Wilson Huang is a tech entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of XY Finance, a cross-chain interoperability protocol. ^[1]

Education

Huang attended National Taiwan University, earning a B.S. in Computer Science in 2015 and a Master's in 2017. While studying for his Master's, he was also a teaching assistant for the "Blockchain, Smart Contract and Big Data" courses. ^[1]

Career

Huang worked as a software engineer for Yahoo! Inc. on projects like YGif and the Yahoo News Webpage. After graduating in 2017, he became a blockchain researcher at Mithril, a decentralized content creation and social media ecosystem on Ethereum. Nine months later, he became the VP of product and engineering and held that position for two years. ^[1]

Steaker

During his last year at Mithril, Huang founded Steaker, a digital asset management platform, where he was CEO for four years. In 2022, when FTX, a crypto exchange and hedge fund, filed for bankruptcy, Steaker's offices were raided by prosecutors. Huang was detained for violating Taiwan's Banking Act by "illegally raising funds and committing aggravated fraudulence." ^[1][2]

“FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on November 11, 2022. Steaker, which uses assets worth US$10 million for strategic transactions in FTX, began to restrict users whose investments were affected by the FTX bankruptcy to take out money. More than a thousand of these affected users set up a group, and several investors sued Huang for alleged fraud.”

In February 2023, Huang was released on bail while the company worked to return money to its investors and platform users. ^[3][4]

“The judge believed that although Huang was suspected of serious crimes, his detention was not necessary. Last week, he "ruled to pay NT$3 million." "Post bail", restricting leaving the country and going overseas.”

“As for Steaker, which had previously completely suspended the withdrawal function, the company said that due to the search and investigation by the inspection unit, the case has entered the judicial investigation process, and the founder and CEO Wilson Huang is still in custody; cold wallet for storing assets It was also confiscated by inspection.”

XY Finance

In September 2021, before the Steaker controversy, Huang founded XY Finance. During an AMA in the TokenHunter Official Telegram Group, he shared the reason why he founded the company: ^[1][5]

“As such, demand for swapping and transferring digital assets from chain to chain has skyrocketed, too. This has created the need for a cross-chain swap application that provides a fast, secure, and decentralized way to perform cross-chain transactions and staking. Also, the daily cross-chain volume has surpassed $100M due to multichain ecosystem growth. As DApps and infrastructure continue to mature and DeFi yield becomes everywhere on multiple chains, we know cross-chain swap needs will continue to grow. This is why we're creating our next-generation protocol, XY Finance, to help users seamlessly and optimally transfer and swap assets from chain to chain without any disruption.”

He then discussed the strengths of XY Finance's platform and how they compared to other competitors: ^[5]

“The biggest advantage of XY Finance is that we have our unique cross-chain bridge — Y Pool, to provide liquidity on our own, which can improve the slow and costly cross-chain transactions caused by unstable liquidity and unreasonable fees. So, it allows users to complete transactions smoothly and seamlessly through our one-stop service. In addition, to balance the Y Pool's liquidity, XY Finance proposes a rebalancing incentive mechanism that will reward users with XY Tokens for helping to rebalance assets on different chains.”

When asked about competitors like Uniswap and PancakeSwap, Huang responded: ^[5]

“To be honest, we won't consider Uniswap or PancakeSwap as our competitors. Uniswap is built on Ethereum, so it only supports ERC-20 tokens, and on the other hand, PancakeSwap only supports BEP-20 tokens. The major difference of XY Finance from the above mentioned is that we support cross-chain swaps between multiple blockchains. Our product allows users to conduct one-stop cross-chain swaps smoothly and seamlessly.”