Dinner meeting in Schindlers Sanlitun

For our 9 November 2021 Rotary talk on digital assets we had as speaker Cici Lu.
Topic: Insights and outlook for digital assets

Highlight of the talk

Cici Lu, Senior Partner of Apollo Capital Asia – an Australian leading crypto asset manager. Cici was born in Beijing, her schooling and career brought her to Canada, the UK, briefly in Australia and now Singapore. Prior to joining the crypto asset management industry, she had over 10 years of institutional banking career, specifically in investment banking, FI & FX trading across 4 continents. Cici would love to share us her unique perspective on crypto assets as tools to enable UN Sustainable Development Goals to create a more inclusive and efficient world
Topic: “Crypto Assets as Tools to Create a More Inclusive and Efficient world.”

For many digital asset uninitiated who are often confused by all the fuss and the spectacular rise and fall of Bitcoin or the haute technological power of Blockchain, Cici Lu, a Beijing native, educated in Canada, has built a career in IB across four continents and now works as an asset manager for a Singapore-based Crypto asset fund, Apollo. In her talk, Cici put all confusions to rest and painted a simpler picture of digital assets and how those assets could change the way we conduct financial transactions in the future. Cici explained how fast-growing innovations in cryptocurrencies have created a new asset class that has grown fast to become the new darling among financial products. In her plain and easy-to-understand presentation, Cici explained the difference between Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies. Fueled by the development of Web 3.0 to be built on blockchain technology, the trend toward Decentralized Finance, DiFi, is gaining traction.

Compared to the traditional Web 2.0 which powered apps like Google, Facebook, and Amazon and allowed them to harvest profits from consumers, Web 3.0 on Blockchain provides enhanced security, better transparency, instant traceability, increased efficiency and speed, as well as automation via smart contracts. While blockchain and crypto have become popular vocabularies, few understand the differences between them. Blockchain is an open-source public ledger on a network that runs on cryptographic consensus. When participants validate their trades on the blockchain, they then ensure the integrity of the ledger, and the more validated trades on a blockchain the more participants will use this blockchain and thus allow the blockchain to scale. So those validating traders are rewarded with additional crypto assets.

The recent flurry of introductions of Smart Contracts, referring to transactions by self-executing digital agreements governed by software codes, fueled even more imaginations for future financial products. Available on many Blockchains, those smart contracts, accessible via computers or smartphones, can provide financial features of borrowing, lending, and even supply chain management. Those smart contracts are executed through payments using the native tokens of that blockchain, so the more people use this blockchain the more valuable those tokens become.

Currently, $275 billion, twice the HSBC market cap, is locked in DeFi smart contracts protocols and this number is fast growing. Cici finished her presentation by illustrating the importance of positive social impact and financial inclusion blockchain and smart contracts will bring to communities worldwide.