Series Summary
The series brings together anthropologists, researchers, and practitioners to examine crypto as it unfolds across time and place. We follow crypto through its successive cycles, from early experimentation and speculative booms to moments of crash. These episodes highlight the value of an ethnographic lens to research the volatile landscape of crypto, showing how ideas of value, risk and trust are continuously reworked across communities, geographies, and cycles.

Final Episode
At a moment of industry soul-searching, host Al Lim sits down with venture investors Wei Shi Khai and Qing Ze (QZ) to take stock of crypto from Singapore and Asia. The conversation traces a long arc: from early idealism through hyper-speculation to today’s pragmatism, asking how practitioners make sense of crypto’s shifting meanings and futures. Topics range from privacy and censorship resistance to regulation, infrastructure, AI, and Singaporean governing logics, through to the role of anthropologists from an industry perspective. What does it mean to build in an industry that prides itself on being “the biggest collection of misfits,” and what might the future hold?

Guests

Wei Shi Khai is Co-founder and General Partner of LongHash Ventures, with aggregate assets under management of approximately US$100 million since 2021. Shi Khai also co-founded and launched LongHashX, Asia’s first globally focused blockchain accelerator backed by a Singapore sovereign wealth fund. Through LongHashX, he has overseen the acceleration of more than 70 early-stage companies and supported them in raising over US$250 million to date. Prior to LongHash Ventures, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Malaysia, advising C-suite clients across the banking, telecommunications, and energy sectors on strategy, organisational design, and digital transformation. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Imperial College London.

Qing Ze (QZ) is a community builder and investor in the Ethereum ecosystem. Over the past several years, he has been deeply embedded in the space — organizing ETHSingapore, one of Southeast Asia’s flagship Ethereum events, and contributing to ecosystem development at Gitcoin. Building on this foundation, QZ co-founded the Ethereum Ecosystem Fund, a $30M seed-stage venture fund backed by Ethereum pioneers. This fund invests in early-stage projects that advance decentralized infrastructure and programmable financial systems.

Series Host

Al Lim is an incoming Presidential Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Singapore Management University and a PhD candidate at Yale University, where his doctoral research examines the social ecology of crypto in Thailand. He has published in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Urban Geography, and The Journal of the Siam Society, and holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA (summa cum laude) from Yale-NUS College. He also brings several years of professional experience in the crypto and AI sectors, including venture capital and ecosystem development.