Wayland Chan, Technology Director at OAX Foundation

As we’ve written before, today OAX Foundation took centre stage at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s day of FinTech sessions, part of the opening day’s line up at Hong Kong FinTech Week. We were in great company, with many high profile members of the community also appearing — including the Head of Product for HSBC’s PayMe app and the Head of FinTech at government body, Invest Hong Kong.

Our Technology Director, Wayland, gave a keynote speech to open the session on blockchain, focusing on the challenges of trading digital assets in a centralized environment. Regular readers of our posts will know all about these by now, but the audience today was a mix of academics, business

leaders, students and entrepreneurs from many different fields. Educating them on the benefits of decentralization — as well as the challenges that DEX need to overcome — remains crucial. And Wayland did just this with a clear walk through of the rationale behind the DEX system, including a step by step demonstration of atomic swaps. He ended by explaining OAX’s role in all this, and the work we’re doing around state channels to find a cheaper, quicker and more private way to trade using blockchain.

Next up on stage was Lio Lunesu, co-founder and CTO of our tech partner, Enuma Technologies. He was on a panel with other distinguished speakers, including an academic from Cambridge University’s Centre for Alternative Finance and two CEOs, one from VEE Technologies and the other from MoneySQ.com. They discussed a range of topics, including the challenge crypto trading poses to regulators as they try to balance innovation with protection. This part of the session echoed very closely what our General Counsel, Paul Li, has talked about several times at other industry events. It

also led into a discussion on the future of exchanges, where Lio talked about how in blockchain we have the ability to create a PayMe-style service without needing any intermediary.

All-in-all, this was another very successful event. One of the last points made during the panel discussion was that crypto is too useful to go away, but that it needs to become a far more regular part of the financial system and lose the stigma that’s got attached to it. This is exactly what the OAX project is all about, and exactly why we’re making every effort to tell our story at events like today’s.