Dr. Sushi

02/23/2025

Token 2049 Singapore - September 24’

I organized a few events in Singapore for “Asia Crypto Week” - the largest conference for the industry in Asia each year. Story has a massive developer community in Asia, partly thanks to the team making the effort to work with local organizations on educational initiatives and exposure/marketing campaigns.

The goal here was to organize one good event where apps built on Story could share what they’ve built via product demos and connect with various funds looking to make early stage investments in our ecosystem. Definitely a success. We had 91 founders apply to speak at this event. The ByBit office was not big enough but I’m not complaining about “Standing room only” situations. Those tend to create fomo.

Singapore is weird. Amazing food, very diverse, overtly menacing (it’s an authoritarian SEZ after all), sterile, suprisingly affordable (if you’re not part of the service economy), and highly efficient. Whole place feels like a mall.

I had an insane experience visiting the Singapore Freeport, where the heir to one of Asia’s largest Art Handling and Storage vaults gave me a private tour of some of the display rooms. They filmed parts of “Tenet” there. Got to see works by Basquiat, Degas, Monet, Rothko, and a number of other seminal impressionists that have not been seen in public since the 1970s. Very tripped out experience.

Will be back in October for the next conference. World will be very different at that point I’m sure of it.

02/08/2025

Story Academy Saigon

Really great short trip to Vietnam to meet with some of the developers building applications on Story’s tech. Lots of talent here, 1 out of every 5 people in Vietnam own crypto - really great place to bootstrap a developer community.

Trip would not have been complete without a top tier bowl of pho.

01/28/2025

10/23/2024

Story Academy Taipei. September, 2024.

The next stop on this Asia tour was Taipei, a place known to be ripe with tech talent. We had a few projects actively developing applications on Story based in Taipei so the decision was quite easy to make a stop here.

We worked with a local VC put the event together and help spread the word to their local network. It seems like a rather tight knit community. Lucky for us, our project has been making waves globally so we had a pretty good turn out. It was the “who’s who of Taipei Crypto”.

Kicked off the day with project demos before taking a bus over to the dinner spot, an incredible Michelin guide recommended Cantonese Restaurant. Insanely good food but the room was full of great people, which is always most important. The food in Taipei is incredible.

Taipei was my favorite city we visited on this trip. While it’s definitely a large city, it doesn’t have the same bustle of the other Asian mega cities. It’s much more laid back, and seems like a place that allows interesting underground creative culture to flourish. I had a chance to do a performance on my day off in Taipei — so fun! Even throughout the back streets, it’s common to find a rogue tree growing through the cracks that has been allowed to flourish. It adds a lovely charm. These help considerably when it gets hot (it was like 95 and humid every day).

Now that we have a blossoming developer community here in Taipei, we’ll look to explore new ways to support them going forward as they build products using our technology.