The years when the stock and cryptocurrency circles called each other stupid

Many years ago, when I was still in the stock market, Nancy Yang, the goddess of the US stock market, invited me to visit her new home in Hong Kong. In the US stock market, most people only know that Nancy is the stock god of the secondary market, but few people know that her vision for angel investment is even more ruthless - in 2014, when Wu Tianhua, a male student from Tsinghua University of Science and Technology, wanted to leave NetEase to start his own business, it was Nancy who became his angel investor. The subsequent story must be well known to everyone: Wu Tianhua not only built up the company, but also took it to the United States to ring the bell for listing. This company is called Tiger Securities (US stock code: TIGR).

Wu Tianhua invited my son and me to attend the Tiger Brokers 10th Anniversary Dinner

2024 @ Singapore

Nancy's new home is in Mid-Levels, Hong Kong. It is a high-rise luxury house with an excellent view. Looking through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, you can see the entire Victoria Harbour. That day, she specially ordered a table full of Yung Kee dishes for me. The taste of other dishes has long been blurred, but the signature roast goose is still memorable...

That was the day I told Nancy that I was going to leave the stock market and go all in on Crypto. Perhaps we would have less chances to meet in the future.

It was the autumn of 2019 that I met Nancy again. At that time, Canaan Technology, the world's first Bitcoin mining machine stock, went public in the United States. On the day of the IPO, Tiger Securities invited me and her to do a live interview to introduce this mining machine company to friends who trade stocks.

After Canaan Technology successfully went public, it held a grand thank-you banquet in Hangzhou, and Nancy and I were both invited to attend. But the seats at the table were quite intriguing: she sat next to Chairman Zhang Nangeng (Pumpkin Zhang), and that table was full of "buyers", gathered with bigwigs from major dollar funds; I sat next to Co-Chairman Kong Jianping, and that table was full of Crypto practitioners - we called ourselves Builders, and perhaps in the eyes of dollar funds, this table was full of "gray industry practitioners".

That was six years ago, the securities industry and the crypto industry were like the two ends of the antipodal point: on one side was regulation, compliance, and cash flow; on the other side was hype, control, gray and black industries... People in the two industries couldn't stand each other, and secretly called each other stupid. But I was different from them, just because I had an obsession in my heart:

It's all air.

No one had expected that in 2025, there would be a scene of crypto companies lining up to go public in the United States, and even less expected that platforms such as Robinhood, Coinbase, and Kraken would compete to tokenize U.S. stocks just to attract cryptocurrency users to buy on-chain U.S. stocks.

The securities industry and the crypto industry have come together so openly. Those days of calling each other stupid are finally over.

A few days ago, I chatted with Dashan of Waterdrop Capital. Both of us are very optimistic about the prospects of the integration of tokens and stocks. We even simulated together what might happen next. The more we talked, the more excited we became until late at night. Dashan said:

There is no doubt that 2025 will become the ' first year of cryptocurrency stocks '.