TurboFlow is Building the Trading Platform Asia Has Been Missing

Mason Nystrom sits down with Tony He, founder and CEO of TurboFlow, to explore why Asia has been underserved by existing perp DEXs and prediction markets, and how TurboFlow is building a new type of trading experience purpose-built for the Eastern retail trader.

Hyperliquid and Polymarket dominate in the West. But in Asia, there is no equivalent. Asian traders operate in communities, expect customer support, prefer familiar centralized exchange UX, and trade completely different assets. TurboFlow is building the platform that bridges those two worlds.

Key Topics:

Why Asia has no Hyperliquid or Polymarket: cultural differences in trading behavior, community-driven trading, preference for CEX-style UX, and completely different asset interests like e-sports and cricket

Why prediction markets are winning with retail: click yes or no on anything you have an opinion on, no knowledge of crypto or margin trading required, lower barrier than perps, higher conversion and retention

Building a trading platform that lasts: safety, liquidity, asset differentiation, customer service, and intuitive UX are all table stakes. You need a minimum viable level of all of them.

Lessons from co-founding Amber Group: bear markets are for building, retail and institutional are completely different businesses, and focus on process over outcomes

TurboFlow's 18-month roadmap: dominate Asian prediction markets, expand from crypto-only to 50 assets including commodities, RWAs, and FX, and win short-term binary outcome products

00:00 Why Asia Has No Hyperliquid or Polymarket
01:56 The Perps Market Today: $9 Trillion, Only 200K Daily Traders
06:07 Why Prediction Markets Beat Perps for Retail
11:18 What Actually Matters When Building a Trading Platform
14:45 Lessons from Co-Founding Amber Group
18:46 Quick Fire: Bear Market Timing, 18-Month Roadmap,

The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's this massive trend towards everyone becoming investor, and a lot of that is around reducing complexity and increasing access.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

For prediction market, initially I thought it was a stupid idea. We put it into test, and then the first day sort of really blow my mind. And then I start to learn why they like the type of product they like and why they trade the way they trade.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to Stateful, a Pantera podcast, where we talk about everything at the intersection of venture capital, finance, and investing. I'm your host, Mason Nistrom, and today we have an amazing guest for you today, Tony Hay, founder and CEO of Turboflow, building a new type of trading experience starting with perpetual futures and prediction markets. Tony, welcome to the pod. But before we begin, a quick disclaimer. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial investment or legal advice. Please do your own research before making any investments.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

I'm very glad to be here and uh to share my journey about Turboflow.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Yeah, I'm excited to get into it. So maybe let's start with an obvious question. Turboflow is building a new type of trading experience. But why does the world need another perps dex uh or prediction market? What do you think people are are fundamentally missing today?

SPEAKER_01 1:09

From what what uh what we see in the market is that there's a huge gap between the Western and the Eastern market. Um, so for example, in the West, you have very successful perp Dexes like Hyperliquid for Perb Side, and then you also have very successful production market like poly market and Cauchi. Uh whereas in in the Asian landscape, you actually cannot find any uh sort of platform that are uh comparable to these successful ones in the West. So it's a very different dynamic and the culture.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

They want the traditional centralized exchange experience, uh, but with maybe like the broader access to the types of products that you can get that are traditionally more on-chain. If we look at the perps market today, I think this point really resonates because in 2025, there's about 9 trillion in total perps volume. Artemis, you know, which is a great on-chain data source estimates, anywhere from 75,000 to like 200,000 daily active traders in a uh, you know, depending on the month and type of market activity that's going on. And so like that's still relatively small. And, you know, that caters to the on-chain natives, people who are your kind of prosumers. And what you're talking about is building a product that really is more retail friendly, is more mainstream friendly. And so, like, how do you think about the, you know, the unlock to building a more retail friendly product, in particular for you know, the more eastern culture?

SPEAKER_01 2:37

We have been thinking about this pro this question a lot ourselves. And then the key thing we want to answer is that how do you like what's the benefit of building on-chain, right? Versus, or from a customer's point of view, what's the benefit of them trading on-chain versus a centralized exchange? I guess uh the answer is in a way it's obvious that is uh there's more transparent and the people are supposed to feel safer with you know their own like key, their own whatever whatsoever, the setup. But oftentimes it's not, right? Sorry, and then on top of that, they need to be able, they need to be able to trade in a similar fashion and uh even broader product offering than what they're already having in the centralized experience, right? So if you can both so if you can bring the good of the both worlds, where you bring the transparency and safety of the the decentralized world, and you uh you also offer like a wide spread of product offering, plus you know, the the customer service, the community service that we talked about, then that's where sort of the users are willing to you know adopt. People have very sort of little patience when they try new products. Yeah. Um, so we try to make all the frictions as little as possible and uh try to make it very easy for them to switch on. Uh, but then also like one of the points I was just mentioning, right? So for DAX, it's supposed to be more safe and more transparent. But oftentimes you find it's no longer the case in the recent years. Like there are so many hacks that uh happened for a lot of the successful DeFi product uh or bridges in the past, right? So it's I think we have evolved into a a point where you at some point you you need to be somewhat less decentralized to make sure you're safe. Like I think you have like less you give out less control to the to the nodes or to the bridges uh and have more like safer custodian plans for your ponds to make sure it's it's safe. Um and uh at the same time, yeah, and then at the same time you try to bring the transparency part back to back to these users.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Yeah, and I think you're seeing that trend play out more broadly across uh a lot of applications interacting with DeFi primitives, right? From companies like Hyperliquid, which operate in a pseudo-decentralized manner with like a closed set of nodes uh that makes it slightly more permissionless, but still has an element of control, even towards like Morpho vaults where you know Morpho is a permissionless protocol, but a vast majority of the way people interact it is via curators like Gauntlet on top, uh, which adds a level of control for the end user such that they feel a little a little safer. And you know, you've you know, as you've kind of already launched a product in beta, you've achieved billions of dollars in trading volume. You know, you've publicly stated that prediction markets have actually been the fastest growing segment here. And so I'm curious to understand a bit more what do you think has been driving the growth in prediction markets? And what are what do you think users are seeking in new types of prediction market platforms?

SPEAKER_01 6:07

When you think about trading a pub product, you go on to the platform, there are about 10 options you can choose. Because I've been a trader for over 10 years. So sometimes we forget how like how difficult it is to trade pubs. And also for a new person who uh doesn't understand finance, who doesn't understand what margin trading is, to start the process, right? Like imagine like explaining this to an older person, right? Like my my parents, for example, that that would take forever, right? And then then they need to understand what is Bitcoin, and then then it's about the direction. For prediction market, it really boils down to if you have an opinion on something, you can click yes or no. Right. So it sort of simplified the whole trading process from learning all the jargons and learning all the buttons on the platform to simply do you think this will happen or not, not you know, not going to happen. Right. So um the I think the learning process was greatly reduced to something that very like the people who have who have no knowledge about no knowledge about finance, no knowledge about DeFi, about crypto, as long as you know they they can pick a side, they can start trading in two minutes. That's one. And then two is that you if you think about the the kind of topics that the prediction market covers today, right? So from all the way from politics to sports, weather, right? And then to some Twitter comments to all the all the financial data. So it covers a wide range of topics that you feel like you you grab a random person on the street and they all have some opinion somewhere, right? It could be like a golf game or it could be like some political issues. But the point is it you no longer require the person to understand really greatly about the asset online, which you know, in crypto world, in perfect world, it was crypto asset itself, right? So I think that greatly reduced the hurdle for any new person to learn about trading and to start trading. And from a product point of view, this is just like it just means higher conversion rate and probably means higher retention rate as as well. Yeah. So so yeah, so back to your question. We have been doing both perbs and uh doing prediction market. We know, well, first of all, perp market, even till this day, still like in the retail sense for institutions. I think that's like a very highly concentrated product where every institution probably trades nowadays. But if you think about every everyday retail, that's still, well, first again, that's like a super hard-to-learn product for everyday guy. And it's very like intense feeling. It's very like makes people very nervous, right? And because you know, that's thinking about liquidation and stuff. Totally. And uh it requires them to have this knowledge about Bitcoin, Ethereum, or whatever asset they are trading, right? And then they need to batting or trading on the direction of the things, right? Similar to the the the traders in the West, they have an opinion on everything. And if you can make it easy for people, uh they'll they'll be interested to participate, right? Because to trade, it is inherently for everyone. I think it's in origin or something. Yeah. Right. So I totally agree.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

I think the way I like to think about it is like you're there's this massive trend towards everyone becoming an investor, and a lot of that is around reducing complexity and increasing access. And so when I think about like reducing complexity, it's like, you know, complexity of the type of asset that people are trading, like you said, having to go from some deep financial asset all the way to like a prediction market of like what's the weather gonna be, or what is uh what do I have a belief on the politicians that's running in like my local election? And then the other part is like, you know, the complexity of the actual asset. Like options are arguably more complex than perps. Like perps are or sorry, yeah, our options are more complex than perps, perps, you know, are more complex than prediction markets. And you know, prediction markets are kind of like the easiest window to any type of like investor or trader entering into like a type of market. And then obviously the access has gotten better from new types of applications like Robinhood all the way to you know newer exchanges like Cul She and Polymarket, and now towards applications like Turboflow of what you're building. And I think one of the you know broader like meta questions I have, and that I think people would be curious, the listeners would be curious to hear, you know, from the builder perspective, is when you're building a trading product, what do you think matters most? Because there's you know what we just talked about in terms of like the complexity, there's the types of asset differentiation, there's this idea of better discovery and social features, better execution, just being able to like quote cheaper prices, risk management. And so, how do you think about you know the the trade-offs and and what you want to optimize for when building a new type of trading product?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

That's a that's a great question. And uh, I've been you know going through the the process myself uh for for a while. I think that the honest answer is that all of that matters. Like the easiest way to think about it is think the opposite. Like if you take away one part of the things you described, would the exchange still be viable? Right. So, for example, if if we take a take away the safety of funds, so you might be able to trade something very interesting and it's like it has good liquidity, but you know, this exchange might get hacked, right? In like on the news, it's getting like hacked every month, right? Would you trade their product side? You obviously like you're always competing with other platforms, so you always want to bring something new to the users. But at the same time, this product needs to have decent liquidity just because it's new, but it's it has like super high trading costs, then no one's gonna trade, right? And then on top of that, because we're facing retail, then remember we have to make it easy. It has to be like very intuitive and people can learn uh very quickly, right? And then you also, yeah, it's it's and again, like you know, stuff like customer service. If people, if everything else checks, but when people who are remember, these are people that are not that familiar with DBI, or just in general, I think the a the Asian community in general are not very are not as used to DBI as the Western community. So if they come here, they deposit $100 and then they can't find it, right? And then they're gonna go like panic, and then they're not gonna use the platform again. Right. Right. So all these things matter a lot. And I think for an exchange, you really have to be like pretty good in all almost like every aspect of the things. You have to be reliable, you have to be trustworthy, you have to have good liquidity, and you have to have have to like good customer service. And on top of that, uh what we learned is that if you were able to provide some innovative products that uh hits PMF, which means you know the the whole community has demand for it, then it'll be better, right? So it's always good that if you have some, you can offer something exclusive on your platform so that people are really eager to come here and try. And then when they when they come here, they feel all the things I I just talked about, right? They feel it's safe, they feel it's good liquidity, they feel feel it's a good good service. So all that things I think adds up to how I think uh a successful platform can be can be wrong.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Yeah, you I think are astute in talking about that you need like a a minimum viability of all those levels. Like you need like at least decent liquidity, otherwise people don't want to trade. You need uh, you know, at least decent asset differentiation, execution, risk management. But like the thing, the question to answer in like a new trading platform is like, why is someone going to come to your exchange? And it's typically a combination of like new type of discovery experience, new type of asset that people can't trade elsewhere, you know, or or something else in the product feature that uh is like convenient or quality of life, whether it's like a mobile first interface, easy onboarding, things of that nature. And so totally, totally here and agree with you there. Most people probably don't know that you're also one of the co-founders of Amber, uh, which is you know an incredibly successful uh you know market making uh platform that's a public company now. What is your biggest lesson from building Amber? And as you kind of reflect on on those lessons and takeaways, like what do you try to you know reinstill in Turboflow versus like what do you try to do differently?

SPEAKER_01 15:06

For from my Amber days, we we had several like up and down of the company and we we experienced like multiple cycles of bull market, bear market. Uh, I think one thing I can say for sure is that bear market is definitely a good time for building. I mean, I do know a lot of people say that. Uh, but from my own experience is that just because there's there are less noise, uh, you you could focus a lot more on the things that you you think matters the most. Uh and uh at around the same time, your compet your competitions uh usually you know don't uh you basically they're not as alert as they are during bull market. So that means this is a time you can build all the foundation of your business. And when the, you know, hopefully when the the bull market comes back, then you lay out a strong foundation for the hypergrowth afterwards, right? So this is the things I learned from my previous experience. In terms of the difference, it there are a lot a lot of differences as well, because Amber is an institutional facing and high networks facing business. So for that, it's a lot of times about building the like the whole business is about building the image and building the product that are suited for people that have a lot of crypto assets.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

Um, very whale-dominated type of product.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Well dominated product, which means they need similarities, like they both need good service. But uh here, people just want very safe return, people want very low, actually, people are very uh happy with low return, but they value the the per preservation of their original capital uh a lot, right? So your your main job is to make sure that uh people can grow that by 3%, 5% per year, something like that. Uh whereas for a retail driven or uh like a platform business, oftentimes you're facing with the retail traders who are looking for more exciting things to trade, right? So if you offer them a product that gives them 3% yield annually, no one, no retail has interest for that, right? They want something that uh they can click fast and then it gives them the instant result, right? They wanna like the faster the better. Right. So it's very different. And also, you know, the Ember team was all like most of them are coming out of the institutions, like including my I myself, right? So we all worked in in banks before and we know how the whole system works. Whereas when we're building a platform, we're actually hiring a lot of people from the platforms, and uh it thinks very differently. Like you have to say different things to your audience. Uh, you cannot know you can no longer say things that look uh attractive to the whales. You gotta start to say things that the retailer are interested, uh, and then you gotta offer product that they are interested in, and you gotta do promotion that they are interested, right? So uh it's a it's a big shift. Uh so we're still learning and adapting as we go.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Yeah, no, totally. I think it's uh, like you said, the it's a focus on the process and as it relates to building out like you know the process uh around the the product, around the go-to-market, and you know, all parts of the business. And so I think that makes a ton of sense in terms of a big lesson learned from Amber. I would love to move on to a quick fire round where I say a quick statement or question, and you give me your quick thoughts. Uh so first question is uh, or rather, statement, uh, hyperliquid will be the dominant perps decks in three years. Do you agree or disagree? I agree. Okay. Hyperliquid bull continues. Um, what does the next 18 months look like for Turboflow?

SPEAKER_01 18:58

We will have more and more users for our prediction market product. We will become a dominant player in short-term binary outcome products, and we will dominate the whole Asian market.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

I love it. Where are we in the bear bull cycle?

SPEAKER_01 19:18

This is, I mean, this no one knows the exact answer, but I think we have about three to four months of more of the bear market coming, and uh we probably will bottom around the end of Q3, early Q4 of this year. Uh, and then market should uh you know rebound back after that.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Okay, so very much maintaining the the Bitcoin cycle, uh, the four-year cycle. Interesting. Uh, and then what's something you changed your mind on over the past six, twelve months?

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Oh, many things. Over the compared to what happened 12 months ago, we didn't even think about prediction market. It was uh random experiments that we tried. And I didn't like initially I didn't expect any sort of traction. It was an idea one of my partners brought up, and uh initially I thought it was a stupid idea. Uh, and then but we put it in, we put it into test, and then the first day sort of really blow my mind. And then I'm like convinced, like I mean, over time I'm convinced, okay, there is something to uh the whole prediction market, and then I start to learn all this user mentality, user behavior, like why they why they like the type of product they like and why they trade the type of the way they trade. Uh and uh I have to say, like it's a it's a very diverse diverse world, right? There are many different types of people and they have different different demand. Uh so uh never underestimate the power of uh the users, and uh you know, we look at the stats and we we started to put the the whole pivot and the emphasis back to predict.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Yeah, and then as a quick follow-up to the next 18 months of Turboflow, what is the most popular market today? And what do you think the most popular market 12 months from now is going to be?

SPEAKER_01 21:11

So, right now, we our most popular product on the platform is the short-term binary outcome for Bitcoin, Ethereum direction prediction. I think in 12 months, we will expand our asset offering to 50 assets, including commodities, RWAs, and uh maybe FX. So we will go from crypto only to all assets uh included. That would be our goal for the next 12 months to 80 months.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Amazing. Tony, thank you so much for joining. Where can people find you, or how can they get early access to Turboflow?

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Uh well to log on to Turboflow, uh you can just log on to tf.xyz. Uh that's our website. Uh, and then to reach out to me, you can just uh well, you can first of all, you can directly uh message me, message me on Twitter uh or just send an email to contacts at tf.xyz. Uh I mean we we check out these uh emails every day. So that's the two best ways to approach me.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Amazing. Tony, thank you so much for joining. It was a pleasure to have you on.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Likewise, thanks a lot.