KuCoin’s Head of Business Development Illuminates Strategies for Project Spotlighting and Community Engagement
In Brief
Dorian Vincileoni, Head of Business Development for Europe at KuCoin, discussed cryptocurrency listing, community engagement, the post-halving market, regional trading disparities, and the convergence of traditional finance with the crypto ecosystem.
We had a chance to talk with Dorian Vincileoni, Head of Business Development for Europe at KuCoin, a leading cryptocurrency exchange. In this discussion, Vincileoni discussed the coin listings, community engagement, post-halving market, regional trading disparities, and the convergence of traditional finance with the crypto ecosystem, providing a compelling glimpse into the industry’s future.
Can you tell us more about the listing process? What are you focusing on?
Some projects get more “spotlight” than others, especially through our spotlight program. Therefore, when a project has a particular interest or intrinsic values, we tend to emphasise it and organise numerous attractive campaigns around its stage in listing.
More broadly, we are heavily focusing on the narratives of this cycle, such as AI, RWA, and DePin. We have listed many promising projects related to each of them, and we will continue to do so.
Which narrative do you think will be more successful?
My personal opinion is that RWA will probably be the narrative that takes off, especially with the arrival of institutional investors, who are very interested in the opportunity of tokenizing assets. There will be more adoption than we initially thought.
On the one hand, the other narratives and their own opportunities do exist. On the other hand, there are obviously meme coins that will continue to aggregate and create communities as we’ve seen them do for years.
Do you have any rewards for the users who acquire coins in the initial stages of listing?
Those rewards are campaign-based most of the time. They depend on what the project wants to organize with us. It can be a trading competition or a “burning drop,” for example, meaning you stake KCS on the platform, and you’ll get the token that is listed as a reward. It can also be an activity-based event. In such cases, users have a couple of activities and specific actions to achieve in order to be rewarded with the project’s token. Overall, it really depends on what kind of relationship we have with the project and its own objectives.
We are continuously offering a lot of activities, and I suspect we will offer many more throughout this cycle, as long as projects manage to draw the attention from the market and from their community.
Why is it important for the exchanges to engage with the community?
All exchanges are community-driven up to a certain point. It’s especially true for KuCoin since we have this tendency to give better chances to smaller projects that want to get listed and have access to a larger market but already have a strong organic community that they can show for.
One of the features illustrating this community-driven approach is one of our new functionalities called GemVote. You can now vote for the projects that you want to see listed on KuCoin. Our entire user base can participate, and all project users can register to KuCoin and participate as well to show us there is actual organic interest. That’s one way we found to strengthen our community-driven process.
Moreover, one very practical reason to listen to our communities is to know when scammers try to impersonate us. We are not going to be looking around for scammers by ourselves. Therefore, it’s a net plus when users notify us about impersonators pretending to be KuCoin support, for example. We can then take action and actually identify them as scammers, hackers, etc.
How do you see the post-halving market? Have you noticed any positive/negative changes in the user’s behavior?
My personal take is the following: if we look at Bitcoin’s history, it has either been indicative of the start of a bull run or of the start of a more volatile bull run. We are not seeing such effects for now. It’s not really surprising since there is always a time lapse between the change of parameters the halving signifies and market prices.
We will see the results of the halving throughout the year. However, the most important aspect of the halving is actually not its impact on the Bitcoin price but the fact that it takes place and works in a foreseeable manner. It is becoming something as certain as “death and taxes,” as they say.
Is there something else that can influence the market other than halving?
In my opinion, the broad arrival of institutions this year in crypto markets will probably have more impact than the halving.
We have had institutions in crypto markets for a long time. Some were more early adopters than others, some were latecomers to the party, etc.
However, this time is different. A large percentage of these institutional investors now have access to crypto markets through ETFs and financial products that they already know and are able to invest in without further technical investments. They’re not as afraid of tiptoeing as they used to be, regarding Bitcoin especially, but it might be the case with other products as well very soon.
Furthermore, most people start with Bitcoin but end up not only sticking to it. They tend to investigate more about the technologies, the projects that are already there, and the possibilities our ecosystem has to offer. Consequently, if we see this happening with institutional investors, this will definitely have a larger impact on crypto markets than the halving during this cycle.
What are the most noticeable differences between users and their trading experience in different regions (Asia, Europe, US)?
I would say there are observable differences between the profiles of investors and the profiles of product users. I do not know if these observations are generalisable to a larger sample than the one I have been able to observe.
To start with, the approach and openness to crypto itself, overall, as an investment product, is slightly different. When dealing with traders, we also see different risk tolerance levels and trading attitudes.
When you look at Europe, you tend to have markets where both the proportion of people who actually invest and the number of transactions tend to be lower than in Asia. However, the volumes per user that we are observing in Europe can be much larger than what we see in more open-to-crypto Asian countries, which makes sense when considering metrics like average earnings and the fact that crypto is still widely considered a risky asset class.
Overall, there is a tendency among people in countries that are in a developing stage to be more open to these new opportunities and new technologies.
Furthermore, a noticeable feature of Asian users is that it is very common for them to have many platforms, use a lot of them and try many different types of products. Whereas in Europe, there is a tendency for users to focus on a smaller number of platforms, and to use products in a more moderate way.
How do you see the technological development in the DACH region? Do you think that this region will be the leading one in Europe in terms of technological growth?
The German-speaking region in Europe, in general, has strong organic arguments for remaining a leader in terms of technological growth. Especially due to its past experience and past investments in its technological development.
Crypto is just one aspect of it, obviously. There is much more to it than only crypto. But these industries tend to be quite capital intensive, meaning that if you’ve not invested enough in the past, it tends to cost even more to catch up. This tendency is strengthened by network effects, which tend to become stronger as soon as digital products are involved.
Also, there is a very high level of educated population with a good standard of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). That is also one of the elements that can be relied on.
Last but not least, investors are quite open to new technologies in this zone. Switzerland is seen as the crypto hub of Europe, and for good reasons. Even in Germany, an investment fund like Rocket Internet could take advantage of the whole internet development. This is a unicorn example in Europe. There have not been many funds that have been able to take advantage of the rise of the internet as efficiently.
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About The Author
Victoria is a writer on a variety of technology topics including Web3.0, AI and cryptocurrencies. Her extensive experience allows her to write insightful articles for the wider audience.
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Victoria is a writer on a variety of technology topics including Web3.0, AI and cryptocurrencies. Her extensive experience allows her to write insightful articles for the wider audience.
