Josh Fraser, the Co-Founder of Origin Protocol, founded the company in 2017 to bring NFTs and DeFi to the masses. Josh started coding at the age of 10. Prior to Origin, he co-founded 3 other venture-backed companies: EventVue, Torbit (acquired by Walmart Labs) & Forage. Today, Origin Story has powered multiple record-breaking NFT sales for top crea…

Tayo Koonprasert and Tansaya Kunaratskul are Senior Specialists at the Central Bank Digital Currencies team at the Bank of Thailand. Both of them have been instrumental in creating the Central Bank Digital Currency. We’ll cover all about the use cases for CBDC, different models of CBDC and it will be used in the future at #FrontierFintech Podcast. …

“History Rhymes But Never Repeats” Yoshi Yokokawa is the CEO & Co-founder of Alpaca, a company that powers more than 100 fintech applications around the world. When Robinhood came out in 2013, Yoshi, in Japan at the time, couldn’t download the app or invest in U.S. stocks. Ten years later, nothing’s changed. Alpaca is based on the idea that every s…

Sherry Jiang is the Co-Founder & CEO of Bluejay Finance, a protocol that creates stablecoins pegged to Asian currencies. By providing local currency stablecoins, Bluejay is laying the infrastructure to support the next billion users to use Web3 products. Sherry has always been passionate about building products for people in emerging markets. She h…

Amrita Vir is the Head of Driver Lending at Grab. She manages over 20 financial programs, including cash loans, BNPL, and fuel financing, for Grab drivers across 6 markets in Southeast Asia. She’s also the host of The Greenroom, a SEA fintech podcast. Amrita found her passion for fintech from a young age. She founded a non-profit microfinance compa…

"Foreign exchange will always be here to stay" Jason Tay, the Regional Director of Business Development at M-DAQ, talks to us about how M-DAQ uses data and algorithms to allow merchants around the world to sell goods in foreign currencies and not lose out when the FX rate changes. M-DAQ is creating the world without currency borders. The 11-year ol…

Welcome to “NFT Party”, the inaugural episode of 3-Peas in a Pod-Cast where we dissect current events and big themes in the world of fintech & crypto. This episode is hosted by Nat Wittayatanaseth, Diana Shih and Jason Tay. As Russia is invading Ukraine, all our financial portfolios have gone red. While Diana keeps a strict Warren Buffett’s philoso…

Iwan Kurniawan, the Co-Founder & COO of Funding Societies (Modalku), has spent the past 6 years building Funding Societies into the largest SME lender in SEA. The company’s raised funds from top-tier investors, including SoftBank and Sequoia India. He also serves as the Vice Chairman of Indonesia Fintech Association. We talked about *What’s next fo…

“We do need banking, but we don’t need banks.” Samir Chaïbi, Principal at Insignia Ventures Partners, talked to us about the fintech landscape in Southeast Asia, from banking API, lending, to insurance business. Samir, a French Algerian, went to the U.S. to explore the startup and VC landscape before joining Insignia, a $450M+ AUM SEA-based VC fund…

“When you make your passion your profession, it’s not your job anymore.” Bala Subramanian, Chief of Staff at Brankas, talks to us about scaling teams from 20 to 100. Since the pandemic started, Brankas has 5x its team in a remote first culture. We dig into frameworks on how to suss candidates for remote first culture, how to augment your process to…

Ryan Chew is the Co-Founder of Tribe Accelerator, Singapore’s first government-backed blockchain accelerator. Tribe was founded in 2018 because Ryan and his co-founder noticed that funding opportunities for blockchain startups were very limited. Fast forward to 2021, Tribe has now supported startups with over $300 million in funding and it is in th…

Raymon Hsu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cabital, a simple elegant platform that allows anyone anywhere to earn passive income as much as 12% APY from crypto without the crazy. Raymond started his career helping people access mobile payments in Kenya at a global bank. Having witnessed first hand how hard it is for people in Africa to send and receiv…

“My life is not that long and the only thing I want to do is making a big impact” Brian Ma is the Managing Partner of Iterative Capital, a YC-style accelerator focusing on increasing Southeast Asia’s GDP. He is also the Founder of Divvy Homes, a $2B company that allows customers to build equity credits as they rent. This episode is so special as we…

U-Zyn Chua is an early pioneer of Bitcoin (fun fact: he interacted with Satoshi back when Bitcoin originated!). He also designed, developed and launched the world's first retail Central Bank Digital Currency for the Central Bank of the Bahamas. Today, he’s the Co-Founder & CTO of DeFi Chain and Cake DeFi, a non-Turing complete blockchain that enabl…

Jeffery Liu, CEO & Co-founder of Xanpool, talks to us about decentralized market makers. Anyone can turn themselves into money changers and earn 25%APY on idle money on their bank accounts and crypto wallets. Xanpool was created to be a payment or liquidity network (think Visa or Mastercard), but instead of being a close network, it’s an open netwo…

Vidit Agrawal is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gajigesa, a financial health platform that provides Indonesian employees with financial education and early access to their salaries. Vidit was the first hire at Uber Asia and he’s also a technology veteran with experiences across many leading startups, including Uber, Stripe, and Carro. Together with his …

Stephane de Baets is the Founder of Elevated Returns & XSpring. He is the first person to launch the world’s first real estate tokenization, Aspen Coin, and Thailand’s first real estate tokenization, SiriHub. He foresees that we’re going to see the biggest hyper-inflation we’ve ever seen. Money depreciates all the time. That is why this is the righ…

Samuel Rhee is the Founding Partner & CIO of Endowus, a Singapore-based wealth platform that lets you invest towards your life goals and provides you exclusive access to best-in-class funds from around the world at low costs. Samuel has been in finance his whole life, 27 years to be exact. He spent most of his time in the public equity market at Mo…

Michael Shaulov is the CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks, an all-in-one platform that helps enterprises store, transfer, and issue digital assets without getting hacked. Michael was an expert in cybersecurity before he founded Fireblocks. North Korean hackers, the Lazarus Group, stole $7M from Bithumb, a South Korean exchange in 2017. Michael, along…

Ian Lee is the Founding Team and Associate Director of Merkle Science, a provider of blockchain transaction monitoring and intelligence solutions. Ian started out as a capital markets lawyer. During that time, many people came to him to ask about how to engage with crypto in a legally compliant way. He saw the vision of what crypto can become and d…

Rohit Taneja is the Founder & CEO of Decentro, a full-stack API banking platform for financial integrations. Decentro handles the heavy lifting of bank integration and offers off-the-shelf financial products that any company can embed into their solution. Rohit realized that “money is just bits and bytes on someone’s ledger. While money is so easy …

Willie Chang is the CEO of Hg Exchange, Southeast Asia’s first private exchange that offers tokenized private company shares and luxury products to accredited investors. Member firms - such as Phillip Securities, Prime Partners, and Fundnel - do the heavy lifting of identifying assets, conducting due diligence, and getting the assets ready for toke…

Beryl Li is the Co-Founder of Yield Guild Games, a play-earn gaming guild that brings players together to earn via blockchain-based economies. YGG is the first company in the Philippines to be funded by A16Z, a leading VC firm based in the U.S. As of the 25th of August 2021, YGG has generated >$7M in earnings and is paying >$1M to its players on a …

Guillaume Le Saint is the Co-Founder & CEO of Atato, a company that’s building a secure computing operating system. Computers were designed for one role: to process data as fast as possible. That is fine if there are only a number of computers exchanging data on the internet. Today, there are billions of devices on the internet, but the lack of sec…

Earl Martin Valencia is the Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer of Plentina, the Philippines’ leading buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) company with the aim to unlock financial services for billions by changing credit bureaus and credit cards. Earl dreamed of becoming an astronaut and went to work for the largest aerospace company in the world. But, he disc…

Pelle Brændgaard is the Co-Founder & CEO of Notabene, a YC-backed company that bridges crypto to real-world use cases by providing a regulatory compliant layer to crypto transactions. Pelle spent 20 years in crypto, self-sovereign identity, and fintech. Pelle was the co-founder and head of uPort, the Identity platform from ConsenSys built on Ethere…

Chia Jeng Yang is the Co-Founder of Fintech Angel Operators, Southeast Asia’s first fintech angel group, and a Principal at Saison Capital, the VC arm of Credit Saison, one of Japan's largest consumer credit companies. Chia started his career as a firefighter and did a hard pivot from policy-making work to building an eCommerce company with Rocket …

Pang Xue Kai is the Founder and CEO of Tokocrypto. Tokocrypto is the leading crypto exchange in Indonesia and backed by the world’s most active crypto exchange Binance. Despite being a Singaporean, Kai packed his bag, moved to Indonesia, and hustled his way to be the first crypto exchange to get a license in Indonesia. Since then, Tokocrypto has se…

Hayden Simmons is the Managing Partner and Founder of Rally Cap Ventures, a FinTech angel community that invests in emerging market FinTech startups across LATAM, Africa, and Asia. Rally has grown into 200+ angels in less than 1 year and consists of FinTech operators and investors across the world. Hayden used a first principle approach to creating…

Khai Lin Sng is the co-Founder & CIO of Fundnel, Southeast Asia’s private capital markets. Khai Lin’s dream is to bring investment access down to the retail investors and, to do that, she’s taken a leading role in utilizing blockchain technology to create Hg Exchange, the first-of-its-kind private shares exchange. She took the risk and left a comfo…

The Asian FinTech Podcast spoke to Felix Feng, a co-Founder and the CEO of Set Protocol, the Stripe for Asset Management. Set Protocol's mission is to accelerate the adoption of decentralized asset management. Felix got his first taste of entrepreneurship when he mined and sold Zynga poker chips on eBay when he was 17 years old. He went on to start…

The Asian FinTech Podcast spoke with Diego Rojas, a Co-Founder & the CEO at Finantier, a YC-backed company that provides the simplest solution to access consumer financial data across Southeast Asia. Diego was born a builder. He started coding at 8 years old in a small town in Argentina. He later discovered his passion for FinTech as a tool to impr…

The Asian FinTech Podcast spoke to Sharon Lourdes Paul, the Head of Regional Payments at Xfers, a YC-backed company that is now a part of Fazz Financial Group. Xfers was founded in 2015 to make payments accessible for the unbanked population and underserved sectors, such as crypto exchanges, in Southeast Asia. Layered on top of banking rails, Xfers…