‘As Much As We Compete, When It Makes Sense to Cooperate, We Do’ – Changpeng Zhao, CTO OKcoin

The ‘big three’ Chinese exchanges – BTC China, OKcoin, and Huobi – have been ramping up their offerings to customers and have demonstrated their desire to expand into lucrative western markets.
In a follow-up to our previous interview with OKcoin, this time we got the chance to talk with the CTO of the Beijing-based exchange, Changpeng Zhao, who shared his thoughts on his company’s recent audit, the NY state BitLicense and a whole lot more.
CoinTelegraph: OKcoin has revealed it has 104% reserves when it underwent an audit last month. Why did you decide to do this audit and are you looking to set a new standard for transparency among exchanges?
Changpeng Zhao: This is a slightly long story. Honestly, we did the proof of reserves in response to user demand. We always wanted to do it, but it was lower priority than the International site or Futures. Around mid August, there seems to be an “organized effort’ in the Chinese community to complain about Margin Trading and Futures, saying these features were causing the Bitcoin price to drop.
We suspect these complains were organized by smaller exchanges which didn’t have these features, but we will never know. Their logic made no sense and it was relatively easy to clear up. But then, the complaints shifted towards lack of proof of reserves, which affected all exchanges in China.
OKCoin responded quickly. With the help of Stefan Thomas, OKCoin is the first one to conduct the audit (on Aug 22nd) and release the upgrade for users to verify their account on Aug 23rd. I wouldn’t say we set a new standard in this case. I believe Greg Maxwell first proposed the Merkle Tree idea and Stefan Thomas has done a lot of work with other exchanges. We simply followed their footsteps.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2014-09-18.