Shuyao Kong

Shuyao writes the Da Bing column for Decrypt. Made in China (Beijing); assembled in the US (Smith College); spiced up in India (Infosys); decorated in Denmark (University of Copenhagen); fine-tuned in Nigeria (IBM); cooled off in Dubai; grad schooled in Boston (HBS '20); currently working in corporate development at ConsenSys. Disclosure: She owns less than 5 BTC, more than 5 ETH, and a significant amount of UNI.

Stories by Shuyao Kong

A Crypto Startup Founder’s Diary
For years, I told myself that I’m not the founder type. Instead, I try to be that strong operator who makes founders’ dreams come true. Perhaps the avoidance of being a founder comes from my Chinese upbringing. As my mother often says: “A gun shoots the first bird that sticks its head out.” She didn’t want me to be that first bird. So until recently, my career was defined by the idea of working hard toward someone else’s vision—until I stumbled into crypto. Crypto is self-sovereignty, starting...
NewsOpinion
5 min read
Shuyao KongMay 11, 2024
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China, Crypto and The Year of the Dragon
Writing a prediction piece is a humbling thought experiment. My three wild bets for the year-of-the-Tiger turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Specifically: (1) I predicted that China would produce the next hit crypto game. Instead, the entire gaming sector launched many tokens, instead of games. I’m still hopeful though, mainly due to the abundant talent from China. They just know how to get people addicted to simulation boxes. (2) I predicted that Chinese tech giants would go big on NFTs. The...
NewsOpinion
6 min read
Shuyao KongFeb 18, 2024
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I Spent a Month Inside Vitalik Buterin’s Social Experiment—Here’s What It Was Really Like
Zuzalu was more like an ancient Greece town square than a seaside crypto conference. And despite what you might have heard, the meetup—the brainchild of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin—was more than just rich crypto bros plotting ways to cheat death. So much more. I spent a month at Zuzalu, a kind of pop-up city program, that went for two months in Lustica Bay, Montenegro. I got to hang out with what seemed to me like some of the smartest people in the world. It was this concentration of talen...
NewsOpinion
7 min read
Shuyao KongJun 1, 2023
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Hong Kong Is Vying To Be The Next Crypto Hub
It has been almost a year since your favorite China watcher wrote anything meaningful about the Chinese crypto community. The truth of the matter is that China’s covid lockdown made it difficult for anyone who’s not living in Asia to truly understand its market, people, and overall sentiment. So I was surprised to feel the pro-crypto excitement at last week’s “Web3 Festival” in Hong Kong. The big news was a major policy announcement from the Hong Kong government, indicating its desire to make...
NewsOpinion
6 min read
Shuyao KongApr 19, 2023
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Brother Bing’s Guide to Surviving the Crypto Bear Market
Brother Bing had planned to write a self-help-ish piece on surviving the crypto bear market when ETH sank to 3 digits. But writing takes a long time, especially when you are having fun at your day job. And now that I've finally pieced together my thoughts, ETH is riding the Merge wave and hovering around $2000—still down dramatically from its ATH, but at least moving in the right direction. First, let’s dispense with the usual tired crypto self-help tips: Go outside to touch grass Find a GF/BF...
NewsOpinion
5 min read
Shuyao KongAug 14, 2022
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What It Means to Be Chinese in Crypto
Crypto conferences used to be quite the scene in Shanghai: fancy venues in five-star hotels, rooftop bars overlooking Huangpu River at The Bund, where chandeliers sparkled above well-dressed, champagne-sipping attendees, chatting the night away before heading out to clubs where more champagne gets poured. That scene is no more, now that China’s “zero Covid” policy has turned the buzzing city into a ghost town. Some residents have reported being cooped up in their homes for three months, not onc...
NewsOpinion
5 min read
Shuyao KongJun 5, 2022
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Brother Bing's Excellent ETH Amsterdam Adventure
Brother Bing was in Amsterdam for the past two weeks at Devconnect and ETHAmsterdam. The waffles were good, if you like that sort of thing, but these trendy upstart waffles don’t compete with the original da bing pancake stack, which was invented around 2,000 years ago. Fried dough aside, here’s what your benevolent and loving crypto gossip correspondent was able to pick up here, there and everywhere. Zero-knowledge, in all its many forms, was the talk of the show. Zero-knowledge proofs, oft...
NewsOpinion
4 min read
Shuyao KongMay 1, 2022
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3 Keys to Success in Crypto Biz Dev
Editor’s Note: Decrypt readers know Brother Bing as our China crypto columnist, but lately she’s been very busy jet-setting around the world in her day job as a biz dev person for a very large and powerful crypto company. What does biz dev in crypto entail, you ask? She’s got the answers. It probably doesn’t surprise you that the crypto biz has been booming lately—regardless of the ups and downs in the market—and it has meant nonstop travel to industry events for me. From Solana Breakpoint in L...
NewsOpinion
6 min read
Shuyao KongApr 10, 2022
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3 Wild Bets for Crypto in China in 2022
As China says goodbye to the Year of the Ox and welcomes the Year of the Tiger, crypto in China also enters an era of tough survival. After months of government crackdown, most projects have either moved their headquarters abroad or become extremely quiet. Since no project can really market to Chinese nationals, many Chinese projects now count the majority of their users abroad. But Chinese retail investors have not shown any sign of slowing down. Metaverse (元宇宙) continues to be the hottest bu...
NewsOpinion
5 min read
Shuyao KongFeb 12, 2022
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NFTs Are Still Hot in China, Despite Crypto Crackdown
In July, I formed a thesis that crypto is going through de-Chinalization, a period in which China’s anti-crypto regulation would force miners and centralized exchanges to go on exile, while the rest of the projects go underground. That did play out, as we've see almost all miners leaving China and chasing electricity all over the world. But little did I foresee the staying power of the NFT. All of a sudden, my crypto WeChat was full of Punk fanboys, Ape guardians, and Loot revolutionaries....
NewsOpinion
4 min read
Shuyao KongOct 10, 2021
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Why China's Latest 'Bitcoin Ban' Is Bullish for DeFi
Last week, China "banned Bitcoin" yet again, or that's how a large chunk of mainstream news outlets reported it. More accurately, as Decrypt wrote, the Chinese government reiterated that it deems crypto transactions as illegal. (Bloomberg framed it as China "widening" its existing ban on crypto transactions.) To be fair, it's understandable the media has such a hard time correctly conveying what China has done, because it's confusing every time China re-announces its own crypto guidance, and...
NewsOpinion
4 min read
Shuyao KongSep 30, 2021
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China's Ongoing Crypto Crackdown Is All About Perception
Calling it a blood bath is an understatement. On July 23, Chinese stocks listed in the U.S. plunged as Beijing issued new regulations cracking down on education technology companies that provide services such as tutoring. New Oriental, an institute where your correspondent spent a good amount of her youth in Beijing, dropped 60% when the market opened. Others saw their market caps decline by more than 50%. The ed tech sector isn’t alone in this free fall. Large-cap Chinese internet companies...
NewsOpinion
5 min read
Shuyao KongJul 28, 2021
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China’s Crypto Projects Plot Their Next Move: Stay or Flee
In Chinese, 出海 means “going abroad.” Colloquially, the term has come to refer to Chinese tech companies expanding their operations outside of China. Entrepreneurs often take pride in going abroad because it demonstrates the superiority of Chinese tech ( think of how ByteDance turned Douyin into TikTok and changed how social media is done globally). But to the Chinese crypto community, 出海 sends a chill down everyone’s spine. That’s because it’s the Plan B that everyone who works in this indust...
NewsCoins
5 min read
Shuyao KongJul 10, 2021
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The Amazing Billion-Dollar DAO
While the entire world is digesting the recent crypto mining and trading crackdown in China, Bybit, a China-born derivatives exchange now headquartered in Singapore, launched its latest and potentially greatest incarnation: BitDAO. Backed by prominent investors such as Peter Thiel and his Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Dragonfly Capital, the DAO raised $230 million on its promise to support and turbocharge decentralized finance. Bybit’s rise and its pivot to BitDAO might seem like an over...
NewsCoins
10 min read
Shuyao KongJun 26, 2021
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Long on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Polkadot: Inside China's Most Successful Crypto Venture Firm
One of the most successful Chinese crypto venture firms—perhaps the most successful—is Continue Capital. The name of the company, 肯定牛, is a homonym that sounds like the Chinese words for “guaranteed bull,” as in bull market. It’s a fitting name. The recent bull market has made Continue a massive success. The two founding partners, Hongjiang Li who lives in China’s Shandong Province, and Xiahong Lin, who lives in California, are among the largest Chinese bag holders of OmiseGo, Zilliqa, Polkad...
NewsOpinion
7 min read
Shuyao KongJun 19, 2021
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Confirmed: China Orders Yunnan's Bitcoin Miners to Cease Operating By End of June
For the longest time, your correspondent was of the view that China would only crack down on speculative crypto trading, and leave the mining sector alone. After all, mining has been an established money-printing machine for both the miners and local governments that collect tax on it. But China’s carbon neutrality goal, along with zealous Dogecoin trading, have once again raised concerns with the government at an inconvenient time: the CCP’s 100th birthday on July 1. Crypto became a sensitive...
NewsCoins
6 min read
Shuyao KongJun 12, 2021
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Here’s How China’s Crypto FUD Will Play Out
For hundreds of years preceding the early 20th century, China’s emperors banned international trade and cloistered the country from the rest of the world. The so-called “closed-door” policy (闭关锁国) was partly a response to the Opium Wars with the British, who had been ruthlessly peddling the drug throughout the previous century and had addicted as many as 12 million people in the country. Though crypto is hardly as addictive as opium, the current regime in China appears to be treating it with...
NewsOpinion
7 min read
Shuyao KongMay 29, 2021
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Grassroots DAOs Are Rising in China
The pronunciation of "DAO" is the same as 道 in Chinese, which means “path” (as in the Dao De Jing). In the Western crypto world, we are seeing DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) become a new form of people organizing people. Prominent projects such as MakerDAO, LidoDAO, and many others have demonstrated the power of decentralized organization. But the trend never took off in China until the recent bull run. Seeing the success of international DAO projects has prompted many crypto p...
NewsDeFi
8 min read
Shuyao KongMay 22, 2021
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Will LoserCoin Be China's Answer to DOGE?
When mentions of LOWB first appeared in your correspondent’s crypto WeChat, I casually dismissed it as yet another yield-farm coin on Binance Smart Chain into which DeFi degens ape for a few days before moving on to the next one. It only took a few hours—and a 400% price jump—for me and the rest of crypto WeChat to do a double-take and shift our eyes to the coin and LoserCoin, the project behind it. The coin is worth only $0.0009 and its market cap is a paltry $880,000. That number might seem...
NewsOpinion
7 min read
Shuyao KongMay 11, 2021
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Is China Rethinking Its Stance on Bitcoin?
Two weeks ago, Peter Thiel accused China of using Bitcoin as a financial weapon. This week, Xiaochuan Zhou and Bo Li, ex-governor and current deputy governor of the Central Bank of China respectively, after years of silence on Bitcoin, voiced their views on Bitcoin, the king of crypto. Who knows how much Thiel’s argument led the Chinese government to re-evaluate its stance on digital assets? But that the government is more prone to talk about the matter at all, shows that they are more receptiv...
NewsCoins
8 min read
Shuyao KongApr 20, 2021
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