This story was originally posted from my Facebook on Sep 17th, 2021

So there is this interesting thing that happens today that reminds me of an event in the past.

I have a group of friends who work on building games under DeFi concepts in Binance Smart Chain (“BSC”). The deal lead guy is smart and creative who I have worked with since my undergrad 15 years ago. My friend, though as smart as I can imagine, is at best described as “all over the place” because he has so many ideas and when he comes up with an idea he’ll fire a bullet toward it and see how it goes. This is best described as firing a lot of lead bullets instead of searching for a silver bullet, which I also believe in. The reason is (1) we might not know if our idea is a silver bullet or not — the world changes so fast, (2) one lead bullet might turn into silver and then to titanium, (3) it’s better for cash flow — try a lot of things, see what works, and push into that direction, this emphasizes fast learning and incremental improvements which are way easier to work with rather than disruptive things. So anyway, my friend comes up with a lot of ideas and many of them fail. As of this moment he and the team have 4 coins active in BSC decentralized exchanges. 1 completely dead. 1 almost dead. 2 live.

So one stroke of spontaneous moment, he thought of migrating the almost dead coin to the 2 live coins to (1) pump prices of the 2 live coins, (2) consolidate team effort into what works, (3) increase liquidity for the 2 live coins. I completely agree with this thinking and as I believe this will work I have been continuously buying his coin pre-event. So he and his team spent the past few days coding the migration back-end, and announced that people can start swapping the almost dead coin to the 2 live coins at 14:00 UTC Sep 17th. It’s 7:00 PST my place.

So this morning, I woke up, laying in bed watching markets and waiting for this migration to happen. Right when the clock turns 7:00, the market previously dead silence suddenly woke up, people started to swap their holdings and blocks of code swapping the abandoned coin into the 2 live coins. Liquidity increased, prices started to jump, bots written by my friends simultaneously bought and sold the 3 coins and moved money from the almost dead coin to the 2 live coins. Hundreds of transactions happened in a matter of minutes and just seeing buy and sell orders rampaging all over the place, to me it is such a moving and magnificent scene.

10 years ago when I was working at VI Group, there was this one weekend morning I follow my boss, David Do — who was in the founding team of EachNet that was sold to eBay in China for $150M in 2003, to visit his friend Trung Dung — who sold his company, OnDisplay, for $1.8B in 2000. At that time Trung Dung relocated to Vietnam and started working on MobiVi. Trung Dung wanted to call capital from David Do. That was a beautiful weekend morning and noone there in Trung Dung’s office except the three of us. Trung Dung went on to make a cross-banks transaction (as far as I remember from Vietcom Bank to Techcom Bank) on his mobile phone and said that with his technology, that was the first time cross-banks transactions like that happened in Vietnam just from texting on a mobile phone.

10 years later my friends write code to move assets with real monetary value across a smart chain thanks to the power of crypto technology. That’s quite cool.

Anyway, I layed there in my bed, witnessed the migration happen, felt the power of technology and talents that build things on it.

P.S. 1: Why did the meeting between Trung Dung, David, and I happen on the weekend? Because David and VI’s bosses always have ways to have their team to overwork without getting overpay, that’s why we love David so much and joking aside but the core team sticks with the firm for a reasonable long time. I say that with utmost respect to the company and my colleagues.

P.S. 2: To avoid appearing of promoting speculative investment. I decided to not publicize the name of the coins of my friends. I personally have a reasonable amount of capital invested and time commitment to the project.

P.S. 3: The migration was a success, even if it’s not, I’m sticking with my friends.

P.S. 4: Bonus a hawkish face of mine, picture taken by aLy33and40thieves in VI Group’s legal room. 10 years ago.