Dialogue with the former investment director of Binance Labs: After 4 years of 500 times the income, the new challenge is to build a resort for Web3

Original source: crypto @ stanford

The main points:

Compilation of the original text: Lynch, Chain Catcher

The main points:

• Binance Labs as a whole has been a huge success and may be the best performing fund in the history of the world. In four years, over 500 times. This has never existed in the world.

• We have seen many communities born through DeFi, NFT, DAO and other models, but they are all fragmented. We want people to come together, take their existing identities out of the community and go to a place where they can have fun together. We use games as a metaphor for how this will play out.

• first level title

Background + Binance

C@S：What year did you go to GSB (Stanford Graduate School of Business)?

Christy：I entered GSB in September 21, and I am studying for the first year of MBA.

C@S：Where is your hometown?

Christy : I'm from Seoul, South Korea, but I grew up like a prodigal son in the process of constantly moving. When I was five years old, I came to the United States for the first time, and then I went to high school and university in Korea, so I can be regarded as a relatively authentic Korean.

C@S：How did you become interested in encryption?

Christy：I consider myself a homeless because my great-grandparents were North Korean refugees and my family built facilities like hospitals and schools for refugees. So basically, I've always cared deeply about the refugee and immigrant situation, and I've also started a nonprofit with my sister and brother-in-law, and they've been working on it full-time. I previously created an educational platform and ran that nonprofit in my spare time.

At the same time, I was working on a project for Samsung about what the world would look like in the next 30 years and how disruptive technologies would shape it, one of which was blockchain technology. I've heard the slogan, "Blockchain will make donations transparent." Obviously, for many donors, their biggest concern is what happens to the donated items or funds after donation. Yep, that's what introduced me to the crypto world in the first place.

Obviously, it didn't take me long to realize that was bullshit.I still don't think any project has solved this donation problem, because in fact, what really drives innovation is not the technology itself, but our intentions and how we create incentives.That experience, around 2016/17, when the crypto industry was very small, when I reached out to all the founders, almost all of them responded in some way.

C@S：How did you come to GSB from Seoul, South Korea?

Christy：It's a long story. At that time, I met Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, through contact with the founders of the cryptocurrency field. That was when Binance took off post-ICO. All Chinese crypto exchanges were banned, but Binance survived, so he is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. For three days, we have been discussing what encryption means, and what our role in encryption should be. That's when I decided to join them and set up an investment arm for Binance.

It was at the beginning of 2018, the frenzy era of ICO, and the funds were pouring in with white papers flying all over the sky. Binance also really has little reason to get involved. It's clear that these projects haven't given any thought to what a market fit project is, so we try to help them figure that out and support them in building their own communities. That is why we founded the Binance Labs incubation project.Essentially writing the first check to smart people trying to solve big problems in the crypto space. These projects include Polygon, Injective Protocol, NYM, and more.

We are very passionate about solving these big problems in the crypto space, but at the same time, Binance is going through huge changes. For example, in the United States, the Binance platform serves all users. However, as other countries gradually develop their own regulatory structures, we have to create separate platforms in different jurisdictions. We basically had to create different fiat exchanges and fiat onramps to enable users to enter Binance, KYC certified and usable compliant payment channels, etc.

That's when I was transferred to Binance's M&A department and oversaw market expansion. So my job shifted to being a crypto investor/ecosystem builder running the Binance exchange.In retrospect, it wasn't really my passion. What I'm really interested in is working with founders and building a community.That's when I realized I needed to go back to where I started, my mission is how we empower people with crypto, and I decided to leave Binance.

There are a few people who have really had a huge impact on my life, and they all happen to be from GSB. So after they heard my story, it was like, time to feel like you belong at GSB. We really thought about what we wanted to do, where our passion lay. My GSB admissions essay was "What's Most Important to You and Why?", which to me was a bit like a clinical therapy course. I've been thinking really hard about what motivates me, what's the most important thing in my life, and what I should be doing right now. Our lives are short. So, that's how I got into GSB.

C@S：So, what is the answer to this question? What is most important to you and why?

Christy：The single most important thing in my life is to love other people, insanely, even a little too much. So the point is to create impact.

Back to my family story. The biggest gripe I had growing up was that my parents and grandparents were both social entrepreneurs in some way. But I'm passionate about technology, so I've been struggling. Why do I like non-profit organizations so much? For me, I discovered through the crypto industry that there are ways to make a bigger impact in the world through technology and finance. That's when I realized this was something I was really passionate about.

But I think what motivates me is different now. I think just because we are in cryptocurrency, and we have the right intentions, we can have a huge impact on humanity.Binance Labs as a whole has been a huge success and may be the best performing fund in the history of the world. In four years, over 500 times. This has never existed in the world.But we didn't really last that long because we all left. I don't feel like we're winning collectively as a team.

This is a big regret for me. Personally, I think everyone is doing a great job. Everyone has found a job that suits them.But I want to get an achievement as a team, not as individuals.

C@S：500 times, wow. When you were working at Binance, what was your strategy for evaluating projects?

Christy: It really depends on the stage of the project, but for writing the first check, the alpha gains come from betting early on, and I think for this early stage, it's definitely about the people. I really like teams that have good synergy and vision, but are rational enough to stay focused on what they're building and never give up.

C@S：Can you give an example?

Christy：Two examples, starting from Terra. Because Do Kwon is from Stanford.Terra is the most difficult investment I've ever made because a lot of people at Binance are skeptical of algorithmic stablecoins.It was Do and Dan, the other founder of Terra, and I thought they were the perfect pair. Dan is a very business-minded individual, while Do is a highly technical, research-driven founder. Ironically, Do has basically become the best businessman in crypto today.

Do has a unique personality and he has very strong leadership. But I'm sure, in the beginning, our faith came from a combination of both. They had a big vision, and they had the cheek to say, "We're going to create a financial system for cryptocurrencies."

Another example is Injective,This is also a project created by Albert Chon and Eric Chen from Stanford. These two were just students at Stanford University, and when I first met them, they only had a white paper. But they're really passionate about what they're building. Also, they were very honest about what kind of help they needed.

C@S：What interests you most about cryptocurrencies right now, both personally and as an investor?

Christy：first level title

Christy's current project: Building a Recreational Resort for Web3

C@S：Can you tell us a bit about what you're currently working on?

Christy：The company name is AO, we are developing Spacebar,This is the playground for the Web3 community. We have seen many communities born through DeFi, NFT, DAO and other models, but they are all fragmented. We want people to come together, take their existing identities out of the community and go to a place where they can have fun together.We use games as a metaphor for how this will play out.

C@S：Can you tell us exactly how the platform works?

Christy：We are constructing a game as its metaphor. Assuming that the infrastructure to support the metaverse will be produced at some point, we want to start building the infrastructure that will support the construction of the metaverse. In our current digital life, we are gamifying everything,Essentially, incentive systems are about gamifying things and human interactions。 

So in order to create the gamified world we dream of, I think we should start by creating a game.Our game is to gather the community, and then let the community own the game in a modular way. The core team builds the initial components, but the community can plug in different tools.These tools may be built by our team, or they may be DAO tools that already exist, or DeFi products, or tools built on the platform by our ecosystem developers.

The game is a space themed game with lots of metaphors. Imagine we're in a space bar, everyone seems to be having a good time, but everyone has different goals and tasks. It's all about finding the true meaning of your life. The metaphor is that if you're in a spaceship and you're launching your spaceship, as you're traveling through space, you're going to meet different stars over the course of your life. Every time you meet a star, it's a big event in your life. Whether you want to mint it as an NFT is your decision, just like whether you want to give meaning to the event is entirely up to you. So users collect NFTs and mint it, whoever collects the most NFTs wins the round. This is an alpha version of the game.

For some, winning games may not be their ultimate goal. Just like in life, some people chase money or status, but some people find different meaning in life. There are other concepts. As an example, in the original game, you needed to be an individual to earn rewards, but we allow players to turn their identity into a spaceship; you use your existing NFT to represent your spaceship .

In this way, users who own these PFP NFTs will initially join as a community. We will then create a party system where users will create different teams to collectively win prizes, and the most obvious way to form an initial team may depend on the NFTs held by users. But as the game develops, users may form a team with people who have different NFTs.

This team system is also how we're trying to define fair price discovery for NFT games, which I think is a big problem in the industry right now. We will have a fixed price pool, and then there will be a certain number of people playing the game, and there will be a certain number of stars in the universe. So, if applied this way, we will be able to give a price for each star NFT.

In the beginning, we build the stars ourselves, but as the game progresses, it will be up to the user to create different shapes and colors of these stars. We might also add, I'm not sure, planetary or space components. But essentially, by adding these layers of identity, different meta-games emerge, such as leaderboards, rankings, NFTs, and of course DeFi and DEX, etc. I think we're going to build the building block functions of the Metaverse by adding these different elements.

C@S：Who are you currently working on this project with?

Christy：The project team is a bunch of guys from Stanford. One of our co-founders is not from Stanford, but he was probably one of the first people to talk about blockchain games since 2017. I met him when I was trying to learn more about blockchain games and NFTs. He is from the mobile game industry, and now he wants to switch from the mobile game industry to crypto games.

The project's CTO graduated from Stanford University and is currently a senior engineering manager at Meta. He is a wonderful guy and one of my best friends. I always thought that if I was going to start a startup, he would have to be my CTO. So those two were the first people I contacted.

We also have a talented Art Director who has worked for Disney, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent America, and more. He is very talented and designed one of the most successful games in Korean history.

C@S：What do you foresee as the biggest challenge in this project?

first level title

The Crypto Industry Today

C@S：What does Web3 mean to you?

Christy：Web3 is about collaboration, and when I say collaboration, I think WAGMI (We All Gonna Make It) is Web3 itself. In Web2, all the value is basically captured by the giant tech platform , by definition the few players who founded Web2 were able to set the rules that worked best for them, so it was really hard to get people to take ownership.

In Web3, we will finally create a true open source economy and turn these passive users into active stakeholders (aka token holders). So to me, we're at a stage where it's more of an experiment because we haven't really proven anything yet. But this is indeed the direction the world is shifting towards,I think crypto is becoming the payment and incentive layer for Web3. I think Web3 probably shouldn't be called Web3 because I think the blockchain itself is a new web. So I think we need to give it a new name.

C@S：When people think of NFTs today, they usually mean JPEGs that can be bought and traded. Do you think these JPEGs are just early versions of NFTs, or do JPEG NFTs continue to function as the metaverse progresses?

Christy : Certainly not in jpeg form, but honestly, it's rendered that way now. I don't think we need anything very advanced right now. I see a lot of projects launching various NFTs with fancier visual effects, even 3D effects, etc., but at the moment, the use cases for NFTs are still very limited. This is one of the problems Spacebar wants to solve.

I think we will try to imitate the existence of many existing assets and convert them into NFTs, but when we transfer elements of the real world to the digital world, I think it is necessary to make a difference. We are now randomly imposing scarcity into our digital lives when we have virtually unlimited resources. So that's going to be a really interesting point because a lot of people are basically trying to create NFTs that represent things that exist in real life. In a way, I think this is going to be the next wave of NFTs, but I think it's really exciting when you're actually creating NFTs purely for your digital life. I think this will be a tipping point (tipping point) for our digital lives when they become more important than our real ones.

C@S：Are you excited about this tipping point?

Christy：I'm very excited about this. That tipping point may or may not be in the near future.I think to achieve this goal, we need to solve a large number of real-world problems, including energy, computing, storage, scalabilityfirst level title

Q&A

C@S：If the crypto space had grown 100 times what it is now, or had reached its limit, what do you think about the crypto time?

Christy：I don't think there is an end in the crypto industry. It will only be embedded in our daily life. I think everyone in our generation and younger generations will be crypto-native and have an innate ability to interact with crypto the way we currently interact with apps or the internet etc.

C@S：What advice do you have for someone new to crypto?

Christy：I recommend starting with Twitter first.

C@S：Which top Twitter accounts should we follow?

Christy：I only suggest one first,He is Qiao Wang from DeFi Alliance. He's the only person worthy of my Twitter feed. I love this guy because it feels like he's pretty much tweeting what I've been thinking too, but he's just outlining it in a very, very simple way. He's great at capturing what's going on in cryptocurrency but explaining it in a very insightful way. Simple words, but very insightful. He is one of the people I respect the most in the crypto space.

C@S：Would you recommend the business school to others?

Christy：It depends on your previous experience and the direction you want to develop. I don't think I would recommend going to business school to everyone. Especially for Web3, I strongly recommend not to read MBA.