My flex in crypto was that I bought Ethereum at $19. (laughs)
My first business didn’t quite work out. My second was an e-commerce company that did pretty well but not at the scale we wanted. So we pivoted it to be more retail focused and was fortunate to have had 10 outlets in Singapore. We eventually got acquired by a publicly listed payments company and for the first time, I had anxiety from being bought over by someone. So I tried to learn more about payments and that’s how I discovered crypto in 2016.
Back then, it was seen as a financial product, always about profits or losses. But when NFTs came into the picture, this was the first time I saw creatives and gamers interact with the crypto world.
That led me to Mintable, a next-generation NFT marketplace.
With NFTs, people can be as creative as they want to be without having to fit into a mould. There is this healthy and vibrant economy for creators that doesn’t require them to know a single thing about trading or knowing how to provide liquidity. It’s the perfect product-market fit to be inclusive.
Being in the space for the last six years, it’s really given me a deeper understanding of what a healthy community looks like. And the main challenge with community building is that most of them end up becoming echo chambers of maximalists that are fixated over price.
That’s why it’s so important for a healthy community to have a diversity of voices with the right people driving the direction. And that’s what ARC is, a community of creators, designers, and musicians, alongside Web3 natives coming together to co-create.
We’re seeing more people enter crypto every year, and new cohorts actually help previous cohorts to play better in the space. We all need to build on the shoulders of those that came before so that we can get better and as new entrants come in with good ideas and skillsets, they’ll need people who have been through historical cycles and trends to help them navigate this world.