#9 HKVAX – Matthew Cheung on building crypto infrastructure for asset tokenization and institutional investors

Matthew Cheung is the founding team member of HKVAX, a custody and exchange solution for institutional investors in Hong Kong. Matt has an unconventional start to the tech world. He started his career as a Recruiter before stumbling across crypto. His journey changed forever. 

He joined OKCoin as one of the first 100 employees in 2016. OKCoin grew into a 1,000+ people company and is one of the most active crypto exchanges in China. After witnessing the 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) boom, he felt jaded by the scammers and left the crypto world behind for a short reprieve. But, that wasn’t for long. He found himself still believing in the technology. He came back and joined Coinsuper, a regulated crypto exchange in Hong Kong and later co-founded JM Consulting to help clients issue tokenized assets. 

At JM, he found that the biggest challenge for tokenized assets is the lack of liquidity. Issuers want to see a large pool of investors before issuing tokenized assets. Investors want to see a large pool of investors to ensure they could trade those tokens. To solve this chick-and-egg problem, Matt realized that the missing building block is an infrastructure for high net worth individuals and institutions to invest in crypto. That’s where HKVAX comes in. Today, Matt is building out a regulated infrastructure for institutional and high net worth clients to trade crypto in a secured way at HKVAX.