Original Article Title: "Malaysian Chinese, the Invisible Protagonist of the Crypto World"

Original Article Authors: Yanz, June, DeepTech TechFlow

When people talk about the protagonists of the crypto world, they always think of the geeks in Silicon Valley, the capital on Wall Street, the investment institutions in Singapore and Hong Kong, and the developers in mainland China, but few would turn their attention to Malaysian Chinese.

They have not graced the cover of Fortune like SBF, nor have they been labeled as the "richest Chinese" like Zhao Changpeng.

They receive less spotlight interviews, and often remain "invisible" even on Twitter.

However, when you truly dissect the landscape of the crypto industry, you will be surprised to find:

· The world's largest crypto data platform, CoinGecko, was born in Kuala Lumpur;

· The essential Etherscan in the Ethereum ecosystem was constructed by a Malaysian Chinese;

· The popular bull market narrative "AI+Crypto" of Virtuals Protocol also comes from a Malaysian Chinese team.

· The Solana ecosystem liquidity hub Jupiter originates from Malaysia.

These projects are not just replaceable byproducts, but have become the infrastructure of the crypto industry and the spark of new narratives.

Without Malaysian Chinese, today's crypto industry would lose a pair of "eyes," a "map," and even a future "path of exploration."

Builders

In 2014, Mt. Gox collapsed, plunging the entire crypto world into darkness. At the most chaotic moment in the market, Bobby Ong and TM Lee used $100 as seed funding to establish CoinGecko.

Source: Fintechnews

One studied economics, the other was a programmer. They met by chance but had the same judgment: the market urgently needed a transparent, reliable data platform. Thus, CoinGecko was born in the market crisis.

“We want to build a business that can serve everyone globally,” they summarized their original intention many years later. The fact has also proven that this direction was correct. With the Trust Score algorithm and coverage of the edge markets, CoinGecko quickly became a must-visit tool for investors every day. Ten years later, it has recorded over 17,000 tokens, and its API is widely used by Trezor, Metamask, and others.

During the same period, another young Malaysian, Matthew Tan, was focusing on Ethereum. He used to operate a blockchain explorer called Blockscan. When the Ethereum smart contracts were introduced, he keenly observed a key issue that was almost overlooked by everyone: the existing blockchain explorers could only handle simple point-to-point transactions and were completely unable to cope with the complexity brought by smart contracts.

Therefore, he almost single-handedly reshaped Blockscan into Etherscan.

“This is no longer just a value transfer from point A to point B. There is too much that needs a search engine to display.”

He decisively transformed the early blockchain explorer Blockscan, which had been operational for two years, into Etherscan, specifically redesigning the underlying architecture to address the complexity of smart contracts.

Today, Etherscan has evolved from a simple tool to the de facto standard of the Ethereum ecosystem, and almost every Ethereum user relies on it. With the advent of the multi-chain era, the successive launch of products such as BscScan, PolygonScan, and ArbiScan has further solidified the dominant position of this Malaysian Chinese in the field of blockchain explorers.

Fast forward to 2021. The warmth of the DeFi summer lingers, and a young man named TN Lee zeroed in on an even more complex problem: How to make yield more predictable and tradable?

With a background in computer science and a deep understanding of financial derivative logic, he proposed a seemingly crazy concept at the time: yield tokenization. He separated future yields into Principal Tokens (PT) and Yield Tokens (YT), allowing users to independently trade these two parts.

What seemed like a simple innovation actually took several years. In 2021, the Pendle Protocol was born.

Also in 2021, young developer Siong turned his attention to Solana. He saw the high-performance potential and also identified the challenges of liquidity fragmentation and excessive slippage. Therefore, he and his team built Jupiter, a trading aggregator that automatically finds the optimal path through an intelligent routing algorithm.

Starting from obscurity, in 2024, Pendle and Jupiter both found success in their respective ecosystems. Pendle became a leading protocol in the DeFi space with a Total Value Locked (TVL) of over $10 billion, while Jupiter also became a liquidity hub in the Solana ecosystem, with daily trading volumes often exceeding $1 billion and its token's total market cap once surpassing the $10 billion mark.

The entrepreneurial journey didn't end there. In 2024, Weekee Tiew, who had previously worked at a Boston consulting firm, set his sights on AI. Having previously founded the gaming guild PathDAO, which reached a valuation of $6 billion but then plummeted during a bear market, he resiliently navigated towards a new direction and in 2024 pivoted to launch the Virtuals Protocol, focusing on creating and issuing AI agents.

Source: LinkedIn

The token of the Virtuals Protocol, $VIRTUAL, hit a new all-time high market capitalization of over $45 billion in January 2025, becoming one of the most prominent projects at the intersection of AI and crypto.

It wasn't until his remarkable rise to fame that Weekee Tiew appeared on numerous podcast shows, surprising many to realize that this was a Malaysian project.

Moreover, not only Virtuals Protocol but also Pendle, Jupiter, Aevo, and Drift all hail from Malaysia.

On Twitter, it seems that a consensus has been reached: this cycle belongs to Malaysian entrepreneurs.

Bridgemakers

"I have many Malaysian friends who are not very talkative on social media platforms."

Compared to renowned entrepreneurs, many Malaysian Chinese in the crypto industry are like veins, dispersed throughout the industry, linking flexible limbs and existing as if part of a circulatory system, with their roles resembling arteries, connecting markets of different cultural backgrounds.

Malaysian Chinese are natural bridgemakers.

The Malaysian Chinese Cova has been involved in the crypto industry for five years now. As she has increased interactions with practitioners from around the world, she has truly come to appreciate the unique advantage of Malaysian Chinese in the industry.

「I believe Malaysian Chinese are born with a talent for customer service. Normally, a Malaysian Chinese person can speak at least three languages without dialects—Chinese, Malay, English—and some may even add Japanese and Korean to the list.」

They grow up in an environment where Chinese, English, and Malay intertwine since kindergarten, combined with each individual's unique background, and possibly Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka dialects... This linguistic 'multithreading' ability allows them to thrive in a team—they can catch up with Western trends, cater to the Southeast Asian market, collaborate with international teams, and easily engage with clients from various countries.

This linguistic gift is particularly valuable in the crypto world. Virtuals Protocol founder Weekee Tiew can showcase Virtuals to a Western audience in an English podcast, demonstrating how Virtuals truly integrate AI and Crypto, while also explaining Virtuals' grand vision to Chinese users in offline events. This multilingual ability enables him to simultaneously serve developer communities from diverse cultural backgrounds.

At the crossroads of culture, Cova also believes that Malaysian Chinese and Singaporeans can integrate more quickly.

「For example, American projects or their meme culture, as well as cultures of some lesser-known countries, Malaysian Chinese and Singaporeans can blend in and understand very quickly.」

Malaysian Chinese's cultural DNA seems like a master key, unlocking the door to an international and diverse market.

However, this unique multilingual advantage has brought about an unexpected side effect: identity blur.

Whenever Malaysian Chinese manage their Twitter accounts or establish crypto projects, they face a crucial decision: should they use English or Chinese as the primary medium of communication? This choice often determines the audience and market reach they can achieve.

A typical example is, without specific indication, you might find it challenging to guess that the well-known Chinese-speaking KOL Wolfy_XBT is actually Malaysian Chinese. Similarly, prominent English-speaking KOLs like @ahboyash and @sandraaleow are also from Malaysia.

More importantly, to gain wider recognition and acceptance in the global market, many Malaysian Chinese entrepreneurs intentionally or unintentionally downplay their regional labels. They aspire for their products to be seen as 'international' solutions rather than projects from a specific country.

This kind of strategy is often wise in business, but it has also led to a regrettable outcome: most users are unaware that these world-changing products actually come from Malaysia.

When you use Etherscan to query an Ethereum transaction, you may not realize that this is the work of a Malaysian Chinese team; when you conduct token trades on Jupiter, when you research Pendle's yield strategy, you may be more likely to think this is a masterpiece of some Western elite team.

Their "invisible" identity precisely demonstrates the adaptability of Malaysian Chinese in a globalized context, but also reflects their complex situation in terms of identity and market positioning.

Behind this identity ambiguity lies an even deeper issue: brain drain.

Many Malaysian Chinese have chosen to leave their homeland in order to achieve success in their careers. This fertile land continues to cultivate one talent after another, but due to various real-world factors, whether it's the policy environment, market size, or degree of internationalization, these talents are often forced to flow to overseas markets.

They shine on the global stage, yet few know their true origins. This "invisible success" illustrates the adaptability of Malaysian Chinese in a globalized context, but it is also the cost this group pays in the process of globalization.

They are the best bridgers, yet they are also the builders of easily forgotten identities.

Transformers

Diligent, down-to-earth, content—these are the common traits of most Malaysian Chinese. They rarely boast about their achievements on social media and prefer to let their solid work speak for itself.

This low-key approach to work is deeply connected to their historical experiences.

During the late Qing Dynasty's migration wave to Nanyang, Chinese people moved from the southeastern coastal regions of China to the Malay Peninsula, facing a completely unfamiliar environment and culture. They had to rely on diligence and wisdom to find a space for survival in the British colonial economic system. However, even though they succeeded in business through hard work, the colonial government's policy of "divide and rule" always kept the Chinese out of political power.

After Malaysia's independence in 1957, the political ideology of "Malay supremacy" and the subsequent implementation of the "New Economic Policy" further restricted the development opportunities of the Chinese in education, employment, and business through quota systems. University admission quotas were limited, government job positions had thresholds, and even setting up a business faced various policy barriers.

This long-standing institutional pressure has shaped a unique survival philosophy among Malaysian Chinese: Since they cannot change the larger environment, they focus on doing what they can control. They have learned to survive in the margins, to prove their worth through strength, and to maintain resilience in adversity.

「The Malaysian Chinese have always been suppressed by policies, so most people keep their heads down and focus on work, as long as they make money.」

This resilience developed through historical experiences has ironically become a unique advantage in the challenging crypto industry. When the market crashes, they do not panic; when projects face difficulties, they find solutions instead of complaining; when opportunities arise, they quietly seize them instead of boasting...

However, focusing on work, profiting while pursuing dreams, proving strength through project success, and then changing the external perception of the Malaysian Chinese community is not a smooth process.

The reputation of early Malaysian crypto projects was not optimistic, with many projects suspected of market manipulation and operating pyramid schemes. A more intuitive example is Cova's representation that Malaysian Chinese project teams are easily prejudged by partners as "pump-and-dump" schemes, creating additional trust costs in establishing business relationships.

This negative impression has its historical roots.

Malaysia's early lack of regulation in financial technology created many gray areas, allowing some criminals to exploit regulatory gaps for illegal fundraising and fraudulent activities. Many projects claiming to be "blockchain innovations" repeatedly rug-pulled investors, not only harming investor interests but also casting a shadow over Malaysia's entire tech startup ecosystem.

What's worse is that these negative cases often spread faster and wider than positive stories. When people hear "Malaysian project," their initial reaction may not be technological innovation but rather "beware of rug pulls." This stereotype has become an invisible barrier that all Malaysian Chinese entrepreneurs must face.

But times are changing. The global success of projects like CoinGecko, Etherscan, Pendle, Jupiter, Virtuals Protocol is putting high-quality Malaysian projects in the international spotlight, gradually improving global users' perception of Malaysian tech projects.

「I think these down-to-earth builders are also proving in these two or three bull cycles that they are not like those project teams playing pyramid games based on stereotypes but are big internationally-oriented projects from the start.」 said a Malaysian Chinese professional.

Across cycles, this shadow army has always been doing their own thing in the industry. Building, bridging, realizing dreams... until they are seen, recognized, or simply "as long as they make money."

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