Harvey Liu Podcast Transcript
Harvey Liu joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Harvey Liu. Harvey Liu is the Chief Executive Officer of Levx Exchange, a crypto exchange created by traders who believe that sharing strategies and successful trades builds a stronger community where everyone wins. A veteran entrepreneur and investment strategist, Harvey brings over 15 years of expertise spanning blockchain technology, venture capital, and financial markets to Levx.
His leadership is defined by a rare combination of technical knowledge, investment acumen, and a community-first philosophy that has shaped Levx’s distinctive approach to cryptocurrency trading. Well, good afternoon, Harvey. Welcome to the show.
Harvey Liu: Hi Brian. Nice to meet you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it.
I know you’re hailing out of China currently near Beijing. I’m in Kansas City. So I so appreciate you for traversing about 13 time zones to get here. That’s just amazing. So Harvey, if you don’t mind, I’m jumping right into your first question. Your path is remarkable. You were among the first wave of Bitcoin investors in China in 2013, then conducted due diligence on early exchanges like Huobi, BTC China, and OKCoin from a leading VC firm, and later spent a decade allocating capital to Web3 as a venture partner before founding Levx.
What did that ground floor view of the industry teach you, and what was the moment you decided to stop investing in exchanges and build your own?
Harvey Liu: Well, yeah, let’s get, let’s all g-go back to about twenty thirteen. I, I, It’s, it’s, it’s a blast, I think, at that time. It’s, it’s basically Wild West for cryptos in China because it’s a very early time.
Not many people actually know about blockchain. And, and I think I was lucky enough because right after I graduate from my business school in France, INSEAD, so I took a actually opportunity back in China to starting as a investment analyst for for local venture capital firm. So I was able to look at lots of actually startups, especially in tech, in internet, and, and I got the opportunity to actually even look at some of those early crypto exchanges, like you mentioned, Huobi.com, OKCoin.
OKCoin actually is a former OKX. So at the time I– this was my first time was looking at this technology, but I quickly understand it, that how blockchain would be very important for the future, especially on the payment side. There’s lots of applications. So I started dive into it, those, and even made my first crypto investment and bought some BTC at that time.
But I was going to actually ad-advise my funds to actually invest in one of those exchanges, because I see the, the huge potential would be. But as you… We already talked about it, like it’s very early stage, it’s not many people actually understands it. So i-it’s really hard to pass the investment committee in, in the, in the funds.
So, so I decided maybe I just invest some of the, the, the, the BTCs at the early time, but I keep studied and, and followed the trends in, in, in, in blockchain at the time. And, and then there’s a opportunity especially as the time goes on during the COVID time, actually, I, I switched my my work to work in Singapore, working for a, a, a foreign venture capital firm, which we started to invest in some of the Web, Web3 projects.
So I interviewed and did some due diligence to over fifty Web3 projects, and I actually got to know many of crypto industry leaders and as well as traders and KOLs. At that time, I think I find it’s, it’s the right time maybe I should started looking at building my own because I got all those years of venture capital experience.
I have technology background. I have the necessary connections. So I was able to assemble a very strong tech team as well as gather the products and, and know the strategy and everything. So I– we were able to s-to start the LabX at that time. That was around 2022 when, when we started. And at the moment, we want to build something actually from the trader side, because I myself is trader, or among my founders or, or the initial founding group, they…
many of them are actually trading cryptos. So we wanted from the trader side and looking at things, develop a platform that actually is, is actually more close to the traders and get more how to say it, more utilities for the traders to be– to let them become successful.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate the backstory, and I know you learned- Yeah
a lot through this time. But c- could … Just to highlight a few things, you referenced that 2013 in crypto as the Wild West there in China. I thought that was interesting.
Harvey Liu: Yeah.
Brian Thomas: You realized that there was a great use case for in this blockchain Web3 space though, and that- that’s interesting, and we’re built on blockchain here as a, as a publication.
I thought that’s really cool. I love this stuff. But you were following trends as you invested in these crypto markets, and then in your time and your research in this industry, you felt that you had the knowledge, the contacts, the technology to start your own exchange, and I think that’s amazing. So I appreciate you sharing the backstory with our audience.
Yeah. Harvey, when you launched LevX in 20- or yeah, 2023, your mandate was blunt: make the first hour effortless, the first trade instructive, and the first risk transparent, even collapsing identity verification to a single ID and selfie validated in under 30 seconds. Why is that onboarding experience so decisive, and how do you balance the tension between speed and thoroughness that most exchanges get wrong?
Harvey Liu: Yeah, I think it backs to the mandate we had at, or, or the original thoughts when we, when we build up the exchange. We want something or we want as a user or trader ourselves, we want the experience to be different or, or I think better in our sense. So, I think first of all I think mm, that when especially in, in the bigger exchanges or, or a traditional financial institutions, you wanna open a bank account, for example.
Even now in the bigger exchange there’s lots of, How do you say? The initial KYC or, or forms you have to fill in. It takes lots of your, your time. I think we realized it, it’s very even from the platform point of view, I think the, the conversion or, or get user who experienced it or, or quickly get into what they, they would want to experience is, is very important.
I think we, we did we did lots of improvement, improvement on the sign-up process and both from the front end and back end, so we have wanted to deliver a, a better experience for the users. At the same time, we’re not really compromising anything regarding security ID checking, verification, all that kind of things.
Because right now, I think the… As the technology improves, we can use lots of AI assistance or, or there’s also third party like Sumsub, we can do identity checkings. All these kind of things we can very efficiently combine them all together and make the sign-up process very smoothly for the users.
At the same times I think we, we also want to W- I think that’s j- only the first part we want to improve the users’ the, the, the sign-up experience. But at the same time, we, we also we will have different levels of KYCs. So for the users, maybe they want more or bigger trades, they want deposit more money, and they want maybe higher withdrawal limits.
And for the security purposes, we, we want those users to maybe just do a higher level of verifications. So it’s both for them saf- for their safety and, and also for the regulatory requirements. So we, we have three le- three levels of KYCs. So, so that’s, that’s how we set up for for the identity verification and everything for the sign-up process.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I, I like this. Yeah. Your foundational mandate for end users is to make it seamless, effortless experience, but your commitment to continuous improvement and security for the customer is paramount, is what I heard while keeping in step, obviously, with the regulatory regulations security, et cetera.
So, I appreciate that. Harvey- Yes … one of LevX’s more novel ideas is reputation-weighted feature voting, where community members who report bugs or create high-value tutorials earn extra influence over the roadmap. How does that actually work, and what have you learned about letting your most engaged traders helps to your product direction rather than deciding everything top-down?
Harvey Liu: This is back to nature when we or the original idea when we f- when we found LabX. As trader ourselves, as some of the founding members, they are whales they are actually experienced investors as well. We all seem to see that when we, When we, when we make some decisions from top down, oftentimes we, we, we re– don’t really actually guess what tr-trader wants.
But as trader, from our side, we also gather ideas and we… as, as a beginning, before we even started the projects, I went out there and talked to many, many of the experienced traders, KOLs in, in crypto world and trying to gather ideas what are they looking for for a new exchange, right? So, so at the start we noticed there is a gap when people trading they want to share some of the trading strategies they want to sh-share their trades and all their entry and, and exit point or, or their, their research in, in certain Web3 projects.
It– I think at the time, especially back in, in twenty thirteen, it definitely there’s not many platform. But later on when Binance came out Binance started to build a, a little bit social part of community side of things. But, but for us, I think this is the, the… one of the major emphasis we, we, we actually roll out when the products features.
We call it we call it exclusive content feeds for for the KOLs. So actually we close– we work very closely with crypto KOLs. For those actually is very well-reputated. We moderate them to trying to generate very useful educational content for our users, for their followers. And within our platform, we build in a area called exclusive, exclusive content for them.
For their followers, they can l-live seeing what their KOLs is trading what kind of entry and exit strategy they would have, as well as some of the charting and, and analysis they’re sharing within the community. So that’s one side, one of ideas we gathered from the traders in the communities when we, when we start building the projects.
And also, as we, we building the projects along, we, we keep getting feedbacks from the traders and, and, and at one point we build a new feature called the multi-trade, where I think we are the one of the f-uh, first exchanges to actually have those feature. What is that is actually for, for… And, and I think for a general exchanges, if you trade Bitcoin, so the BTC-USDT trading pair, you can only open one long position at one leverage at one time.
But our features allows you to, in under the multi-trade mode- You can open a BTC long trade at a different leverage, at different price, at different time. So it allows you to have up to 99 positions o- on one trading pair instead of one. So, so that’s it’s amazing for our KOLs because they often showcase their followers on different strategies, right?
There’s long-term strategies. They, they will ga- go like s- maybe 2X and 3X long positions for longer term. But at the same time, they can also do short-term trading with higher leverage, for example, 50X and, and so on, Bit- Bitcoin trading pair, and they can showcase that with their viewers. And also for entry-level traders, it’s also helpful because sometime they would have different timeframe.
They… This way, they were– they, they will be able to easier manage their trades on that trading pair. So this is one, one of the features or one of the examples we actually benefited from listening to the ideas of the traders or the users. Also, we, we run bug hunting programs. We, we even give out prizes for, for users actually reporting bugs and then maybe giving very useful suggestions.
So that, I think, for us, we want to build a community together and let our users help us to improve, and I think that’s the goal. Yeah.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. Appreciate that. And I think it was interesting you talked about you interviewed dozens of experienced traders to get insights on what really traders want and you felt listening was very important for you.
And, this exchange you felt had to have a community-led ecosystem to include useful educational content and assistance. And I liked your community sharing on trading, investing, and charting, that sort of thing. You just made it very inclusive for your community, and community-led, and I think that’s important, and that’s what helps obviously with your success.
Thank you. So yeah, absolutely. And then Harvey, the last question of the day: you’ve positioned LevX at the intersection of major trends as transparent as DeFi, but as performant as the best centralized exchange. Launch compliance first as regulatory clarity improves. As you look toward the next bull cycle and beyond, where do you see crypto trading heading over the next five years, and what will separate the exchanges that endure from those that don’t?
Harvey Liu: I think I think the the… Especially on exchange business and centralized exchange and as well as decentralized, like a perp tax, like a hyper liquid I, I think they’re, they’re evolving very very fast. And, and then also, I’m not sure if you see the news recently there are many at least two very famous exchanges actually shutting down because I think they’re, they’re running into all kinds of problems.
I think from my side, what I’m seeing the problem is I think in the traditional way when, when people used to run exchanges, they will have massive BD team and massive technology development teams and, and, and, and basically the, the daily cost or running cost is really high. When the bear market hits and when the trading volumes can come down and it just…
The business become not viable, right? So the cost is too high, the revenue is too low. But I think there are some smarter ones or some exchange has vision. They would for example I, I won’t name the name, but it’s very common trends right now on the crypto exchanges. People can trade stocks can trade stocks or commodities because it’s, it’s…
I think the, the trading of financial trading platform, but both stockbrokers foreign exchanges and, and crypto change exchange, I think in the future, they, they all gonna become one or, or, or, or one exchange would have the products offers for, for, for, for lots of different people’s needs, right?
So that’s one thing I, I think where the exchanges will go eventually At, at the same time, I think what is being listed on exchanges also is getting very different than, than before. And back in maybe twenty seventeen or even the last cycle you will see many, many small crypto projects and has not really too much value.
Even they don’t have their funding teams. Funding teams are anonymous. They don’t really have a product, but they get listed in exchange, and they can go up to like one billion dollars of value or even ten billions because people just trading, trading them and then, then getting FOMO, right? So but I think in this cycle especially during the last, like the, the last bull cycle we didn’t really see so many this type of project getting, getting hyped because I think as more people, more people get into crypto and people start realizing only the projects has the true value or true, eventually they would have income streams, revenues they can, they can actually generate a profit for the investors to… Those type projects will be appreciated and those pump and dump projects, there’s nobody’s gonna invest to them. So that’s one thing it’s gonna tell. I think the quality of the projects who is actually– which is get, get listed on exchange is, is actually more important or, or get people more focused to invest.
I think that’s something is changing as well. So, so in the future, I see exchanges will, will be more transparent because on, on-chain, on assets is, is, is verifiable, and, and that’s one thing. Second, the selections of the investment products gonna be, gonna be more abundant, and then people can select all kinds of things they want to invest, and the quality of the projects will be much, much improved compared with before.
So, I think that’s, that’s a very good direction we see the industry is going. I think only when the exchange can, can create or, or help the user to create more wealth, it will gonna be more welcome then and, and together we can grow. So that’s, that’s what I see the, the crypto exchanges going, yeah.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah … just to highlight some things you talked about, obviously the DeFi industry will continue to evolve over the next several years. And of course, you talked about s- a couple exchanges shutting down. Regulatory changes, bear markets, et cetera, certainly will make it challenging for exchanges in the future.
And of course, exchanges will need to diversify and look at other digital assets, attaching physical assets to digital, bringing that stuff on chain. D- just diversifying, you talked about education for your communities. But transparency, having diverse products, and a quality platform and services are gonna be key to the viability of these exchanges in the future.
So I appreciate that.
Harvey Liu: Yeah.
Brian Thomas: And Harvey, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Harvey Liu: Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Harvey Liu Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
