Understanding Cobo's Three Major Product Lines: How Shen Yu's Product Vision Shapes Cobo
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Understanding Cobo's Three Major Product Lines: How Shen Yu's Product Vision Shapes Cobo
Cobo continues to evolve.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
How to craft a great product is a key issue that consistently draws attention and discussion across any narrative, regardless of whether it’s Web2, Web3, or other domains.
Regarding how to build a strong product, my superficial takeaway from reading "Steve Jobs" is the need for founders to have deep passion for the product itself and an obsessive drive to create perfection.
Passion, action, and reflection are equally important—and all depend fundamentally on the leader at the helm.
As a veteran figure deeply focused on product development in the crypto space, Su Zhu has continuously reflected on how to refine and upgrade great products: "Cobo’s product evolution cannot be separated from the industry’s developmental history. Over the past decade, blockchain-based applications have advanced rapidly. For Cobo, the core questions I’ve been pondering and striving to answer are: Does the industry still need custody solutions? And what kind of custody services are needed?"
This reminds me of an interview in March, when a Cobo insider clarified the meaning behind Su Zhu’s WeChat name suffix “2.1.0”—essentially a personal reminder for himself to prioritize cognitive iteration.
Recently, Su Zhu and his team at Cobo have gained further clarity on several key issues. Much like that version number, their products are once again undergoing iterative upgrades—Cobo continues to evolve.
Cobo Custody in the Context of Blockchain Evolution
It’s well known that Cobo was co-founded in November 2017 by Su Zhu, founder of F2Pool, and Changhao Jiang, former senior scientist at Facebook.
In less than five years, Cobo has evolved from a single wallet offering into the largest one-stop digital asset custody and asset management platform in the Asia-Pacific region, serving top-tier global institutions with secure crypto custody and value-added services. Last year, the company completed a Series B financing round of approximately $40 million.
Currently, Cobo’s technology-driven infrastructure primarily serves institutional (B2B) clients, and the continuous evolution of Cobo Custody will remain central over the next one to two years.
Leveraging its industry-leading three-layer private key storage architecture, bank-grade HSM encryption modules, multi-signature schemes, Cobo Guardian multi-factor authentication, cold/warm/hot storage separation, private key sharding, global physical storage distribution, and customizable risk control policies, Cobo Custody ranks among the most secure cryptocurrency custody platforms on the market. Cobo now supports over 60 public chains and 1,600+ tokens, making it one of the most comprehensive custody and asset management platforms globally.
To date, Cobo has served over 300 institutional clients through its one-stop custody solution, covering more than 85% of top-tier APAC crypto exchanges. Its institutional clients include Deribit, BitMart, Pionex, and others. By the end of 2021, Cobo had managed over $100 billion in transaction volume.
How should custody evolve? According to Su Zhu, "we must think in the context of blockchain’s historical progression."
Su Zhu divides blockchain development into three stages.
The first stage was marked by the success of value-storage blockchains like Bitcoin, which have already gained recognition from central banks of smaller nations and other major financial institutions.
Most custody solutions today were built to meet the needs of this stage—addressing security and usability challenges, helping institutional users convert fiat to on-chain assets more compliantly, and enabling secure storage, payments, and transfers.
However, opportunities for innovation in this phase are limited—mainly expanding chain support, enhancing security, SaaS-ifying operations, and improving compliance.
The second stage involves the recent surge of mid-layer protocols led by smart contract platforms, primarily DeFi, addressing financial use cases and opening up vast new opportunities for the industry. In response, Cobo launched DaaS (DeFi as a Service), a semi-centralized on-chain solution—including institutional-grade on-chain interaction tools and derivative offerings such as the Cobo DeFi Fund.
The third stage looks ahead to the coming years, where application-layer growth, improved chain performance, and widespread adoption will gradually bring us into the Web3 and metaverse era.
Under this vision, application layers will become highly sophisticated. The question then becomes: Will custody still be needed? If so, what form should it take? These are precisely the questions Cobo has been contemplating and attempting to solve. As mentioned earlier, they’ve begun forming answers and are already building early-stage demos.
Insiders reveal that specific initiatives will be gradually unveiled over the coming months or in the second half of the year.
Such forward-looking considerations and upcoming moves stem from Cobo’s consistent adherence to a “beginner’s mindset,” publicly emphasized multiple times. By embodying the ethos of being industry builders, Cobo adapts to each stage of blockchain development, addresses current industry pain points, and injects new users, assets, and momentum into the ecosystem.
Cobo DeFi Fund: Capturing Opportunities in Sentiment and Cycles
Of course, while forecasting the future is something every founder must do, focusing on the present remains crucial. Given that the industry is still in the second stage, the Cobo DeFi Fund—as a core product line—is naturally a key focus of this latest upgrade.
To briefly introduce the Cobo DeFi Fund: Launched in October 2021 in stealth mode and personally led by Su Zhu, this product line centers around DeFi-as-a-Service, designed to solve multi-party, multi-permission management challenges on-chain.
It originally offered three tiers: low-risk “Whale,” medium-to-high-risk “Swordfish,” and high-risk “Bloodyfish.”
Within six months of launch, the fund gained strong traction among institutional clients. It now manages close to $900 million in assets, earning broad recognition from mainstream institutions and experiencing rapid client growth.
However, after observing actual usage patterns, Cobo found that clients overwhelmingly favored the highest-risk, highest-return options—even though these had limited capacity and posed greater risk management challenges. As part of this upgrade, these have now been consolidated into a single fund category emphasizing medium-to-low risk and return profiles.
Additionally, the upgraded Cobo DeFi Fund includes a safety buffer to mitigate potential profit drawdowns. Most importantly, the product features a rigorous internal audit and monitoring system to ensure risks remain under control throughout the DeFi investment process.
“Many well-known projects offer extremely attractive yields, but fail our internal smart contract audits or due diligence checks, so we don’t invest in them,” said Su Zhu.
On asset allocation strategy, Cobo is building an in-house fund management team, bringing on board professionals with experience in traditional regulatory compliance and data analytics. Furthermore, the research and investment team has started adopting a partially DAO-like structure to collaborate externally, enabling access to real-time, ground-level insights.
Moreover, compliance remains a top priority for Cobo. In 2018, Cobo obtained Hong Kong’s TCSP custody license, which was renewed this April. Also in 2018, it acquired the U.S. MSB license, renewed in 2021. This year, the focus is on securing relevant asset management and custody licenses in Singapore.
Su Zhu himself will concentrate primarily on projects internally rated S and S+, using them as foundations for constructing complex investment strategies. In addition to DeFi assets, the Cobo DeFi Fund also holds BTC and ETH, with plans to implement strategies around ETH 2.0.
“Based on current projections, Ethereum 2.0 is likely to merge in Q3 or Q4 this year. Cobo already offers related products tailored for high-net-worth users.” Su Zhu believes the merge period presents both arbitrage opportunities and new foundational growth vectors.
Specifically, opportunities arise from sentiment and cycles. The former stems from divergent market expectations around the ETH 2.0 merge, potentially creating significant arbitrage windows.
A real-world example occurs during sharp market downturns, when some investors need liquidity and are forced to sell illiquid assets at depressed prices, causing rapid price spikes—often presenting annualized returns of 10–20%. The latter refers to Ethereum’s stable, long-term base-layer yield—the foundational returns underpinning the entire DeFi ecosystem.
Beyond these, there may be two additional near-risk-free sources of yield: one arising from volatility and sentiment-driven arbitrage, and the other from true demand-based activities like lending and trading—both forming the bedrock of DeFi’s yield economy.
Therefore, Cobo will place significant emphasis on strategic positioning in ETH 2.0 and core DeFi assets, with concrete plans likely to be disclosed publicly in the future.
Cobo Labs: Research and Investment in Tandem
Cobo Labs is Cobo’s in-house cryptocurrency research lab, aiming to lower the knowledge barrier for market participants and crypto enthusiasts while contributing insights and research perspectives to the broader industry.
Currently, core research output comes primarily from CEO Su Zhu, CTO Changhao Jiang, Asset Management VP Alex Zuo, and Research & Investment VP Ellaine, focusing on foundational infrastructure, cross-chain, and scaling technologies. Since late 2021, Cobo Labs has invested in over ten projects.
Its evolution lies in transitioning from pure research to a dual model of strategic investment plus industry research—leveraging synergies and打通上下游资源 (streamlining upstream and downstream resources) to continue injecting vitality into the ecosystem and shaping industry trends.
For instance, after in-depth analysis of the cross-chain bridge space, Cobo Labs has formed distinct views.
After closely studying existing cross-chain bridge projects, Cobo Labs observed that many suffer from excessive centralization at the protocol level—where nodes or validator sets are restricted to predefined groups, resulting in a verification layer structure akin to centralized exchange (CEX) management. Additionally, bridges inherently carry smart contract risks related to lock-up mechanisms, token release logic, and inter-chain communication layers. Given the frequent hacks targeting cross-chain bridges, Cobo Labs urges caution regarding smart contract risks when using such protocols.
Cobo Labs continues to monitor and research other emerging sectors, driving investment through research to empower the broader market.
Looking across Cobo’s product iterations, we can sense the agency and proactive mindset of a capable product builder. Like Steve Jobs’ passion for products and relentless pursuit of perfection—though expressed differently—the essence is shared: Cobo’s defining keyword is simply “Builder.”
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