Many of us are already familiar with MEXC Global as a crypto trading platform and now the introduction of the MEXC Pioneer program has got us even more interested to know more about MEXC and its various initiatives. We decided to speak with Katherine Deng, founder of MEXC Pioneer to know more about the program and connect with Pioneer’s latest partner in this initiative, Polygon.
Q: Hi Katherine, would you please enlighten our readers about MEXC Global and how it stands apart from other exchanges and trading platforms?
Definitely, we have been established since April 2018, and have more than 7 million users in more than 75 countries around the world. MEXC Global is one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchanges with more than 800 tokens in spot trading on our platform. Lately, we have also partnered with Bybit to establish an advanced CEX union for over 10 million users to benefit from our partnership. We are working together closely for quality projects for our joint Launchpad, which means the projects launching on the Launchpad on MEXC Global and Bybit will be vetted by both our professional teams in order to give our users a much safer and higher chance to invest in quality projects.
Q: Hi Charlie, would you please enlighten our readers about how a well-established ecosystem, Polygon, looks at the MEXC Pioneer’s establishment?
First of all, I really appreciate the event invitation today from the MEXC Pioneer program. It’s great to see that MEXC established this new global Pioneer accelerator initiative to help boost the ecosystem building with Polygon. From Polygon’s standpoint, we have experienced a huge growth of ecosystem projects within Polygon. In 2021, the number of projects that have deployed on the Polygon network has grown from 200 to 3000, based on the recent on-chain report made by Alchemy. With this rapid growth of ecosystem adoption, we do find it very challenging to just reply to our own Polygon official team to give all the extensive ecosystem support without other ecosystem partners’ help. That’s why the Polygon team really feels happy and grateful to see the MEXC Pioneer program established with such a big vision and support in the pipeline for Polygon.
Polygon will keep its focus on the blockchain network full-stack scaling, with the new focus on the Zk-Rollups, along with the adoption layer focus on the web3 gaming and metaverse. Polygon established a separate business entity and brand called Polygon Studio which aims to be the global facilitator for web3 gaming, metaverse and NFTs. We hope we can co-build and facilitate world-class projects together with the MEXC Pioneer program.
Q: What is MEXC Pioneer all about?
MEXC Pioneer is a platform designed to give new projects, innovators and entrepreneurs the tools necessary to turn their dreams into reality. To help do this, we are launching a $100 million growth fund to support blockchain technology and infrastructure projects, especially those focused on building cross-chain infrastructures, NFTs, gaming and decentralized finance systems.
Q: What was the reasoning behind this initiative?
For people who are familiar with MEXC Global, we have a strong record in leading projects growth, especially in terms of helping support new and visionary projects in taking their first steps forward. In the past three years, we have supported more than 100 new projects. These include supporting projects within the ecosystems such as Solana, Polygon, Avalanche and Algorand in their early days. These have all gone on to become household names around the crypto sphere.
Initially, these teams all had huge potential and execution prowess but required support — financially and in the form of mentorship. Especially in the rapid development of the blockchain space today, we have seen there are more and more outstanding developers in this industry with stories of mismatched resources or funding. Hence, we aim to be their trusted partner providing the support they need, helping bring their ideas to life and working with them throughout their entrepreneurship.
Q: How do you think the MEXC Pioneer program will help today’s crypto ecosystem?
[MEXC] The MEXC Pioneer platform and its team will not only finance and support decentralized projects but help to identify, invest, market and build the communities of the decentralized world’s most talented developers and teams.
We aren’t just looking to accelerate the adoption and innovation in the industry, but to enhance the stability and trust between projects, communities and other key players in the industry, while helping our communities and partners to grow and flourish. We hope to do everything we can to pull the future forward and benefit the greater community in this journey.
[Polygon] In 2021, we see a lot of new innovations coming to the market, with solid products and a great community. Polygon has already supported top DeFi, NFT, GameFi projects in our ecosystem such as AAVE, Quickswap, OpenSea, Decentraland, Sandbox, Cryptovosels, Aavegotchi, Skyweaver and Zed run etc.
But we understand our resources and bandwidth are limited. We cannot keep up the same level of ecosystem support to all the upcoming thousands of new Polygon ecosystem projects without partnering with a high-level third-party industrial facilitator, incubator and accelerator, like MEXC Pioneer.
Q: How does one become part of the MEXC Pioneer program, and what can they expect to gain out of it?
For anyone who is interested in applying to the MEXC Pioneer program, please follow our Twitter and website. The registration date for new projects will be announced shortly.
The selected projects will be provided with strategic capital from the Pioneer growth fund, periodic mentorship from advisors who are CEOs and investors from well-known projects and VCs, as well as marketing support from industry-leading influencers who onboarded on the MEXC Pioneer platform. On top of that, projects will have access to additional value-add operational support from MEXC Global’s ecosystem, including PR and marketing, legal, recruitment, and so on.
Q: How does MEXC Pioneer leverage the existing MEXC Global infrastructure for the benefit of participating projects?
As mentioned earlier, projects can benefit from the resources in the MEXC Global ecosystem including PR and marketing, legal, financial and recruitment. This is also the unique competitive advantage that MEXC Pioneer has, we adopt a diversification strategy by leveraging existing MEXC Global resources, allowing us to provide all-in-one operational services to projects in a wide variety of DeFi sectors.
Q: What are the different ecosystems that are currently partnering with MEXC Pioneer?
Before MEXC Pioneer was officially announced, we already had really close relationships in place with Polygon, Avalanche, Solana, and Algorand and we will also be partnering with more top ecosystems in the industry, in order to provide wider chances for talented and innovative developer teams out there and to contribute to growing the whole world of decentralized technology.
Q: Tell us more about MEXC Pioneer and Polygon’s partnerships and collaborations with other projects or businesses
[Polygon] Polygon has a big pipeline of GameFi projects that are going to be launched by the end of 2021 or Q1 2022. With all these game projects launched, we hope to see a big growth in the daily active users, active wallet addresses and ecosystem activities. We hope the partnership with MEXC Pioneer can make it stronger and more scalable in the ecosystem engagement with our users.
Q: Now that we know MEXC is planning on collaborating with Polygon, what can we expect from it, from both sides? Can you each answer this one?
[MEXC] We have worked closely with Polygon in its early stage, with the recent GameFi market hype, Polygon has already supported a lot of great projects in NFT, DeFi, and GameFi. Now that with our $100m growth fund specifically focusing on supporting the projects in the metaverse notion from MEXC Pioneer, and with Polygon Studio launching, we happen to hold the same view of combining our strength together into a better partnership.
[Polygon]
MEXC has been very supportive in Polygon’s previous hackathon and with many ecosystem project listings such as OneRare, ApeSwap finance, and Step Hero. We hope to find large, active user bases from MEXC Pioneer from South East Asia, Europe, and Latin America. These regions are actually the same active regions as Polygon ecosystem users. Therefore, we believe there is an interesting synergy to co-building the ecosystem and pushing the projects forward together.
Q: Any new announcements or surprises in store for the crypto community?
[MEXC] There will definitely be lots of exciting news coming up on our future partnership announcements, and we will establish a MEXC Pioneer hackathon early next year, all of our partners within the worlds of venture capital, ecosystem development, influencers and media will all be working toward the same goal – bringing the best projects into the decentralized world.
[Polygon] We have a few things coming up. The upcoming acquisition of some world-class zk-rollup engineering teams will be announced soon, stay tuned. Also, there is lots of exciting news on the high-level, triple-A games coming from Polygon Studio.
Q: Anything else you would like to share with our readers from your perspectives towards MEXC Pioneer?
[MEXC] We are so excited to have the chance to continue our partnership with Polygon, and furthermore, we will be working closer than before in building a platform where all quality project teams can be supported in every way they need, with the help of our great partner like Polygon.
[Polygon] We hope we can bring great ecosystem projects into the MEXC Pioneer program.
There are some really interesting GameFi, SocialFi, DAO and other new areas of projects such as SportFi coming out and together we will be at the forefront of all of them. We will share more details once they are ready.