From Baidu’s billion-user ecosystem to institutional blockchain infrastructure, Liang Wang (Miles Wong) Wong has spent a decade building digital asset platforms across Asia and Europe — through two full market cycles, multiple regulatory regimes, and one global pandemic. We spoke to the London-based product leader and angel investor about what survives a crypto winter, why cross-border expansion breaks most teams, and where he’s deploying capital next.
Blockopedia: You’ve been building in the digital asset space since 2013 — that’s over a decade, predating most of today’s Web3 industry. What did the landscape look like when you started?
In 2013, blockchain was barely a category. I founded Blue Island Fund in Shenzhen as a cross-border venture accelerator and growth agency focused on blockchain ecosystem expansion across the Asia Pacific. At that point, Bitcoin was under $1,000, Ethereum didn’t exist yet, and “institutional adoption” wasn’t even a phrase anyone used. The people building in the space were either deep technologists or people who saw an infrastructure shift before the market did. I was in the second camp — I’d spent seven years at Ogilvy and Baidu building digital platforms at a massive scale, and what I saw in blockchain was the same kind of infrastructure inflection point that I’d witnessed in China’s digital entertainment market in the late 2000s.
What most people don’t realise is that early blockchain building in Asia was fundamentally a cross-border challenge. The technology was global, but the markets were intensely local. Regulatory frameworks, user behaviours, partnership structures, KOL ecosystems — all of it varied dramatically between Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. That’s what Blue Island was built to solve.
You ran Blue Island for eight years and built a team of 30-plus across Greater China and Southeast Asia. What did you actually do there?
Three things. First, we helped blockchain projects expand across Asian markets — not by translating their website, but by rebuilding their go-to-market strategy for each local context. We engineered acquisition engines for five leading exchanges and delivered over 300,000 active users. That’s not a vanity metric — those were real, transacting users acquired through localised strategies that accounted for platform-specific behaviour in each market.
Second, we built a media and KOL network. We activated more than 200 KOL and premium media partnerships to drive liquidity and brand authority for partner platforms. In Asia’s crypto ecosystem in 2017 to 2021, KOLs weren’t a nice-to-have — they were the primary distribution channel. We built relationships across Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian influencer ecosystems, each of which operates on completely different platforms and with different engagement norms.
Third, we implemented operational frameworks — OKR-based management systems, cross-functional team structures — that allowed a 30-person international team to operate across multiple time zones and markets without the coordination overhead collapsing. That sounds like a management detail, but it was the difference between scaling and chaos.
Then the 2018 crash happened. How did that change your operation?
2018 was the first real test. Bitcoin dropped from nearly $20,000 to under $4,000. Most of the projects we worked with either froze operations or disappeared entirely. For us, it was a forcing function. We stopped working with projects that didn’t have a real product or a real user base. The partnerships we maintained through the bear market — those became the highest-value relationships in the portfolio, because they proved that both sides had staying power.
The lesson I took from 2018 is that market cycles are a filter. They don’t destroy good companies — they expose the ones that were never good in the first place. The operators and founders who survived 2018–2019 were the ones who had genuine product-market fit, not just token-market fit. That distinction shaped how I evaluated every opportunity going forward.
In 2021, you made a significant move — from Asia to London. Why?
Several reasons. First, the regulatory environment in Asia was shifting in ways that made long-term planning difficult. China’s crackdown on crypto was accelerating, and the rules of engagement were changing faster than anyone could adapt to. London offered a clearer — not perfect, but clearer — regulatory framework for building digital asset businesses.
Second, London sits at the intersection of traditional finance and emerging digital infrastructure in a way that no other city does. You have the institutional capital base, the legal infrastructure, the talent pool, and increasingly the regulatory appetite to support institutional-grade digital asset products. For someone moving from building consumer-facing crypto products to building enterprise infrastructure, London was the right environment.
Third, and this is underappreciated — London’s time zone is a strategic asset for anyone operating globally. I can take a morning call with Singapore, work a full European day, and still catch the US East Coast before close. For someone running cross-border operations, that connectivity matters more than people think.
You founded CODA WEB3 CREATIVE in London in 2023. What was the thesis, and what happened?
CODA was built around a straightforward thesis: the NFT market was collapsing in terms of speculative trading, but the underlying need for digital asset creation and distribution infrastructure wasn’t going away. Brands, artists, and content creators still needed platforms to issue, manage, and distribute digital assets. What they didn’t need was another marketplace. They needed plumbing.
I led the product architecture and personally oversaw more than 60% of the core platform development — smart contract structure, asset minting logic, wallet connectivity, metadata handling, on-chain verification mechanisms. We built a complete digital asset lifecycle management platform: from creator onboarding through minting, distribution, and secondary market interaction.
We launched into the teeth of the 2023 market contraction. The technology worked. The product was solid. But the market timing meant that customer acquisition costs were prohibitive and the revenue model couldn’t sustain a growth phase. I made the decision to implement a structured operational wind-down after completing the core platform milestones. We prioritised capital preservation, maintained full UK corporate governance and statutory compliance throughout, and managed the closure responsibly.
I don’t view CODA as a failure. I view it as a complete development cycle — we built, shipped, and made a disciplined decision about timing. The technical foundation and the product architecture remain relevant, and several of the design patterns I developed at CODA directly inform my product work at TecStation today.
That brings us to TecStation, where you’re now CPO. You’re working on institutional MPC custody and Wallet-as-a-Service. How is this different from your earlier work?
Completely different user, completely different set of constraints. At Blue Island and CODA, the end users were retail participants, creators, and consumer-facing platforms. At TecStation, the users are banks, asset managers, and regulated financial institutions. The product challenge shifts from “how do we make this accessible?” to “how do we make this deployable inside an organisation that has a 50-page security policy and a compliance team that needs to approve every integration?”
Multi-Party Computation custody is the core technology — it allows multiple parties to jointly control digital assets without any single party ever holding the complete private key. That eliminates single points of failure, which is non-negotiable for institutional adoption. But the technology itself is mature. What’s not mature is the product layer around it.
My focus has been on standardising the enterprise deployment pathway, designing API-driven security architecture that maps to how institutions already manage access control, and compressing the time from initial engagement to production deployment from months to weeks. I’ve worked across product, security, and commercial teams to translate what is fundamentally a cryptographic capability into something a compliance officer and an IT director can confidently approve.
The strategic impact is lowering systemic custody risk and accelerating compliant digital asset adoption among institutional participants. That’s the mission.
You started angel investing through AngelList in 2025. You’ve deployed approximately $3 million across more than 30 companies. How do you think about portfolio construction when you’re investing across AI, robotics, aerospace, fintech, and digital infrastructure?
The portfolio looks wide on paper, but the thesis is consistent: I invest in Seed and Series A companies where the founding team has a genuine technical moat, a realistic route to commercialisation, and where my operating experience adds value beyond capital. I co-invest alongside established Silicon Valley syndicates through AngelList, but I’m not a passive participant. I source deals, build independent conviction, screen founders directly, and then actively support portfolio companies on product positioning, go-to-market strategy, and cross-border connectivity.
The cross-sector spread is deliberate. AI infrastructure, robotics, aerospace, and fintech are all undergoing the same structural shift: the underlying technology is maturing faster than the product and go-to-market layer around it. That gap — between what’s technically possible and what’s commercially deployed — is where I’ve spent my entire career. Whether the technology is MPC custody, NFT infrastructure, or autonomous robotics, the product question is the same: how do you take a technical capability and make it deployable, sellable, and supportable in a real-world context?
My evaluation framework adjusts by sector. For AI infrastructure, I’m looking at defensibility — is this a product or a feature that a foundation model provider will absorb? For robotics and aerospace, it’s capital intensity and timeline to deployment. For fintech, it’s regulatory path and distribution. But the founder quality filter is constant: can they explain the problem clearly, do they understand their customer, and are they honest about what they don’t know?
You’ve facilitated cross-border connectivity between UK, US, and Asian founders and investors as part of your angel work. What does that actually look like?
It’s one of the areas where I add the most differentiated value. I’ve operated in China for over a decade, built partnerships across Southeast Asia, and now work from London with access to US deal flow through AngelList. That gives me pattern recognition across three major startup ecosystems that most angels simply don’t have.
Concretely, it means I can help a London-based AI company understand how to position their product for an Asian market entry — not in theory, but based on having done it. I can help a Singapore-based fintech founder navigate UK regulatory conversations, because I’ve built companies under both frameworks. And I can connect founders with investors, partners, and advisors across ecosystems in a way that’s curated, not spray-and-pray.
The cross-border piece is also where I see the most underpriced opportunities. Some of the strongest technical teams I’ve backed are in markets where valuation discipline is tighter and competition for allocation is lower. Connecting those founders with Silicon Valley syndicate capital while providing hands-on operational support — that’s the model.
You’ve now been through two full crypto market cycles — 2017–2019 and 2021–2023. What’s different about this phase?
The infrastructure is real this time. In 2017, “institutional adoption” meant a few hedge funds buying Bitcoin through OTC desks. In 2021, it meant corporate treasury experiments and a rush of retail-facing products dressed up in institutional language. In 2025 and 2026, it means banks actively building custody capabilities, regulated stablecoin frameworks being deployed across major jurisdictions, and real-world asset tokenisation moving from pilot to production.
The difference is that the current wave is being driven by infrastructure builders and regulators, not by retail speculation. That’s fundamentally healthier. The projects that matter right now are the ones solving integration problems — how to connect digital asset rails to existing financial infrastructure without breaking compliance, security, or operational workflows. That’s exactly what I work on at TecStation.
The other thing that’s different is the talent base. In 2013, finding someone who understood both blockchain technology and enterprise product management was nearly impossible. Today, there’s a generation of operators — people like me — who’ve been through the cycles, built real products, managed real teams, and come out the other side with pattern recognition that the industry badly needed. That institutional knowledge is what makes this phase viable in a way that earlier cycles weren’t.
What’s next for you?
More of the same, but at higher altitude. At TecStation, the goal is scaling the custody and WaaS platform into multiple institutional channels — not just direct enterprise clients, but through partnerships with existing financial infrastructure providers. On the investment side, I’m increasing my deployment pace and looking at larger allocation sizes as my conviction model gets sharper.
And I’m increasingly spending time on what I’d call ecosystem connectivity — using my cross-border network to create strategic linkages between founders, investors, and operators across the UK, US, and Asia. I think the next generation of globally successful companies will be the ones that can operate natively across multiple markets from day one, rather than treating internationalisation as a phase-two problem. I want to be part of building that infrastructure — not just the technology, but the networks and operational knowledge that make cross-border scaling actually work.
