kyber, Axie are all great and Mr. Thanh Le loves working with them. We got inspired by those projects to build a new one. They prove that Asian people can build great products on their own which can globally reach out. 

In one conference, when seeing those prominent projects in Asia, he thought that they could do it then we could too. As a result, we are being driven by the motivation to build our products such as Coin98 Wallet.

Furthermore, people use Coin98 Wallet not only for storing value but also interacting with DeFi protocols and NFT projects on multiple blockchain platforms/protocols. We’re supporting chains that might not be available on other wallets. 

EVM vs non-EVM blockchains and cross-chain bridges

6. Support EVM, and non-EVM blockchains, how do you allocate resources to support that many blockchains at the same time?

The future of blockchain will be multi-chain since there might be thousands of blockchains. While the gas fee of Ethereum is too high, as a user, you want to do things on multiple different blockchain platforms. Therefore, we’re supporting lots of blockchains.

It took more than a year to build a framework that helps us support more chains at scale. In the early days, it took us a month or 2 months to integrate a new chain into our products. Then we were able to reduce the process from 2 weeks to 1 week and now it only takes one or 2 days to integrate a new chain 

⇒ New blockchain integration is not a big problem for us now. 

There will be more and more new blockchains. They are willing to spend money and effort bootstrapping their ecosystems. Therefore, we can be the first wallet to support those blockchains. It’s not just about layer-1 blockchain but layer-2 blockchains such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and recently Boba Network as well. 

Supporting blockchains at the same time brings us huge rewards. For example, if we integrate 10 blockchains and 1 out of 10 might bring the next thousand users.

⇒ We consider it a successful decision for us.

Solana and Binance Smart Chain(BSC) are the biggest and the most successful integrations for us as they bring numerous users to our ecosystem.

7. Why does your team want to build a bridge since there are other bridges among blockchain platforms?

For partners we work with, we can provide bridge service to them to transfer tokens among blockchains. 60%-80% of the time people use Coin98 Wallet to convert tokens on BSC, Solana, Near,... We’re available on all chains.

To fulfill the demand for swapping tokens, we’re building our own bridge and supporting other bridges so that users can swap any kind of tokens among different blockchains.

8. What do you think of incubated projects on Solana and Terra?

Firstly, we want to support projects on Solana. And we’re looking for builders offering lending, synthetic assets, or margin services to integrate into Coin98 Wallet. Our C98 is available on Ethereum, BSC, Solana. 

To expand the utility of C98, in the future C98 would be deposited as collateral on lending platforms of multiple blockchains.

The future of blockchain and the ultimate state of a crypto wallet

9. DeFi super app like Coin98 Wallet, because of composability in DeFi, we might not need this app supper anymore, what do you take on this?

Coin98 Wallet is going to be a super app. We're focusing on this thesis. In very few cases, multi-chain Dapps can beat Dapps running only on a single blockchain. For example, Sushi is deployed on BSC and Polygon but users prefer to use PancakeSwap and QuickSwap since those platforms have more liquidity.

The contribution of multi-chain Dapps to a specific ecosystem is less than the native Dapp running only on that chain. On one side, multichain Dapps can bring users from bigger chains to smaller ones.

In terms of resource allocation and support allocation, they’ll have to put in lots of effort and resources to maintain the multi-chain platform. While the native project often gets supported from the blockchain foundation, meaning it’s better than multi-chain.

A wallet interface supports more chains and products. Since the wallet owns the most user base. The wallet can capture 10% of users of one specific chain but they connect to hundreds of blockchains

⇒ A positive-sum game when we share the same user base and attract more users from traditional finance to DeFi.

Users cannot use Metamask on non-EVM blockchain like Fantom or Solana. So users need to use 2 different types of wallets to access Dapps.

Before building a bridge, Coin98 Wallet was built to solve this problem by providing an all-in-one interface. All blockchains, protocols, products in one single wallet app and one single interface with one similar user experience.

⇒ A feature aggregator

10. What do you think of the ultimate state of wallet? Like all gains like a browser?

The future would be like. The users don't need to care about their assets on what chain or protocol. They can use one seedphrase to store all assets. Similar to using Centralized Exchange or custodial wallets. 

When technology is mature, the wallet will have the most user base and the most influence, and also take the most market surge, when most people have access to DeFi and metaverse.

We’re trying to achieve that with millions of users. 

Any builder in this space wants to achieve mass adoption. We realize that it's easy to switch between protocols but it's hard to switch between wallets, they’re too busy to do that. They want to store assets in one single wallet. For example, Metamask and you have to export to import into 2 or many other wallets

In the future, it’s the winner-take-it-all game, who can serve most users who will take it all. We’re doing whatever we can to put Coin98 into that position.