Hello, this is Rita Liao. Welcome to Episode #1 of Leapfrog, a podcast about entrepreneurs who have ventured out of their native land and are reshaping a slice of the global tech landscape. You can read more about why I started this project in About.
When Xin Yan heard about Bitcoin in 2017, he was studying electrical engineering in Israel. He soon dropped out of the masters program and joined a wave of entrepreneurs trying to prove that cryptocurrency, and more broadly, blockchain, has real-world utility beyond enabling speculative bubbles and scams. Backed by Sequoia Capital, his startup EthSign is building a digital residency system powered by blockchain technology. In a few weeks, he might be shaking hands with the president of Sierra Leone to bring his solutions to the West African country.
Timeline:
6:00 The “ideological ivory towers” of the U.S. and China.
9:30 How Xin chose where to reside: a place with inflows of talent and capital, and absent of a “strong culture”
14:11 Why blockchain might be the solution to verifying online identities
15:45 Meeting and vetting the “professional ambassadors” of Sierra Leone
20:04 Venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan’s “network state”
25:24 Players in the grey area are “always quick to adopt frontier technologies”
27:05 Regulators “should spend more time studying the newest technology”
27:50 People in China find ways to use crypto despite it being banned
33:28 How Xin learned from his grandpa to always seize opportunities in life
38:41 Xin’s three unconventional life essentials
Links:
The Network State (Balaji Srinivasan)
EthSign brings DocuSign-like features to Line, Telegram with a web3 twist (TechCrunch, December 2023)
Asia emerges as a promising haven amid the crypto winter (TechCrunch, October, 2013)
Despite crypto ban, China’s tech talent rides the global web3 wave (TechCrunch, July 2022)
*Special thanks to Jess for drawing the wonderful frog logo, Jordan for sharing the technicalities of podcasting, Vlad for polishing my words, and Yunan and Jason for inspiring my vision.
*Leapfrog is also on Apple Podcast and Spotify. The RSS feed is: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2686580.rss
#1: From China to Sierra Leone - the path of a digital nomad