EliteX, Behind the Scenes
Interview with Haidong Liu EliteX CTO
By Arjuna @ EliteX Media
The EliteX Exchange team is working hard to bring version 1.0 to fruition, with its launch slated for July. Leading up to the launch EliteX will also be adding several more coin listings to the exchange, so keep an eye on our twitter and reddit accounts for announcements. In the meantime we continue with another behind the scenes profile, giving a little insight into the EliteX team. Coinciding with the launch of 0.5, we interviewed the EliteX CEO Leo Yu. This time we talk to our CTO Haidong Liu, the main man when it comes to the all the technical workings and product development for the exchange.
Back when you were studying computer science, what kinds of projects did you most want to be involved in?
I took a lot of time to study knowledge related to software compilers, and I wanted to work on some basic framework, system service or even create a new computer language. In my first job, I wrote a component to transfer SQL queries from Oracle dialect to SQL server dialect which is still used by ERP (Enterprise Resouce Planning) systems now. My favorite projects are those which not only enable end users with specific functions, but also benefit other programmers to be more efficient.
You have a very extensive background in the finance industry, working on ecommerce and quantitative trading engines. How do you see the industry developing?
Rapid economic growth in China has provided more opportunities for people trying to work in different industries. For example, the hedge fund industry tends to focus on data security and integrity, while the e-commerce industry puts more effort into user experience and digital marketing. Fintech, generally speaking, provides the finance industry with software, cloud or other technologies. If you take a look at the fintech industry right now, most companies are using technology to improve efficiency based only on existing financial business processes or models. For example, moving loan services from banks to an online platform. I believe the fintech space has huge potential to innovate and grow with more and more creative services.
You’ve worked for other blockchain projects before EliteX, what interested you in the crypto and blockchain space?
My first exposure to blockchain was BTC. As a developer with fintech experience, I was intrigued that it was an open source platform which issued a digital asset used for payment; that it could work without any government endorsement. But if you look at history, both in China and western countries, there has been a long history of folk currencies that were used to exchange value between people, and functioned just like a market economy.
Before blockchain it was rare to see an entire industry made up of open source projects, the core data hosted by people who don’t know each other, with funds raised from non-traditional investment sources, and critical decisions arrived at via a community rather than board of directors or shareholders. All these core values of blockchain will fundamentally change how business runs and the way people collaborate with each other. BTC and ETH, for example, have attracted a lot of attention, the next phase will be how to utilise blockchain technology into concrete business scenarios. It’s just like in the time before the likes of Google and Amazon were big established players in the tech world, no one was sure how online services could be profitable and create a whole new market. Now we are at that starting point with www.elitex.io, which will service the Lisk ecosystem, and play an important role in supporting the development of Lisk sidechain DAPPs and other blockchain applications.
What challenges have you faced, working as a developer in crypto?
We have found that it’s quite challenging to build a platform to exchange different coins/tokens, because each chain defines its own data structure, API specifications, and time frame to produce blocks. One of the big advantages of blockchain is the way it facilitates exchanges of value, but the difference between chain structures makes it difficult to implement. You can see that the top crypto exchanges are all centralised platforms because it’s easier to handle critical processes which still require traditional solutions, while providing a user friendly service. For example, KYC processes and the order matching engine. Overall, they still follow legacy trading system infrastructure in which all the customer data, trading and order handling systems are hosted together. The security of digital assets is also a big issue, where huge amounts of assets are managed by one team, so there are risks that need to be properly addressed and secured, from both a technical and ethical standpoint. That’s why we’re seeing so many projects working on cross-chain solutions and many centralised exchanges developing their own chains to solve this issue.
How do you see the future of blockchain and crypto, with wider adoption. What will change?
The way computer technology has been used by businesses, and the relationship between user and developer has changed in two phases. In the first phase, a company or individuals paid for a software licence, owned the copyright of software, and hardware was maintained by users. During the second phase systems migrated online, people instead subscribed to services and permission to use the functions. Blockchain technology will bring in the third phase, where the system/platform’s management is open and dynamic. Every blockchain project can be an ecosystem. Users, owners, and developers can each contribute to the chain’s community. As more companies migrate new projects to blockchain, more people will become aware of its advantages, in terms of exchange of value, privacy protection, logistics, source tracking etc.
What role do you see EliteX playing in that crypto future?
If we take BTC to be proof of concept for blockchain in general, Ethereum is a platform that works for specific business scenarios. But, each faces issues with transaction rates and scaling, as well as being difficult to customise. On the other hand, Lisk is a blockchain project that is highly suited to real world business use cases, with the innovation of sidechains and an SDK for regular developers to build DAPPs that run as a Lisk sidechain. We believe that it has enormous growth potential. EliteX will play an important role to help these projects, listing tokens on our exchange, spreading awareness to more people and attracting more users. For the EliteX exchange itself, it will continue making improvements in user experience, build new products, as well as develop a DEX (decentralised exchange) in the near future. We are working hard on the current exchange platform, which still needs a lot of work and improvement before we can say it is finished. What we aim to achieve is to make using all the exchange functions of our platform seamless for the user.
If anyone has questions, or wishes to discuss related topics with Haidong, feel free to email him at haidong.liu@elitex.io.
Arjuna is Community Lead at EliteX Exchange www.elitex.io, email: media@elitex.io.
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