The years when the stock market and the crypto world called each other stupid X

Many years ago, when I was still in the stock market, the goddess of the US stock market, Nancy Yang, invited me to her new home in Hong Kong. In the US stock circle, most people only know Nancy as the stock god of the Secondary Market, but few are aware that her eye for angel investing is even sharper — when Wu Tianhua, a Tsinghua University tech guy, wanted to leave NetEase to start his own business in 2014, it was Nancy who became his angel investor. The story that followed is well-known: Wu Tianhua not only built the company but also took it to the US for an IPO, and this company is called Tiger Brokers (US stock code: TIGR).

Wu Tianhua invited my son and me to the Tiger Securities 10th Anniversary Gala.

2024 @ Singapore

Nancy’s new home is in Mid-Levels, Hong Kong, a high-rise luxury apartment with an excellent view. Through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, the entire scenery of Victoria Harbour is in full view. That day, she specially ordered a table full of dishes from Yung Kee for me; the flavors of the other dishes have long faded, but the signature roast goose still lingers in my memory…

It was that day that I told Nancy I was preparing to leave the stock market and go all in on crypto; perhaps there would be little intersection like this in the future.

The second meeting with Nancy was in the autumn of 2019. At that time, the world’s first Bitcoin mining company, Canaan Creative, went public in the United States. On the day of the IPO, Tiger Brokers invited me and her to conduct a live interview to introduce this mining machine company to our friends who trade stocks.

After Canaan Technology went public, a grand thank-you banquet was held in Hangzhou, and both Nancy and I were invited to attend. However, the seating arrangement was quite intriguing: she sat next to Chairman Zhang Nangeng (Pumpkin Zhang), and that table was filled with “buyers”, gathering big shots from various dollar funds; I was seated next to Co-Chairman Kong Jianping, and that table was made up of Crypto practitioners — we call ourselves Builders, perhaps in the eyes of the dollar funds, this table is filled with “gray industry practitioners”.

That was six years ago, the securities industry and the crypto industry seemed like two ends of a diametrically opposed point: one side was regulation, compliance, and cash flow; the other side was speculation, market manipulation, and gray-black industries… People from both industries looked down on each other, secretly calling each other fools. But I was different from them, simply because I had an obsession in my heart: it’s all just air.

No one expected that in 2025, there would be a scene of crypto companies lining up to go public in the U.S., and even less could have imagined that platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Kraken would compete to tokenize U.S. stocks, all to attract crypto users to purchase on-chain U.S. stocks.

The securities industry and the cryptocurrency industry have come together boldly like this. Those days of calling each other silly X have ultimately passed.

A few days ago, I was chatting with Dashan from Waterdrop Capital. We are both very optimistic about the integration prospects of Tokens and stocks. We even simulated various possibilities that might happen next, getting more and more excited as we talked, until late at night. Dashan said:

There is no doubt that 2025 will become the ‘Coin Stock Year’.