ScalingX Founder’s Narrative: Awe for the Market, A Decade of Crypto Adventures

Written by: Jayden WΞi

In a few months, I will turn 33 in 2024. It also marks the 10th year since I fully dedicated myself to the blockchain field. I remember when I applied for an Australian green card as an international student, the scoring system deducted 5 points for being over 32 years old. From this perspective, it seems I should lament that I am "getting old."

However, I believe our generation can live to 100 without much issue, so in this light, I have only lived 1/3 of my life. If a person's life is counted as 24 hours, then I am still at 8 AM. Every time I think about this, I feel that my life's Prime is still far from being reached. I often have a strange confidence that 95% of my wealth will be earned after I turn fifty.

Some people think that I must be a rich second generation to study in Australia. In fact, I wouldn't say so; during my studies in Australia, I often faced financial difficulties. Although I was in business school, I ended up treating it like "adult night school." I scheduled my classes for the evening, trying to make money during the day, juggling entrepreneurship and staying up late to finish assignments. I wasn't a top student either; I had some cleverness as a child, but there was still a significant gap compared to the top students in North America. I can only say that at that time, I didn't know the heights of the sky and just managed to graduate, and Australia happened to accommodate me.

In 2014 and 2015, I began actively organizing Bitcoin meetups in Melbourne and became a somewhat well-known opinion leader locally. To this day, my colleagues and I still hold offline meetups regularly at our office on Collins St. The crypto community in Australia is small, and I should be one of the few Australians I know who held the most Bitcoin and Ethereum at that time.

When I graduated from business school at 26, my company had been running for a while. I encountered the explosive bull market of 2017 right after graduation, which, by worldly standards, allowed me to experience "financial freedom." However, having money for the first time doesn't mean you are truly wealthy, especially when the money is earned by luck; it often gets lost due to a lack of skill. Like all normal entrepreneurs, I later experienced betrayals from team members, fraud from partners, and other pitfalls that entrepreneurs often face. The hardest times were probably at the end of 2018 and mid-2019, when I didn't cash out during the bull market, holding onto a bunch of altcoins with little cash on hand, and had to sell valuable coins at a low price to support the team. From that bear market, I learned the most profound lesson: always have enough reserves; when the market is in turmoil, see who still has cash.

Fortunately, being in the crypto space has given reckless young people like us many opportunities to learn from mistakes. With the arrival of the pandemic and the Federal Reserve's monetary easing, although I woke up too early for DeFi Summer, the bull market in crypto came as expected, finally allowing me to breathe a sigh of relief. When the wealth number broke new highs again, I was in my thirties, and I no longer acted arrogantly; I began to become more low-key. It was this market that educated me, and I met many truly outstanding talents, realizing my own immaturity and shortcomings back then.

By the way, here are some personal updates from the past two or three years for friends who know me:

In 2021, another explosive bull market occurred, and the ICOs I invested in during 2017/18 finally yielded good returns. I cleared my position in the ICO investment FILCOIN around $120; I cleared my position in Polkadot around $42; and of course, there was ICP… (I actually participated in all the "moonshot" ICOs that year.) Although I made some money from these projects, there was no sense of achievement. Looking back, I can only say this was an incoherent investment logic, just luck striking a dead mouse. However, cashing out at the right points was indeed a lesson learned after paying countless tuition fees for the "pulling out without sentiment." Cashing out allowed me to comfortably rest on the funds and the team's 10-year salary reserves, so I decided to take a break and travel around. After all, the pandemic lockdown lasted for several years, which nearly drove me to depression.

At the end of 2021, I spent some time in Singapore and fell in love with the place. Although my family is still in Australia, I decided to spend 2/3 of my time in Singapore each year. In the following time, Singapore gradually became the hub of Web3 in Asia, with not only entrepreneurs from China pouring in but also exchanges from Australia coming to Singapore to obtain licenses. Singapore has gradually become a bridge connecting the East and West in Web3, which is also what I have been doing all these years.

In 2022, as the pandemic ended, more and more friends chose to come to Singapore. At the beginning of 2023, my office in Singapore, OGBC Innovation Hub, was renovated. In fact, the space I use for work is not large; I transformed it into a place where everyone can gather and communicate. I define it as an Innovation Hub; what we do is not complicated, just continuously hold events, repeating simple things, helping entrepreneurs and investors.

We have hosted many high-quality projects from around the world for roadshows in Asia, and even Worldcoin approached us to launch the first Orb in Asia, making our place a true Web3 Hub in Singapore. Whenever there are large crypto events in Singapore, our place is often bustling with people, and I personally enjoy the feeling of a crowd.

I have indeed met many excellent entrepreneurs and investors face-to-face, as some people rarely appear at offline events but show up in my office. One of my most memorable moments was when the CEO of Nansen visited me; I thought about how, when Nansen started, several co-founders worked remotely and had never met in person, and I might have seen their CEO more times than their co-founders. Thinking about this made me happy; as an ENFJ personality, I am easily satisfied.

At the beginning of 2022, I took a trip to Silicon Valley and met a friend who had experienced entrepreneurial setbacks and was looking for direction to start again. We talked for several hours after not seeing each other for years. Later, at the end of 2022, we summarized our past failures, hoping to help more entrepreneurs, and thus we started a Web3 accelerator, which is the origin of ScalingX. By mid-2023, my partner also became a partner at a new emerging VC in North America. In Q1 2023, ScalingX co-hosted a hackathon with Gitcoin, the largest developer community for Ethereum, and later held two accelerator camps with VCs from Europe and America, encouragingly investing in over a dozen very early-stage projects. In the process of helping these early projects, we also formed a very excellent new team, which gave me a great sense of achievement. Recently, I saw the team write the year-end summary for 2023, and we organized over 60 events both online and offline. It seems that most of the time in these two years has been spent on organizing events.

Now, several of my closest colleagues are starting their own businesses; they might not have dared to think about this before, but I have always encouraged talented people to become entrepreneurs. (What comes to my mind at this moment is "give it a shot, and become rich for three generations"???). In 2022, a colleague who had worked with me since 2017 began preparing a Liquid Venture, and I became his first investor. He named this fund Greythorn, which is a nice name because I found that names with "Gray" perform well. For example, Grayscale, Graylock, so it is not impossible for Greythorn to become a towering tree in the future, mainly because the people are reliable… Greythorn has not disappointed me; it is one of the funds I have invested in with the highest returns, capturing most of the hot alpha in 2023, outperforming Bitcoin and Ethereum. (Of course, I was involved in many investment decisions, just to brag a little about myself)

In fact, this industry is always in a reshuffle; only by continuously learning can one avoid being eliminated. I have seen many "big shots" disappear and witnessed many young people soar to great heights. This is the charm of this industry. Back then, I was also seen as a "rising star." I was once young and reckless, but now I have learned to have more respect.

Respect the market, learn to manage risks well amidst market fluctuations, and learn how to survive in this industry; respect the motivated and hardworking senior OGs, their experiences are our guiding lights, learning from their insights, and working together to contribute to the industry; respect the talented young people, and if there is an opportunity, try to help them succeed; they are the future big shots. Because I have started a business before, I want to help more aspiring entrepreneurs.

I believe the next two years will be another super bull market in the crypto space. How will you embrace this immense wealth? After securing your wealth, how will you give back?

I previously accumulated nearly 100,000 followers on Weibo, but later, due to unfriendly domestic policies, many bloggers left Weibo, and I stopped updating much. After coming to Twitter, I also rarely write Chinese tweets. In 2024, I will set a flag to write more Chinese content and make some new friends :)