As VP of Business at LBank, I oversee the exchange’s global growth strategy with a strong focus on ecosystem expansion, strategic partnerships, and B2B-driven volume growth. My mandate is to scale LBank’s presence and trading activity across diverse international markets by building high-performance agency structures, deepening institutional and partner relationships, and creating sustainable growth engines for the platform.

What that means in practice: I’m responsible for the agency and partner networks that drive volume in each region, for the institutional relationships that anchor liquidity, and for making sure our global strategic direction actually translates into something locally relevant— when it lands on the ground in each market.

Prior to joining LBank in 2024, I worked as a partner in traditional finance, where I specialized in capital markets, cross-border investments, and large-scale business development. That experience in structuring deals, managing risk, and driving institutional growth has been instrumental in shaping how I approach the crypto space — particularly in building robust ecosystems.

The honest answer is that there were two major mindset shifts, and they pointed in opposite directions.

The first was speed. The second was what I call “the loss of institutional memory.” In traditional finance, you need weeks or even months of structured negotiations before a deal is finalized. In the cryptocurrency world, a partnership might be struck in a Telegram group chat and then collapse on Friday. This speed is both exciting and terrifying.

I had to abandon the ingrained notion that “slow means more rigorous, fast means reckless.” Those cryptocurrency markets that truly survive—those with genuine liquidity, a real user base, and sustainable trading volume—have developed their own unique rigor.

I needed to ensure rigorous control over the quality of counterparties, strategies to maximize the interests of both parties when building high-risk relationships, and the patience to build institutional trust that transcends the depth of any single market cycle. In an industry where short-termism prevails, these ultimately become competitive advantages.

We’ve been running several things in parallel.

The headline campaign is our World Cup Super League — a structured campaign with a $5,000,000 prize pool campaign that launched on June 9. Rewards include official World Cup Final tickets, a 1,000g gold football, BTC, ETH, and other platform incentives, subject to availability, eligibility requirements, campaign terms, and applicable local laws and regulations. It runs across multiple tracks so users can participate through trading, predictions, community tasks, or referrals depending on what they’re into.

On the product side, we launched LBank Predict as an event-based market feature around the tournament.For eligible users in permissible jurisdictions, LBank Predict supports selected event-based trading features with conservative leverage limit of up to 5x, backed by stringent risk controls, clear product rules, and jurisdiction-specific restrictions. Also, we have BK Genie, an AI assistant on Telegram that gives users match-related information and market sentiment insights. The idea is to make prediction markets accessible to users who are interested but don’t want to do all the research themselves.

On the partnership side, the Celebration was an important moment because it allowed us to sit down with key stakeholders in person and reinforce relationships that have been built over time. Then, during the VIP World Cup experience, we had the opportunity to spend meaningful time with partners and users in a much more natural setting. Those conversations often create more value than a series of online meetings, and they play an important role in supporting long-term collaboration and growth.

So the short answer is: the AFA partnership gets us the attention, the campaign and products give users something to do with it, and the Dallas event deepens the relationships that convert that attention into sustained trading activity.

Prediction markets are far more than a temporary hype — they represent a new primitive that bridges entertainment, information markets, and financial trading.

Historically, markets have always been mechanisms for aggregating information. Prediction markets simply expand that mechanism beyond assets into events, probabilities, and collective expectations.

The real question isn’t who launches a prediction market first, the real question is who can make it scalable.

LBank has launched our own prediction market platform with a differentiated approach. We pioneered a futures account trading model, rebuilding the entire event trading experience with derivatives-grade architecture, also accessing up to 5x leverage where permitted by applicable laws and jurisdictional restrictions.

It’s not about building another prediction platform. It’s about turning prediction into a native market behavior.

I’ll answer the demand question first, because that’s the one that actually drives what we do.

Across the regions I cover, the line between ‘crypto user’ and ‘traditional investor’ has effectively dissolved. The person in Dubai trading altcoins at 2 am is also looking for exposure to US equities, gold, and energy commodities — and they want it in one account, settled in the asset they already hold, without navigating a foreign brokerage account they may not even be eligible to open. That demand is real, and it’s distinctly regional. In a lot of the markets we serve, access to global financial assets has historically been the friction — and crypto infrastructure removes it.