Ventures and Virtues of Crypto: A Conversation with Wei Shi Khai and QZ

Hello and welcome to mergers and acquisitions, a podcast series from the Society of Economic Anthropology and Producing Collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. My name is Aowl Glim and I'm an incoming presidential assistant professor of anthropology at Singapore Management University after defending my dissertation in anthropology and environmental studies at Yale University. My doctoral research draws on 27 months of ethnographic fieldwork to examine the social ecology of crypto and Thailand as part of my broader research program and finance and tech in Southeast Asia. I'm your host for this quarter of mergers and acquisitions entitled Crypto Through the Years. The series brings together anthropologists, researchers and practitioners to examine crypto as it unfolds across time and place. We follow crypto through its successive cycles from early experimentation and speculative booms to moments of crash. These episodes highlight the value of an ethnographic lens to research the volatile landscape of crypto, showing how ideas of value, risk and trust are continuously reworked across communities, geographies and cycles. Our first episode of the series Crypto Ethnography and AI walk through what people do with crypto, are being a source of value or investment to new forms of technological experimentation. Our second episode from crypto, speculations to its geopolitics shifted to talk about crypto in the context of crisis in Turkey and Latin America, showing how it's embedded in broader national and geopolitical tensions. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different and I believe the first time in the podcast history that there will be a sole focus on the role of practitioners. Our two guests today, Wayshikai NQZ, are partners at well known crypto venture capital funds. They've also been my colleagues and friends for many years and as anthropologists we know that friendships often extend far beyond the confines of future work per se. I've learned a tremendous amount from them and I'm very grateful that joining today share their insights in crypto, VC and what things look like from a Singapore or Asia-based perspective. So they're bios. Wayshikai is co-founder and general partner of Longhash Ventures with aggregate assets under a management of approximately $100 million US dollars since 2021. Shikai also co-founded and launched Longhash X, Asia's first globally focused blockchain accelerator backed by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. Through Longhash X, he's overseen the acceleration of more than 70 early-stage companies and supported them in raising over $250 million US dollars today. Prior to Longhash Ventures, he was consultant at McKinsey & Company in Malaysia advising C-suite clients across banking, telecommunications, and energy sectors and strategy, organizational design and digital transformation. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Pure College London as well. Tinkta or QZs are second guests, a community builder and investor in the Ethereum ecosystem. Over the past several years, he's been deeply embedded in the space organizing ETH Singapore, one of Southeast Asia's flagship Ethereum events and contributing to ecosystem development at Kikoi. Building with this foundation, QZ Co-founded the Ethereum ecosystem fund, a 30 million US dollar seed stage venture fund backed by Ethereum pioneers. This fund invests in early-stage projects that advance decentralized infrastructure and programmable financial systems. So, with that, I'd love to start us off by asking our guests, how would you go about defining crypto to your colleagues who aren't already in the industry? Shukai, would you like to start? Alright, thanks for the intro while your voice is very professional when you're running this podcast. Almost, AI generated if I might say. So first question, what is crypto? To be honest, that is a question that surprisingly everybody in this circle is now grappling with. It used to be quite clear in the early days. I think when I first joined the space in 2017-2018, there was an ICO boom and it was clearly a bunch of misfits who felt like we belonged because we were inventing new ways of crop funding, donating, building things in this decentralized and open way. But over the years, I feel that we have shifted from DE and various verticals into more FI. So we started adding FI to everything, gamefI, DeFi, whatever FI, social FI. And that I think has resulted in a culture of hyperspeculation and some would say overspeculation. And as a result, after that wave of financialisation, which I think I think more like 2021-22, in this cycle, we see the further generation to that with a lot more of memes with the number one, meme trading, volume, application generating billions of revenue. But we also start to see the maturation of new primitives, such as prediction markets, potentially decentralized physical infrastructure, and stablecoins, real assets, things that people care about in the real world or actually are operating in the real world. So because crypto has expanded so much into all of these verticals, including of course, AI, robotics, I don't quite know what to say about what is crypto anymore. And maybe that's a good thing. It's not a contrainting within our space right now to say that crypto is becoming like the internet where nobody now says that, oh yeah, I work on an internet company or I'm an internet investor. It's just part of the technology suite that is used whenever it makes sense. So in a way, that is what crypto is today. When you need a global permissionless open system for anyone to coordinate with each other, you use blockchains. When you need things to be verifiable, immutable, easily proven, then you use cryptographic techniques like zero knowledge proofs, trasex, execution environments, fully homomorphic encryption. And these are many of the primitives that also used within the crypto circle. And we also broadly call them crypto. So in the end, basically, it's a collection of all of these things. So yeah, you touched on some points that I was going to mention also, which is great because the work that we do as part of Ethereum Singapore is engaging closely with the public with the art science museum. So for the past two years, we've been working with artists and art science museum is a premier place for science communication. And the one thing that came up from a lot of the conversations is that cryptography, not cryptocurrency. So I think that's something that came up a lot and became a very easy way for me to talk about crypto as a space. Because for me, at least crypto as money and the financial aspects of it are not super interesting. Especially for the early days, a lot of it was about whether Bitcoin will replace money as a new form of digital money. But it's not very interesting. In the sense that if you go to any museum, you will see a coin section or a money section of the museum. So pretty clear that answer is yes. You can replace money. But usually it's with another form of just as bad form of money. Every Roman emperor will have a new form of money. He will stamp his face on it. Every dynasty will have a new kind of paper money or coins. So this is not super interesting. But when it comes to cryptography, as you mentioned, I think it's really interesting because one is openly verifiable and it can be used at a very low cost. So it's actually possible for you with the power of cryptocurrency to create the same kind of guarantees that money used to have without needing the mites of an entire empire to maintain this or the institutions that come with empire building or countries or nation states. So this is interesting because now you and I can create forms of value that are tailored to local needs but globally available. So this is interesting. It's never happened before. So I'm going to touch on some points that are unique to Ethereum. You might see this in some of the recent conversations. And it's four things. First, it's censorship resistance and cryptography actually helps to protect your messages and intended actions from interference. Second, the values of open source where now anybody can use these tools. But more importantly, because it is open, it's easy for you to build these common standards that no single actor controls. This is really important when it comes to institutions. The third point is actually privacy. It's very obvious from the perception of like a cryptography and encryption schemes that come out of it. But I think what's more important is that right now, privacy is usually the first to go when it comes to compliance. It's now possible to create methods that you can prove things without revealing the underlying information. And now, maybe it finally might be possible for privacy to be default. And then you selectively reveal what you choose rather than just giving everything up to whichever institution. Like back in the day in Singapore, you just give all of your ideas just to win a lucky draw something. That's crazy now. But back in the day, people would just do it. In the last piece is security, which is you need to have all of this view on a strong kind of battle tested foundation. And it's not new. The internet already runs on cryptographic security. And I think it's probably a good way to talk to non-focus at it in the space, but also broad enough to apply the outdated day. I want to push back a little bit on the crypto graph and not crypto currency thing. Okay, let's go. Let's go. I mean, the new form of currency is not so interesting, but new form of ownership, like you said, is actually quite interesting, right? And it does present new challenges to regulators like, you know, who owns Ethereum? What is Ethereum? Is it a company that has owners like, yeah, shareholders, and they're like, obviously, doesn't. But at the same time, you know, who governs it? There is a governance structure in some way, which is not entirely. There's like a social governance structure or like how to upgrade and so on. But there's also a more financial driven ownership structure in the sense that validators hold stake. And like that amount of stake actually determines who gets to vote on the next block and determines the sort of the reality that gets formed at the tip of the blockchain. So while currency is not interesting, I think the idea that a lot of people can collectively own something that is not really controlled by anyone is interesting. So add to that, more more ownership thing, more crypto ownership, plus cryptography. I would agree actually. So my own take on Ethereum is that it's a mutable land. Like you talk about Ethereum as silver or oil, I think it's a land. It's something that you can't take away, that you can build and it's going to be stable. It's going to be there for a long time. And it benefits from public goods and infrastructure. But because it is so stable, you can build things that accrue a lot of value on top of it. And you know you won't get wrapped. The infrastructure that you build on will suddenly disappear just to use non-cripple jargon. So this is really important because previously you might think that you own it but you don't. And this has happened in day-to-day life. Like I come from a high school that was actually donated from a tycoon 100 years ago. When I was about to graduate, the government decided that we needed a train station. I only reported to ask us, but at least they bothered to name it after our founder. But for three years, they just decided to tear out the land that we had to build a train station. We were lucky to get it back, but our neighbours weren't so lucky. They lost their track and they have failed forever. So this is interesting from a real life kind of perspective. I don't think it's uniquely Singaporean. In many parts of the world, sometimes people will evoke such laws to basically take back the land, the built infrastructure, whatever. And if your government is good, great. But if your government might be undergoing turmoil or might not be a public service oriented, then it becomes very challenging for you to build things in an ownership perspective. Amazing. So I think just for the listeners who might not be so familiar with what ownership means, what is governance, how does that work. Maybe Katie Walker's a little bit through how this idea of what you said, the censorship resistance, open source privacy security, or what I'm hearing as crops more recently. How did that develop over time? Why I mean, why now is one question? But I'm curious, like if you go back a little further, what have people built on a theory of right? You mentioned decentralized infrastructure and programmable financial systems. How would you unpack that? What sorts of things are like the land that you're talking about? A simple example is I think when Facebook inside the rename itself, meta. So the word meta clearly wasn't unused before Facebook decided to just take it. They happen to also own Instagram. So from what I understand is that somebody who used to own the meta name basically had it lost. And for them, Instagram is not just for you to post photos. They were, I think they were creators also. So in some extent, that is their financial infrastructure. That is programmable to some extent because you know, you can have your insights or you can put different ways of getting your posts out. And this is really important because if this was on the theory, it wouldn't be possible. There are other examples of digital ownership that nobody, not even the foundation, not even validators, not even the government will be able to remove even if they really wanted to. And I think that's really interesting because then there needs to be newer forms of governance that come from what you call community consensus. So if you just happen to be early and you happen to buy like computer.ethereum, like it's like a domain for yourself. Does that mean that you can just shorten it forever? Or should there be other ways of governance for you to give it up at some point if you don't choose to use this after a year or so? So this brings up new questions. But I hope that meta example, you know, at least people should be more familiar with it. And why something that is censorship resistant is really important. And when we are arriving, or at least in the next year or so, I think we're arriving in a inflection point where large corporations can become increasingly more powerful and they will, they also own most of the platforms that we're on. And therefore, crops as a set of values collectively from what we believe, sanctuaries technology. So this is a term that recently, Ethereum has been trying to promote a little bit more. But the idea that you can create a sanctuary, your sanctuaries and that they could be multiple different sanctuaries is really important. Otherwise, I think humanity risk just evolving into an internet field with AI slot. Yeah. So I think maybe helpful to bring up that. I mean, this governance issue exists because Ethereum is trying to do something in like an ungovernable way, right? That like anyone can come and do anything. And so if they figure out new ways to coordinate. At the same time, crypto or blockchains or cryptographic techniques are also purely technology with people don't decide how to use them. So technically, for example, stable coins, if it's issued by a centralized issuer, even though it was on chain, then like, hey, they can freeze it, right? For whatever kind of terrorism and sanctioned countries and so on. Or tokenized things like stocks or funds, clearly, they can whitelist, freeze, even reverse transactions. Like I said, pretend you never really ordered because they can actually do those things. And furthermore, if you do something like CBDC where the central bank actually can see all of the transactions that are happening by everyone, they can decide to do it in a way without privacy. Or maybe they can do it in a way with privacy, but they can even program in certain logic like, hey, if you have a certain amount of transactions, here's your personalized tax rate. Or here's a merchant code and I can blank it, kind of freeze all assets from this category of merchants if you run a whole country's currency on such a blockchain. So it's not by default, right? Like, you can use it to become even more draconian and even more all-reaching if it falls into different hands. You're right. Yeah, absolutely. So that's why somebody needs to put a stand. I don't think the idea is that governments shouldn't be building this, but it's that, sure, everyone should be able to build this, these things. And so are we, and we should also be able to build alternatives. I think the idea of like alternatives is really, really important. In a sense that I have to pay my taxes in Singapore dollars for sure. Right? If I'm in the States, I have to pay USD. Not only that, I have to pay wherever I am globally, because there's a global tax regime, right? Like, that's incredibly powerful. There should be the ability to build such an alternative. As of now, the only possible kind of way of doing this is through Ethereum. I'm back to the point about governance, I think you mentioned. It's not that it's ungovernable to say, but I think it's more like you cannot fall to governance capture. So if there is a, this is a big controversy. I think people have been discussing this for a while, but if there is a very clear kind of like governance structure, right? There are certain assumptions that are baked into like the constitution, you know, the structure of the voting or how decisions are made. This is basically a framework on how to capture the decision-making power. And we are seeing, we've seen this in all of humanity from the beginning, when we first came together as a country all the way till now, how like incredibly powerful institutions can eventually be captured. And it doesn't happen suddenly, right? It happens bit by bit day by day. You make one compromise, right? You give up something to a private sector interest or you allow lobbying or all these little things, slowly, slowly creep up. And what the intended system outcomes are supposed to be compared to what the system is designed for. After 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, the system itself is totally different from what it was actually built to be. So having consensus that arrives each time for the people that are most affected by it is probably a right principle to do, right? I mean, that's kind of how democracy came about, I suppose, again, like, I know, the Indian times. And I think digital democracy is also another interesting aspect that now their could enable. If I remember correctly, I think some countries are exploring voting through WhatsApp, right? Because you know some countries are so big and people work day by day, it's very hard to get people to like walk, give up time to go down to make a vote, but this is really important. So I think this is something that these properties can now enable. Can we tie you back a bit so, what do you, all the concepts you just mentioned, when you say that that is crypto? Because I mean, oh, there's a lot of factions have emerged, right? That kind of play along that spectrum. Like you said, make those compromises. Are these still crypto or are you saying, is this what crypto should be? Or is how it like, we started and then we kind of straight from it and like, we're not there now. That's interesting. Cosset, this is has to do with history and kind of like philosophy, but also anthropology. I think what's important here is to remember why like digital cash was first created, like in '08, '09. The cypherpunk philosophy is really important. And then I think it sounded kind of like crazy, but self-sornerantly from the perspective of having some control over your day to day necessities. I think these are important principles. Now, why is this relevant and why we advocate for it as like what they call it like a front page for crypto is that these are properties that we think are truly unique to what crypto can create. Everything else actually can probably be created in the current form of the internet that we're in. And for us, this means that it's possible to create like entirely new categories. I don't remember any particular, or maybe back in the '90s or the '80s people were trying to define the internet. And people used to call it a digital highway, remember correctly. There were two different versions of this digital highway. One was, you know, you have to use apps built on my version of the internet. I think it was AOL pushing something like this. And they would always advocate better UX, better security, you know, verified ads. But that actually constrained the potential of the internet. In the end, it was people that set up their own servers in the garages that took over, you know, what the version of the internet was. And now the emergent use cases of the internet came about rather than it being dictated or decided by the initial folks that attribute the internet. And this is really interesting because I was in SF like last week, I think, two weeks ago. And I met somebody who knew people at Caltech, I think, or Berkeley, they were viewing the initial internet. At least for just researchers, they were just playing around with interesting technologies. They didn't really have an opinion about like what this was going to do. They were just using it to see whether it could be done. Right. I think that energy is really important. But it also has to be guided by some kind of virtue. So it's very challenging because so much of the space, right. As you kind of like mentioned earlier, has become very, very financialized. But my take on that is that really it's just easy to talk about finance because everybody touches money, everybody uses it, everybody has some sense of digital money or digital experiences with finance. And so it's easier for them to kind of like reason about what crypto can be used for. Awesome. So I think there's this initial emergence of crypto as scurting the feds. And it's often evoked whenever I especially scholars talk about crypto and it's changed over the years. Right. So previously in the last episode, we talked about context of crisis, right. Having crypto or USDT, for example, be a hedge against a volatile fiat currency or in other senses, hyper speculation. So I think there are these emerging use cases through the years that follow kind of the different cycles and they kind of span between speculation. You have censorship resistance and use cases of philanthropy. You mentioned tax. I'm curious if tax is something that's come up more. Or these other aspects of cryptography that allow for certain things like immutability, putting things on the blockchain that you cannot change otherwise. And it's there for everyone to see and it cannot be hidden, covered up or changed beyond the fact that that can apply to a whole suite of things that I've seen through the years, right. Land records, health records and all these other, let's say use cases and applications. And over the years, we've seen factions come up and the different virtues that you talk about, right. So Ethereum Foundation is one of the big entities and they're always careful because they don't want to be a kingmaker. They don't want to kind of dominate the space. Yeah, there's a certain expectation that being a Ethereum Foundation to guide or to kind of show direction as to what is crypto. Where should it go? What should what should people do with it? And there are other factions, right. Like the Bitcoiners who are derogatory at first known as a Bitcoin maximalist who believe that Bitcoin is the only proper cryptocurrency. And so they have their own faction and there are many, many others that haven't merged since. And so one way to kind of push the conversation along a little further is to ask, you know, where are you investing or what have you invested in as a way to kind of see like what use cases are you most interested or convicted about? So I think both of your funds have fairly different mandates in terms of like the kinds of projects you invested and happen investing in. So I'm curious if you can talk a little bit more about those kinds of use cases like what infrastructure, what projects do you see as being the future of crypto? So we are not third, fine now. And actually operate also other smaller pools of capital. And I think investing is like you said, probably the ultimate test because for something to be useful and successful investing is like the proof. Although you can argue that okay, maybe there's a financial return as well of social impact. So anyway, my take on investing is that there is no set permanent direction. We always had to adapt to what was missing at that point in time. And like we said, because crypto has gone through this wave of firstly idealism and then speculation or you know, hyper financialization. And then now I think onto a wave of more pragmatism. So I think our investment trend has also followed the frontier of what was possible with these. So when it was more idealistic, we wanted to also back, right? What is meet it in the centralised world? Be it faster, cheaper blockchains, more privacy, smart accounts, so on. And then as more applications emerge, we then started investing in DeFi, deep in into AI agents. And now I think even more so, what is useful? There is a more controversial take that, well, some of our investor friends share is maybe blockchains were not really built for humans, maybe it was built for AI and AI agents to transact because it's digital by nature. And it's also easier for AI agents to leap from humans, right? Just like how it takes a lot of time and effort for humans to change behaviour from let's say banking and credit cards to Fintech mobile. And Asia could make that leap because we did not have the baggage. So similarly, but because it's more efficient, so then we just made the leap naturally. So same thing with AI agents, right? Because they don't come with the baggage of like, hey, here's the existing financial system. Because technically crypto is a more open efficient system, then we could expect them to adopt this far quicker than humans and enterprises have. Of course, the bottleneck is that agents are created by humans and humans are still operating in the real world. So that has not quite happened yet. And you could speculate that, okay, when agents start creating other agents or agents want to start transacting, transact autonomously, then they might decide to use a more efficient transaction platform. Just like how when two agents communicate, there was a very famous clip where two agents decided to, hey, let's switch to this like gibberish language that nobody could understand, but it was much more efficient for them. Like maybe they switch over to something like crypto. So while it seems like sci-fi, it does seem to be happening quite quickly. So we are looking into a lot of agent-related investment areas on chain. In terms of DeFi as well, more practical applications on the ground within Asia, within Southeast Asia of how you can use these open systems for payments and such. And I think one more area I'm very interested in. So we touch on AI DeFi. I think in for us as well, I still think that infrastructure needs to be improved, especially privacy and security. So the last two bits of like crops, I think, are not there yet. So technically the systems today are already censorship resistant and open enough. So most blockchains by default are like immutable and permissionless. Well, at least the public blockchains. But very few, almost none of the chains and apps are private by default and secure by default. So I think that presents an insane opportunity if we see more enterprise retail in the agent adoption, right? That the, how can you have built-in privacy, could you be at a layer or be within an app? How do you have built-in security, be it at a wallet level, at the transaction level, or maybe even somehow chain level. So I think yeah, those three buckets is where we're looking to invest in next AIDify in Fra. I think it's interesting to hear your perspective from this mostly around the lines that when there are new opportunities to come about crypto also seems to move very very fast right the agentic stuff came up like kind of they hope any I used to work agent like last year or for the first time we be from member correctly and then now like I'm not sure if you have tried it but it's pretty pretty both incredible and scary and I think this is where we both agree which is that in Ethereum right there are certain new ways of working that we can credibly rely on. So for for example if we say oh you know we're going to build like an agentic commerce right on say some kind of payment processor it's hard to trust that they're not going to just like change or copy your agent or just like you know maybe remove the API or worse I think what Twitter did was they just blocked it I think right and there were many prior projects that were building kind of like AI or agent type of things using the Twitter API as like a social agent use case right either sentiment analysis or to some people was like trend analysis to some folks it was like how do you react to real-time situation so things like this. So from an Ethereum ecosystem fund kind of like perspective generally we believe one thing which is that Ethereum is emerging technology therefore right two things either you are able to build totally new use cases that can only exist on the Ethereum and then that's something that we will look at very closely it's challenging because it's totally new it's hard for people to fully understand secondly that might be some incumbents or thirdly you might need to achieve some kind of like consensus within the Ethereum ecosystem right so I think that's the first one the second category of projects that we look at is Ethereum as emerging technology is imperfect so there's more things to be built on I think the very first Facebook was built on PHP now it's not possible to you know run Facebook on PHP I think you're just like server catch fire or something so for Facebook to scale they had to build new things right I think they built social graphs there was a new invention of their debut they they they funded and supported react but in the AI space they also supported from remember it was Lama they also supported PyTorch a lot of these new primitives technology infrastructure that came about so for us we're looking at similar things right there are some things that Ethereum will never compromise on for example a lot of financial infrastructure has been I wouldn't say lobbying but like asking or pushing for something that we call faster finality which is when can a blockchain network agree that this is 100% gonna be there forever final right and many kind of like up and coming blockchains have kind of like decided to optimize for this because financial infrastructure you know use cases come up immediately then you can have like sub-second transaction speeds right Ethereum won't do this it's not possible to do something like this and remain decentralized because there are physical limits to it so this is just one example I'm diving a bit deeper into because we are looking at projects that could help improve things like this while making sufficiently acceptable trade-offs to you know either decentralization or security or privacy whatever right the different different kinds of trade-offs to make in order to achieve that something has to give you cannot have everything out one goes not possible so such a project that we're looking at is also looking at improving transaction finality or providing execution guarantees and this preserves because it doesn't require Ethereum to you know centralize more but it preserves Ethereum's current architecture or global network state without you know sacrificing all of these are very important values that we have while improving the speed of finality which means it's now possible to build execution quality that could rival visa for example or in the case of crypto like centralized exchanges so things like this where it opens up entirely news case new use cases but it's on infrastructure layer that's another thing another category of things that we're looking at also I think something that's probably dancing around people's minds in with this conversation is how do you govern in terms of the god rules behind it because a lot of people have heard about crypto as like a technology for money laundering right and so creating a censorship resistance layer to that would be optimizing for criminals you know in a way and so how do you you know as Ethereum is some fund or or folks in crypto how do you kind of determine that boundary between like okay these are not like these are elicit sources of money we need to cut those and those are not really what we're building for right versus the kind of other forms of financial transactions whether that's for yield whether that's institutional whether that's consumer base that are more legitimate so how do you kind of draw that line especially because of the censorship resistance quality this is an interesting coin and it came up quite a lot over the years I think let's start with Bitcoin I suppose very early on Bitcoin was seen as anonymous money I think the first major global use case of Bitcoin is Silk Road eventually people figured out how to find who was running Silk Road and then you know they they will eventually take a nap it was very difficult it took the the authorities multiple attempts to take down the website but being a immutable blockchain it's impossible to run away I think it's really interesting in the sense that if you use technology to commit crime it's still crime right it's it's not like you know it's not like because you use crypto it's not crime anymore I think what's important is that the base level of privacy and censorship resistance should be at a certain point because governments legal enforcement have incredible amounts of resources that can be used to track down these things and it could be done in many different ways right in the end it wasn't Bitcoin itself that helped kick out Silk Road it was comment on a forum that the guy running it did and that was how the authorities found him so we're not saying that it's totally impossible it's just that the base level needs to be good and we should try and optimize for that rather than just like giving it up entirely right so we have seen and this is actually if you look through different improvement proposals that have come up over the years there have been many many many attempts to view commissioned white listed only kind of like things but they have never caught on either because the minute you view that I just use a bank what's the point right there's no reason to do it anymore so I think this is a interesting kind of like tension to kind of go into because it's it comes out a lot like I don't know how many times it comes out like every other week where oh when censorship resistance and privacy is so this means that you know you'll be able to do money laundering so back to Asia Southeast Asia right I think since this podcast is kind of like along the lines of the Asian perspective recently I think in the last year and a half there has been massive crackdowns on illegal money laundering activities if I remember correctly the line with Cambodia I think Thailand had a couple Singapore had quite a few they they weren't using Bitcoin or crypto they were just keeping gold bars and diamonds if I remember correctly and owning the jail so they have crypto they have yeah but just a little bit right like like Singapore caught three billion of worth of it and I think they had like 100 Bitcoin or something or all less than that and there's a fraction compared to the total amount of money that can be moved through just what's already currently existing my take is a bit different I think it's entirely possible to build systems that are kind of like proof of innocence kind of like perspectives so it's possible to continually prove that you are not on a sanctions list so that you are not associated with certain pulls or funds or you are associated with funds if you only to verify or to demonstrate without revealing everything at one go this is useful from a very practical perspective because if I remember correctly to four years ago I remember there was a lot of like a bank pick protruding scams I think that were volunteering money through Binance peer to peer the thing was in the news right and and it was very bad I've had friends who had their entire families bank accounts get closed down because they happened to be transact using Binance peer to peer they didn't know anything about it but then they got a call mingled and it was not possible for them to prove that this was not stolen money so the best thing that a bank could do was just trace and see where the money went and just close everybody's bank account down and they were all blacklisted on goal so I think now if there is a verifiable global shared database it's actually much easier for us to prove that we are not associated with like bad sources of money right and not get accidentally implicated in things like this and building something like that is actually really useful because I believe banks spend a lot of money on compliance like like crazy amounts that and data protection And all of this is because they have no other way to be able to comply with global anti-molonding laws or anti-terrorism financing laws. And so the only way is to just track every source, every dollar where it's going. And so that's why the entire financial system is very civil. Right, so Crypto, Cryptography provides the possibility to build an alternative. If it was built, we would be using it. So actually this is a good chance to see what projects we're trying to build this. Let me add a little bit, fully aligned. So in short, it's basically an engineering and cryptography issue. So it's entirely possible. I want to add one key distinction, which is the asymmetric effort that's required to prove innocence versus proof guilty. So with the right cryptographic techniques, like what QZ said, you can prove that you're not associated. Right? But and then you remain, let's say, private by default or more or less private. But it's still possible, probably, like I said, if you run Silk Road that a well equipped intelligence agency, whatever it can go and trace all the sources and in the end trace it back to you. Right? But it should not be easy for them to simply surveil, mass surveil all of the transactions and mass control of the people. Right? If they want to go and check, it should be, it should take effort. And therefore, it is reserved for big enough, like criminals, money laundering cases, so on. And actually, Vitalik has written so much about this. All of the things that we've just mentioned, he has written about all of this already. So if you're listening, I highly encourage. Yeah, going, going to his blog and read about it. Yeah, I totally agree. This is a, we have a super aligned on this. I mean, that's the inspiration of of of why we're in this space, actually, for quite a lot of us. Awesome. And so one thing I don't think of a talent certain about is pragmatism from the Singapore context. So, Shikha, you mentioned earlier, you mentioned earlier about, okay, so we have several phases of crypto. You said we had phases of speculation. There were phases, oh, idealism first speculation and pragmatism. So that's super interesting because as what might know, Singapore's political philosophies resolved around this idea of pragmatism. And QZU have been working through Ethereum Singapore and doing all sorts of events and thinking about what a Singapore-based perspective might be. So I'm curious, both of your perspectives, unlike what a Singapore perspective is how that kind of led into your own work or elsewhere in crypto. What, what is Singapore, what is pragmatism, how does this bleed into your own views and vision? I give you a funny story. So we are currently licensed. So we are one of the very few funds that have decided to do things properly and actually be based in Singapore and also be licensed in Singapore. Most of the funds just do it off shore and came in and be via and so on. Right, they have some weird text arrangement. So we follow very closely M.A.S guidance or questions of like, okay, actually, how do you deal with crypto? Right. And initially, you're okay, you're investing in these startups because with this venture capital license, they're like, fine, no problem. Just go and buy the equity. Sometimes you have tokens. Okay. Recently, we actually have this license upgrade to 11MC, which will allow us to trade basically any asset, any financial asset. We're like, that's great. So then, you know, we can potentially hold some if on the balance sheet because there's no way to invest in if as a startup, right? Or own some Bitcoin, for example, in the fund, right? Let's see as Treasury. And they're like, no, we can't do that. And we're like, why not? And they said, oh, it's not a capital markets product. It's not a financial product. And we're like, okay, then what is it? You know, is it a commodity? Is it a whatever? Like, no, it's nothing. It's not categorized anywhere. There is a can do anything. So unfortunately, mathematically speaking, we are still moving a little bit ahead of regulation. And we need to find like rappers intermediaries sometimes to make these things work. But it doesn't mean that we stop doing what we need to do. We just find ways to do it. And as long as we keep in the spirit of like, we're not doing the wrong thing. We're still doing things properly or as properly as we can with limited regulation and rules, then eventually things will work out. So that's how that's how it has been for us. And that's important because some people have not done things that they should be doing. And years later, they're, they are labeled as criminals. And that's happened a cool wide a few times. Yes, QZ. This is pragmatism from an operating perspective or like a more general perspective. Well, either, right? So Shukai mentioned as kind of like this era of pragmatism of like, well, you know, cryptosis is kind of sweet of technology. How do we then apply it, right? And how that also worked for him through his fun. So I'm curious for yourself, what is pragmatism or being based in Singapore? What does that do for you? So I think Singapore has the right approach to technology, which is that is a tool. Right? So if you look at technology as in general, right? I think this is like a, I don't know, the 1990s or something when the civil service was starting to adopt computers. Right? They did this as a way to improve efficiency and communication so that you can serve the citizens better. Right? I think this is a very important kind of like perspective, which is that Singapore government, Singapore as a country is still very value-driven. And a lot of it goes back to how can you improve societal outcomes for your citizens for the country? Is it better? Better defense? Does it help with manpower issues? Does it, is it faster? I think that's really good. And Singapore's use of Ethereum is actually quite extensive. So people don't realize that like every single Singaporean uses Ethereum because our certificates are on it. The Ministry of Education does it, yeah? Right? This is like in 2018, Ethereum was not mentioned anywhere because they didn't care. It was on Ethereum. I actually met the guy that built this and for him the story was very simple. As the Dean of a higher learning institute, every cycle after people graduate, right? They they enter the workforce. Suddenly the registrar gets like thousands of phone calls because they are just trying to verify the certificate. He realized that not only his you know office is being sworn by this every single higher education institute is suffering from this problem. What if there was a publicly verifiable database? So around that time Ethereum came up and they were experimenting with very different versions of this. They were looking at private blockchains, right? So should we run our own one? They were looking at consortium blockchains, right? These are very old terms but they still exist. Like oh, maybe the university together with the Ministry could run a blockchains and that's it. But what happened was that they realized that there was a much bigger dream here about allowing or making the education system be more flexible. And it also to do this, right? There might be new kinds of credentials that the Ministry, you know, operating like a massive education apparatus wouldn't be able to adapt to. And so allowing at this time was around the same time that the government was pushing for like lifelong learning kind of like initiatives, right? So having all certificates on Ethereum that is independently verifiable and people could issue them but you know the credentials eventually built some kind of like credibility through the lifetime of the person who got it. All this is really interesting and has the potential to reshape education for I think the concept is a more modular certification programs, right? All allowing people to mix and match different learning learning journeys for their lives because you know right now society is changing at a much faster rate and the government notices for a very long time already. So this is as pragmatic as it gets. They didn't even bother talking to Ethereum foundation. I know because when Ethereum foundation found out they were surprised and they also surprised that Ethereum foundation didn't know about them. And so when they met it was really interesting because it was like a meeting of minds but it was pragmatic. They just needed to find something that worked for what they did and was actually cost effective for the lifetime of this technology. They were also at one point I think also looking at service providers. This is in my opinion crazy like if Microsoft for example or Amazon or it was either of these or there was some like certification authority or service software company had control over the entire nation's certificates, right? Like that's crazy. So one thing that Ethereum provides is self sovereignty. I think I mentioned this. Self sovereignty not only for us but for our nation. I think this is really interesting and only Ethereum could provide something like this. So six, seven years later this last year the Kingdom of Bhutan has decided to bring all of its ideas, identification, pieces onto Ethereum also. Different countries are starting to see this as possible and taking a more pragmatic approach to adopting crypto. This is important. I think pragmatism in Singapore is something that is almost as a matter of existential, I don't know how to put it like it's really important because for us as a small country as a very global country, entering what looks like a complete reorganization of the international space. We only have pragmatism to survive. And this is not just a matter of policy. Yeah, that's super interesting because this idea of Singapore being a small nation state has been the kind of survival ideology for many years. I think in the 2010 scholars got together and wrote about the Singapore consensus and how it's freeing, but then it still has a sticky power, right? That just doesn't bleed into politics, but kind of all these other things as well, which is kind of, which is fascinating to see. And I'm curious, just a quick note on like, well, how do you think Singapore is then different than the rest of Asia? Because I feel like is it an exception or is it similar across the other Asian context that you've been working in as well? Shikai, we often have this conversation about Malaysian and Singaporean food. I'm curious, do you think Singapore is pragmatism or how things work here? Does it also translate into other contexts on that you've seen? I think Singapore's unique stance. So I have to paint a few examples to contrast it, right? So, bigger, small country, versus a bigger country. So let's say, China, US, or say Japan, or Korea, they have enough people, enough resources that like, they have to make decisions based on like, what is happening within their country? So China's like, okay, no, no, good to mind, so much mind is happening, or people using it for bypassing capital controls, that they have to enforce those things, right? Or for example, like Japan culturally, like, race slow, and they're really thinking about like, okay, this makes sense for our people, our systems, and then eventually they do, the concomitants, I just try not to use it. I feel that Singapore, like, what's happening within Singapore, actually matters less in the very real way, because Singapore is like this nexus of like trade and people. So it's a weird kind of in between where it's watching, like what's the US doing, what's China doing, what's, you know, Hong Kong and all these countries doing, without taking an opinion. But then it has to be very well prepared. So it's done like how many, a dozen pilot phases of using crypto for like settlement, the layering versus payments, CPDC, well now we have certification and so on. But it hasn't kind of like, switch everything into crypto yet. But it's like very ready to do so, right? So it's a weird sort of where like, it's probably more prepared than any other country in Asia or Southeast Asia to adopt crypto all in. But it's also, it will never be the first. It always wants to be at most like second in the speed to adoption. Just think. I think with that's a good point. And you're right in the sense that Singapore is a very compliant country. So if you want to move everything in the crypto tomorrow, we can probably do it. Like, if I remember some of my friends were saying that the British were very interested in how we got Singapore's adoption to 99%. And the Singaporeans were surprised that they were surprised. Of course, we just like using past. And then we just started using Singapore's. Right. Same as like trace together back in COVID. And a lot of these different things that, you know, the government says, do go A, move right, you go right, you're going to say, jump, you're asked how high, right? So it's kind of like how, it's kind of like Singapore's perspective on this. And it's very different from, like you said, like the region. So from a Southeast Asian region, I think they have like, always a bigger problem. So more pressing problems that they are dealing with. Domestic issues. Right. And sometimes I'm reminded just how, how the long history some of these countries have. We had DEF CON Southeast Asian Thailand two years ago. And like, it was incredible for me to learn. The long history of just like Bangkok, for example. Right. Like why a Bangkok street? So, you know, the roads are all the way they are. Well, they used to be rivers. And that's why it's called, you know, the city of rivers at some point, right? So, like there's such a long history to all of these different places that you cannot just bring in some new technology without hurting or displacing or leading to anxiety. Because some of these things have been around for centuries, maybe. Right. Even, you know, like trade routes are not infrastructure, that was maybe created consciously or by design. But people just started walking and then it became a road. Right. So for us, I think I should kind of mention also, like Singapore has to take a, oh, we always say like a way and see approach. Right. Cause if you want to do it first, it's going to be the one guy there and no one's going to follow you at no point. Right. And other countries or different folks in the region, they do have a lot of like domestic politics that you're with. Right. And a lot of international, some of these are like a posturing that we have to deal with. I mean, self-China C is one example, right. It's very, very complicated. And everyone is just trying to look strong, but you don't actually want to get into a fight, because everyone's going to lose. Right. So for us, when it comes to crypto, same thing. We're pragmatic, because it is necessary. Actually, one more thing about Singapore that I just realised, like, what is probably the trade route, right? Is exactly way and see. And also, neutrality, because you don't want to be part of like, you don't offend anyone, you don't want to be part of like this faction, this camp or whatever. So you kind of like, hmm, okay, what is the approach that will be most acceptable to all? Your neutrality as a matter of policy, but from a foreign affairs perspective, it's national interests. Right. This governing ideology bleeds into so many of the things like crypto regulation, right. And there's a fair amount of things at Domazal in Singapore. You have token 2049, or the biggest conferences in the world in Singapore. Yet, when you talk to the person on the street in Singapore, they're like, no, we don't really trade crypto. Whereas, for example, in Bangkok, it's a day in 2021. It was everywhere, right. Or Accine in nearby in the Philippines, right. It was, it took over the country for a period of time. So there's this really weird dichotomy between like its own citizens and others. And these things about pragmatism, foreign affairs, don't just stay within those silos, but also kind of bleed into regulations, the financial everyday financial behavior. And it's fascinating to see the kind of crossovers and intersections that emerge. I think we're running close to time soon. So I'll ask my last few questions. So for Shurkhai, I think a couple of years ago, we were having coffee, and you mentioned that the anthropological question to ask the one that you would be interested in, is like, why do people stay in crypto, right? We know that a lot of people started because of speculation. They follow their friends. That's kind of pretty well known. But they stayed for a whole variety of different reasons. And you mentioned many times before, like, if you weren't paid, you would love doing this. So I guess like, why have you stayed? And why have you seen people stay? I love weird people. And the weirdest people in the world are in crypto. Because crypto has the weird people from tech, and also the weird people from finance, and the weird people from like social, anthropological kind of curiosities. So it is the biggest collection of misfits. And I find that infinitely fascinating. And we are feeling kind of sad because I feel that era is ending. We're all becoming more normies now. In fact, probably the old era of crypto is just going to be the dark web. We're going to be the forechanners of crypto in the future. I feel it used to be like, Internet, yeah, forechand, like, you know, these like dark web forums, so good. And now it's like, no, no, no, Internet is these big tech companies. I think unfortunately crypto is probably going to hit that way. We're going to have several big platforms. And of course, there's going to be open alternatives, close alternatives. But the misfit bunch where we're going to have to take our corner and let the mainstream come in on their own terms. So the mainstream are not weird people. And they need normal things. And we need to welcome them to misfits. That is an apt answer. Qzy, I think another way to ask a kind of rapid question is, what do you think anthropologists of social science needs to do more in terms of engaging with industry, right? So I think one thing for anthropologists is we take so long to do our few work. And for me, I ended up working in crypto instead. And I haven't published a book or something. It's usually about 10 years to get a book out. And so anthropologists take our markedly long time. But there are other folks in the crypto space, for example, that are doing work with economics, with political science, with a lot of computer scientists, of course, who are having making a dent, right? And so academics intersecting with crypto. And so I think as a way to wrap up the series and this episode, I'm curious what do you think social scientists anthropologists can be the way more to talk to industry to engage? There is a lot actually. I think Ethereum has a truly sort of. like unique culture in the space. We're, you know, the misfits tend to look at Ethereum very quickly. And we are somewhat welcoming. We really don't judge or care too much about these things. In fact, we believe that this is really important for preserving a vibrant, pluralist kind of like society. If you look at different kinds of social science and crypto or Ethereum as a space, Ethereum is socially or has the potential to change society. And we are not sufficiently equipped to understand what might be the implications or some of the things that we are doing. And we also don't necessarily know why or how certain things became the way that they were for all that we talk about, you know, social consensus. Like, even now, people still debate about, you know, something that happened in 2016, the Dow hack, right? Like, there hasn't been anybody that has gone down, interviewed people who were there from the folks in the Dow itself, from the people who voted, from the folks that were super dissolution from it. And, you know, being in the space, you talk to people from all sides of it. And there is definitely something to learn here because it's going to happen again. Well, not saying that there's something you'll get hacked and then we might fork Ethereum. But like, there is going to be many difficult conversations and potential changes that we will need to grapple with every step of the way. I think what social scientists can bring to the space, right? To understand the sort of like ethnographic implications of technology is, I would say, almost critical to Ethereum success, right? It's a gap in the ecosystem. It doesn't exist. It's very hard to fully get into it because it's hard for scientists to figure out what is real and what is not in Ethereum. The only sources of information is either you go down and interview people in conferences, for example. But there's like a 70% chance you meet somebody who's totally new to the conference. So that's actually wrong, it's not the right perspective. If you look at Twitter, I think most of it is just like a bunch of opinions. Reddit also, right? Even in the research forums, there's no way to get like good sources of information. And that's why there is a gap. We don't know what we are doing. We are not even sure how we did it. Like, if you look at it, why is Ethereum number two, or how do we do this? What happened to the other, it found us, right? This is all very social in its nature. So if we could better help social scientists understand and break out of just trying to understand, I guess, the money-ness of crypto as a very coordinating perception. I think that was something that came up quite a lot in past discussions where whether crypto can really become money, if I'm as a social phenomena. OK, we can move on to how it's going to be money, maybe, or what other things we can do with crypto. Then those are super interesting. And the other thing that social scientists seem to be super and abstract with is decentralized organizations. Because I guess it's just easier to study, because everybody is participating. And there's a wealth of these participation examples in 2020 or 2022. But we do need to take a step back and look at the broader picture here and look at the broader phenomena. I think there's a lot that can be done. Yeah, I think there's a whole range of use cases that go beyond money and speculation that are both interesting. One, speculation itself in different contexts tell us different things, right? And also the different kind of use cases, as you talked about, like this sweet, right, Shukai mentioned early on, as well as different forms of voting, different forms of governance. I think this is worth not just analyzing, but also thinking about different sources. How do we analyze Twitter versus how do we analyze interviews? And also kind of creating sources of trust, right? Crypto things move very quickly. It's very hard to know, especially with the anonymous quality of it, who should be trust, right? And also how do you archive some of this? I think we talk a lot about archiving certain forms of data, certain forms of historical events and interviews. So how do we do that in a way that doesn't fall back to the old archival method, but think with Ethereum's kind of movement and the kind of dynamism that comes along with experimentation as well? And then to then push it further to think and to introduce planarily, to think about, OK, what are regulatory implications? How do we then talk to policymakers? How do we then talk to folks, other folks in industry? And also other things, right? And so I think there's a whole wealth of information and directions to go from analyzing crypto. And I hope today's episode gives a picture of the diverse actors in crypto, the diverse use cases, and also their first geographies of how crypto works. And at a point where you mentioned crypto is so searching, almost, it's worth kind of thinking about where do we go from here and how do we do it better. And so in that note, thank you both so much for a riveting episode and look forward to catching up with you all soon.