AMA Recap: Ontology x Phemex
On July 17th, Jack Tao, CEO of Phemex, was invited to join an AMA with our Co-Founder Andy Ji in the Ontology English Telegram to talk about zero-fee spot trading on Phemex and much more!
Check the chat message history of AMA here.
Section 1: Top 10 pre-selected questions
Q1. Why the name Phemex?
Jack: Excellent question! Our name is inspired by the Greek Goddess Pheme, the personification of fame and the public’s voice. “Mex”, of course, just stands for mercantile exchange. We aspire to be the most trustworthy platform, one that is open and transparent. We want to represent and address the needs of our users and the crypto industry as a whole. Everything we do is with the best interest of our customers in mind. This is why we believe this name is well suited to represent our philosophy.
Q2. How are you different from other platforms?
Jack: Thank you for the question! Phemex is certainly different from other exchanges or trading platforms. Although we provide similar services, since our inception, we’ve diligently followed 4 core values.
- The client always comes first. Too often have we seen other exchanges prioritizing profits over service. To us, this is simply unacceptable. This core value, which also happens to be one of MorganStanley’s, is exemplified through our excellent customer service, the availability of our leadership team, and our openness to communicate.
- We strive to improve every day. We are never satisfied with what we have achieved and we are not afraid to change in order to lead the industry. The recent addition of our Spot Trading services and Zero-Fee model is a great example of this.
- Mutual benefit. We see fair and mutually advantageous partnerships that can become long term relationships as a key to success. This idea is what has helped us with the incredible number of new payment gateways and coins that we are featuring rapidly, including the Ontology family!
- Giving back. Once again, another one of MorganStanley’s values as well. Whether it’s interesting and educational giveaways like our Satoshi Puzzle, charity work, or better and more affordable services, we will always give back to the community that supports us. We will never forget to remain thankful and humble for this opportunity we have to serve you.
Q3. Who are the people behind Phemex?
Jack: Thanks for asking this, we are always proud to introduce the core members of our team. Besides me as CEO, we have Cecilia Wang as our CMO. Cecilia used to be the CEO of J.C.Moritz. Her company specialized in serving top global management consulting firms and Fortune 500 clients in the areas of private equity and venture capital. With more than 10 years of executive experience in creating, developing, and managing both businesses and teams, Cecilia is undoubtedly one of the reasons for Phemex’s success. Next, we have Yang Du as our Chief Architect. Yang also has extensive experience in the financial industry as a core developer. He worked in Ericsson, MorganStanley, and HKEX for about 12 years. One of his main motivations is his belief that technology is meant to improve and simplify our lives. Having worked closely with Yang for many years, I can confidently say that he is one of the best developers I have ever met. Finally, as our Director of Business Development, we have Federico Variola, a Ph.D. candidate at Fudan University. He actually first encountered Phemex while researching the prospective role of cryptocurrencies in the international community. It wasn’t long after that, he joined our team to become a part of what he describes will be “a fundamental shift in transnational relations and the global economy”.
Q4. What do you think is the advantage of using Phemex than the other trading platforms?
Jack: Besides the core principles and guiding philosophies that differentiate us from others. Our services are also superior in many ways. Take our Zero-Fee Spot Trading and Premium Membership for example. We are the first major exchange to say goodbye to trading fees. While other exchanges will charge you 0.1–0.5% per trade that you make, we instead offer you a premium membership that can cost as low as $7 a month. For active and high volume traders, this means thousands or more in savings. The reason we’ve chosen to lead the industry with this model is once again rooted in our desire to provide better and more accessible services that place our customer’s needs first.
Q5. What are the benefits of @Phemex_official from doing AMA in @OntologyNetwork? What is the strength of the community that @Phemex_official expects?
Jack: As mentioned previously, customer service and open communications are two factors that are very important to us as a company. This is why we wanted to provide this opportunity to the Ontology community to get to know us better and ask us any questions that you may be curious about. We are always incredibly happy to partner with a promising project that has a passionate community. This AMA is only the first step in our initiative to merge our communities and grow together as we ensure mutual success.
Q6. Is there a plan to list futures trading for ONT on the Phemex platform?
Jack: Yes! We are diligently working to develop an ONT perpetual contract for you and all those interested. Stay tuned with our social media as we will announce more details soon.
Q7. With the recent breach happened on Twitter, What can you say about the security of Phemex? And what ways do Phemex implement to avoid data breach?
Jack: Security is very important to us. We take these types of incidents very seriously. Although we cannot comment on Twitter’s security practices and what led to the recent breach, what we can do, is promise you that both your assets and data are safe with us. In terms of our wallets, we’ve implemented a Hierarchical Deterministic Cold Wallet System which assigns separate cold wallet deposit addresses to each user. All the deposits are periodically gathered in the company’s multi-signature cold wallet via offline signature. Each withdrawal request is rigorously scrutinized by both operators and founders. Based on our sophisticated Wall Street risk control experience, we are able to detect any malicious actions and quickly act to protect the assets of our users and platform. Qualified withdrawal requests are also processed via offline signature, thereby all assets remain 100% stored in a cold wallet system with all operations conducted offline.
In terms of our system, it is deployed on secured on the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Cloud. We have firewalls to separate different zones and machines for different trading purposes. Our internal network access management protocols control the accessibility of one instance to another. Phemex applies restrictions on a system level. In many restricted zones, we only allow whitelisted instances to access the system while the system itself must also be whitelisted.
As far as your account, we use a bank-level double-entry bookkeeping system to ensure account security. Each time a user performs a funding operation, Phemex performs a matching accounting action in two or more accounts to prevent the tampering of records. Through the double-entry bookkeeping mechanism, Phemex can immediately detect if the user’s account has been tampered with. If so, the system will immediately freeze the tampered account and stop all of its pending actions and operations.
Rest assured knowing that our security is top-notch and even in the unlikely event of any incident we have you covered 100%.
Q8. Would you please allow ONT currency to be withdrawn from the platform or will the withdrawal remain for USD and BTC?
Jack: All of our listed tokens, including ONT, can be directly and conveniently withdrawn to the wallets of your choice.
Q9. Can customers get support from PHEMEX support without delivering sensitive personal information? What information do you save on the system? Is it necessary to present the information? How does the system protect users from risks?? (@phonglan1232)
Jack: Absolutely! You will get assistance from our customer support at any point you desire without the need of providing any sensitive information. Our service has no KYC. This means that when you create an account, you do not have to provide your personal information. Likewise, when you request our assistance, you only need your user ID and the email address you used to create the account, but again, none of these are associated with your personal identity.
Q10. Will a Phemex token be created and what obstacles stand in the way of that?
Jack: At this time, we have no plans of creating our own token. We instead want to focus our efforts on improving and optimizing the services that we currently provide. In addition, we are more interested in partnering with influential projects such as Ontology to help address other demands that are already present in the crypto industry.
Section 2: Top 5 selected LIVE questions
Q1. I am already using other Trading platforms. Why should I Move to the Phemex Platform? What Main benefits will I get on the Phemex platform? (@rinnguyen)
Jack: The main benefits of trading on Phemex are as follows:
1) zero trading fee for spot market
2) top liquidity in derivatives trading
3) best performance, no lagging no overloading (we have a youtube demo for that, the only one in the world)
4) best security
5) the best CS among peers.
6) transparency ….
7) more financial products to provide to our members with no change in membership fees, and more and more
Q2. What is the main potential Threat do you see in Blockchain Technology currently? What is the real-life problem Phemex is aiming to solve with Blockchain? (@ashwini_Crypto)
Jack: Well, threat… I would rather say challenges. It is a new, fresh industry. It gives ppl another choice except for fiat. The technology inspired many of us probably a generation. Since it shows a way to build something cool and better. But it has many challenges. TPS, throughputs are still the main challenges we have.
Whether we can fully achieve decentralization or get closer needs time and effort. I do see researchers are working on it, many good projects like Ontology are moving towards those directions. But I do believe blockchain tech is one of the most important innovations in this century, no doubt. it changes many ppl’s careers and lives. and I believe it will be something even bigger and better.
Regarding the Phemex mission, we want everyone can catch opportunities and prevent risks in this revolution. Quite simple. Exchanges play a critical role in this industry. The exchange has to be safe, cheap, efficient to help us find true values of cryptos. DeEx is not perfectly ready. CeEx still has lots more to offer if more and more team like us to join the party, this industry will become better and better
Q3. How does Phemex incentivize liquidity in the markets? Does Phemex have in-house market makers to ensure liquidity is consistently provided? What can people do if they are interested in providing liquidity on Phemex? (@armahes)
Jack: We use 3rd party MMers. Top MMer in bitMEX, FTX, Binance, Huobi (ignore my sequence :)), etc. are all MM with us. and there are more connecting. We will soon be one of the top liquidity.
Improving the liquidity on our platform is always a top priority for us. We are currently and continuously working to optimize our services by signing up with more third-party market makers. If you wish to help us in this task, feel free to write to us at marketing@phemex.com and we will discuss any future potential collaboration.
Q4. Community Support & Awareness of Platform is very Important for any Exchange & Trading Platform! So, How do you Evaluate Community Support? What are your plans to achieve more Adoption & awareness of the Phemex Exchange Platform? (@Hoang_NamV)
Jack: We have established several local communities to encourage our users' involvement and we have received great feedback and support from all over the world, if anyone is interested in joining we’d be glad to have you on board.
The Phemex team has established several local communities to encourage their users' involvement and they have received great feedback and support from all over the world if anyone is interested in joining they will be glad to have you on board.
Q5. what success stories have you been able to observe in the time you have been active? Which users have stood out, any particular case interesting? (@lelebakar)
Jack: There are so many. There are so many young generations dedicated themselves to this industry and become extremely successful. Like Vitalik (ETH). One of the biggest MMer among, Huobi, Phemex, Binance was born in 1990, 4 years ago he was struggling to find a job as a developer.
There is a guy in our exchange won xx BTC by just using $2 worth trading welcome bonus. I have a friend in NY, try to build the next generation of blockchain and he has been working on that for 4 years. I mean this new industry is full of excitement and surprises. This is the part I like most. If you dig into it you will find your gold.
Speaking on this collaboration, Andy JI, Ontology’s Co-Founder said:
Ontology is pleased to be listed on Phemex, a revolution in traditional exchange services. After joining the #ZeroFeeFamily, users in the Ontology community can enjoy a better ONT spot trading experience on Phemex.
Find Ontology elsewhere
Ontology website / ONTO website / OWallet (GitHub)
Twitter / Reddit / Facebook / LinkedIn / YouTube / NaverBlog / Forklog
