By Kevin Hoang, Founder & CEO, EQ Exchange

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Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, once said, “There are no such things that are great that are easy to do. So by definition, to achieve greatness you have to be willing to do the hard things.” That quote really stuck with me.

The inverse doesn’t quite apply. Just because something is hard doesn’t automatically make it great. But choosing to tackle hard problems with purpose, especially the ones most people avoid gives you a shot at building something that truly matters.

I’ve written before about Elon Musk’s achievements and this isn’t a blog about personalities or politics. However, you can’t ignore what SpaceX did for humanity by building reusable rockets that can be caught with precision metal arms eliminating the need for heavy landing gears. SpaceX has moved humanity forward years if not decades by rethinking using first principles and tackling the hardest problems in aerospace.

At EQX, we’re not building rockets. But we are choosing to take on a hard problem that no one else has tried to solve — real-time financial transparency. We’re aiming to become the first company in the world to generate and publicly disclose a real-time financial statement, both on-chain and off-chain. Not quarterly. Not when it’s convenient. In real time, every day. We’re not doing it because it’s easy or because it’s expected. We’re doing it because we believe trust in finance is broken — and fixing it starts with transparency.

First Principles of Trust

When we began thinking about how EQX could stand out in a crowded market of digital asset exchanges, the answer wasn’t more features. We could have easily spent money on influencers building hype for a token launch. Instead, we wanted to focus on something that we saw no one else building and doubled down on trust as a foundation. 

In today’s financial landscape, trust is often taken for granted. Many of us have banked with the same institutions for decades without stopping to think why. I’ve personally had the same bank account at TD Bank for 25 years — despite that same bank being fined billions for violating anti-money laundering laws. Why? Because inertia is powerful. That’s the paradox of trust. Once we’re comfortable, we stop asking questions. And we only realize the cost of blind trust when it’s too late. Once an institution gets big enough or old enough, we assume it’s trustworthy by default.

That assumption has cost consumers again and again. Whether it’s “too big to fail” banks passing risk to taxpayers, or exchanges like FTX imploding behind closed doors, the result is the same — customers pay the price whether it's through losses or taxes through government bailouts. 

What if trust didn’t have to be blind? What if we could earn it in real time?

Is It Hard Because It’s Hard — Or Just Because It’s New?

When I first started talking to finance professionals about real-time reporting, most said it couldn’t be done. Not at scale. Not accurately.

So I asked my favorite product question: Why? Over and over again…

What I uncovered wasn’t a technical impossibility. It was institutional inertia. Real-time didn’t fit the existing processes, the tools, or the mindset. It hadn’t been done — so most assumed it couldn’t be. But startups aren’t bound by the past. We don’t have to wait for a legacy system to be updated. We can build from scratch. And that’s what we’ve done.

Sometimes, hard just means unfamiliar. And once someone shows it can be done, the rest of the industry can follow. Catching a rocket with metal chopsticks doesn’t sound so crazy today but 2 years ago? 

Radical Transparency — What Makes It So Hard?

The idea of real-time transparency sounds simple, but the execution is anything but.

Public companies compile and report financials quarterly for a reason. Behind those reports from multiple entities across different geographies compiled by armies of accountants painfully and oftentimes manually reconciling financials using legacy spreadsheets processes sitting on top of outdated systems built on SFTP or on Windows machines from a decade ago. Month-end close at most companies can take weeks. Real-time accounting? It sounds terrifying. And yet, that’s exactly what we’re building. 

But what if we didn’t adopt the legacy systems and built a system from scratch. How would we build it? We had to design a system that didn’t wait for the month-end, didn’t rely on manual intervention, and could reflect every transaction, trade, and fee the moment it happened.

Even beyond the technical hurdles, operating with radical transparency forces a different mindset. It means we can’t take on risky bets or fudge the numbers. We have to operate more conservatively, knowing that every user, partner, and regulator can see exactly what’s happening. That’s hard as a startup. It’s unforgiving. It strips away the narrative and puts your operations under constant public scrutiny. But that’s also what makes it powerful.

But as a customer? It’s exactly what I would want from a company holding my assets. 

Why We’re Doing the Hard Things First

In crypto, the easy path is obvious. Drop a token. Hire influencers. List the trendiest meme coins and avoid regulation by not doing KYC. Many exchanges have done exactly that — and grown quickly.

But easy choices come with hidden costs. They create technical debt, cultural shortcuts, operate in the grey, and most dangerously, trust debt.

We’ve chosen the opposite path. I’ve written about our stance, role to play as a centralized exchange and our line in the sand here.

Instead of launching fast and figuring it out later, we’re building a real-time financial reporting infrastructure from the ground up. That decision has already paid off the platform we built is more powerful than we thought. It’s given us a foundation we can build on for years — one that’s flexible, scalable, and ready to support a truly open financial platform.

Because we tackled the hardest thing first, we’re now in a position to innovate in ways others can’t. Internally, our infrastructure unlocks powerful features such as peer to peer transfers, liquidity pool and advanced treasury management functionalities. More importantly from a user value proposition perspective it will enable us to launch completely differentiated product offerings and business that will fundamentally change the Web3 world. Something we’re really excited to launch called EQX Zero (coming soon!)

And most importantly, we’re proving that trust can be designed — not just marketed.

Building for the Long Term with a Non-Consensus Idea

One of my favorite books is Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr., where he talks about the power of non-consensus ideas. The best startups often look crazy at first — not because they’re wrong, but because they see something others don’t. Ideas such as microblogging on Twitter between your facebook updates or staying in a stranger's house while traveling were definitely non-consensus ideas when they launched.

Real-time transparency is a non-consensus idea. Most people in crypto believe users don’t care. That it’s not what drives adoption. That it’s too expensive, too risky, too early.

But we believe otherwise. We believe that trust can become the most valuable asset in financial services. And we want to be the first company that doesn’t just claim trust — we prove it… and hopefully force the financial ecosystem to also prove it as well.

After a year and a half building EQX, we’re getting close to launch. As I reflect on our journey, I’m proud that we chose to do the hard things first. Even if we don’t achieve everything we set out to do, I hope that we would have moved the space forward. We’ll have shown that a different kind of financial institution is possible and if successful have built an incredible moat. 

Doing the hard things first doesn’t guarantee greatness. But it creates the kind of foundation that greatness can grow from. And maybe…  just maybe that will inspire others to do the same.
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- Kevin