A note about Okcoin’s new look from CEO Hong Fang.
As we reviewed designs for our new identity as a company, my mind kept circling back to something specific: dualism. The one, and the zero. The light, and the dark. The east, and the west. The old, and the new.
Differences are often how we organize the world and set boundaries. Our differences can bring out conflict, but they also help us challenge and complete each other. They inspire us to achieve the unimaginable. It’s by investigating and celebrating those differences — and by engaging both sides — that we arrive somewhere new.
Today, we’ve arrived with a new identity for Okcoin. It unites an ancient coin with our vision for a new crypto-economy that is accessible to everyone — no matter who you are, or where you’re from.
What is money
For centuries, money in ancient China took the form of simple metal coins with a square inside a circle. The circle represents space–what is external and always moving. The square represents earth, or, what is internal and more stable.
This duality in the ancient form of money carries rich philosophical and cultural connotations, but here is one interpretation that is most important to us today: Money is both an abstraction and the thing we rely on most to sustain ourselves and grow. “Hard money” is what we call money when it acts as a predictable store of value and travels well across space and time. Hard money is an anchor that rewards long-term investment and ultimately drives technological change and innovation. It is what doesn’t change (hard money) that is an invisible yet powerful agent for change that drives our civilization forward.
Bitcoin, as the first native money of the internet, is perhaps the “hardest” money in human history. Its monetary policy is fully transparent and predictable, written into an open-source code base, accessible to everyone, and not controlled by any government or human. It is the first digital global network of value that can change how people think about value and time, make their financial and personal decisions, and interact with their future self and others.
With our new logo, we hope to pay tribute to both the wisdom of dualism in ancient money and the more recent creation of bitcoin. We hope that our new identity brings these two worlds together. It is a new expression of the ancient interplay between square and circle, constant and change, today and tomorrow.
The next chapter
For generations, the rules of money and finance have been set by a relatively small group of insiders. I’m excited to see the door to capital, to financial sovereignty and economic freedom be nudged open by cryptocurrency.
Now, Okcoin is here to rip that door wide open.
We are proud that our team members come from different parts of the world, with very different cultural backgrounds and personal experiences. We are brought together by the same passion for building a better and a more inclusive future. We are here to build something that gives everyone simple access to a new emerging financial system, and a path to wealth creation.
More importantly, we believe that we are not alone in our journey. Bitcoin and crypto represent groundbreaking technology, but they are nothing without the people who bring it to life and keep it alive. Crypto is about people. People like you, people like us — we form a diverse and hopeful community representing ~200 countries around the world. We can work together to define this new world. We can all be agents for change.
The light, the dark, the future of possibilities
I keep coming back to dualism not only as an inspiration for Okcoin, but because there is an urgency to how we navigate differences in 2021. In so many arenas of life, we define ourselves through these differences. It is so much easier to dismiss differences as “us vs. them”, “good vs. evil”, and create echo chambers that amplify division. But reality is never that simple. When we can defy our human nature, be better listeners and learn from our differences, we can become more open and inclusive, and better. Just like black and white, which make our new logo. They are not colors themselves, but being light and darkness, they compete and complete each other, and bring all other colors to life in their transition.
Crypto is about every one of us. We couldn’t be more excited to celebrate our collective diversity, and we invite you to help us build the future of crypto and finance. With us working together, the future will be more than ok.
