In my previous column, I wrote about LIDAC26, the Luno Institutional Digital Asset Conference hosted by cryptocurrency exchange Luno in Kuala Lumpur on Sept 24, and confessed that my favourite session had nothing to do with regulators or stablecoins.
It was a breakout on Malaysian builders shaping the global digital asset landscape, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
Here's why. Talking to participants and reading reports, I found that if you have ever checked the price of a coin, traced a transaction on Ethereum or swapped one token for another on Solana (two of the world's busiest blockchains), there is a decent chance you used something that started in Malaysia, whether you knew it or not.
That's not just national pride talking: Tiger Research, a crypto research firm, said as much in its 2025 report on our market: "Etherscan, Jupiter, Virtuals Protocol, and CoinGecko all started in Malaysia and now have global reach."
The crypto world's price list
Start with CoinGecko, which Bobby Ong, an economics graduate of University College London, and TM Lee, who studied computer science at Purdue University, founded in Kuala Lumpur in April 2014. It began by tracking a mere 20 coins and now covers more than 21,000 crypto assets across over 1,000 exchanges, drawing what it says are more than 10 million users a month.
What I find most remarkable is how they got there, with no venture capital and no first hire until January 2018.
"Choosing not raising venture capital allowed us the opportunity to not need to relocate to Silicon Valley, one of the most expensive locations to live in," Ong told CryptoSlate in 2021, while Lee put it even more bluntly to The Edge: "There were no parents to bankroll us. We kept it low-cost and kept reinvesting; this helped us stay in the game."
In January, CoinDesk reported that CoinGecko was weighing a sale at a valuation of around RM2 billion. Not bad for a startup whose founders, The Edge reported in 2021, worked remotely before renting their first office in Taman Tun Dr Ismail.
The window into Ethereum
Then there is Etherscan, launched in 2015 by Matthew Tan. Think of it as a search engine for the Ethereum blockchain: punch in a wallet or transaction and it shows you exactly where the money went.
Back in 2019, The Edge reported that Tan was running the business out of Shah Alam with a team of just 15, and that it was already profitable. Since then, Etherscan says it has ranked among the world's top 1,000 websites by traffic, and in 2024 it bought Solscan, a popular explorer for the rival Solana blockchain.
Today, a team of more than 70 runs over 60 explorers, and developers can pull data from more than 50 blockchains with a single Etherscan key. That's right, the explorer Tan built and launched back in 2015 now reaches across much of the crypto world.
Solana's best-price finder
Next up is Jupiter, co-founded by Siong Ong, who sat on that LIDAC panel. Jupiter is an aggregator, which means it scans Solana's many trading venues for the best price and then makes the swap for you, even splitting your order across several venues if that gets you a better deal.
The numbers are staggering: according to data tracker DefiLlama, Jupiter has routed more than RM5 trillion in trades to date, and handled almost RM60 billion in the past 30 days alone, about half of all aggregator volume on Solana.
When Jupiter launched its JUP token in January 2024, it handed out a billion tokens to more than a million wallets, and it has since grown into perpetual futures, lending and a mobile wallet.
And the bench runs deep
Virtuals Protocol, co-founded by Jansen Teng, lets anyone launch and co-own artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Its token briefly topped a market value of RM20 billion in January 2025, and in February this year it launched Eastworld Labs to put humanoid robots to work, because, in Teng's words, they "are currently hamstrung by two fundamental bottlenecks: lack of data and capital".
Virtuals said more than 18,000 AI agents had already been deployed on its platform, alongside a fleet of more than 30 full-sized humanoid robots. Being in the robotics industry myself, I can tell you that is no small feat.
Then there is Pendle, a marketplace that lets investors trade the future yield on their crypto, a little like stripping a bond's coupons from its principal and selling them separately. Binance Labs, then the venture arm of the world's largest crypto exchange, backed it in 2023, and at its peak in September 2025 it held more than RM54 billion in deposits.
Tiger Research counts Pendle among the global projects in which "Malaysian talents also play key roles".
Sure, crypto is volatile, and several of these figures sit well below their peaks today. But the point is not the price of any single token; it is that a country of our size keeps producing the people who build tools much of the industry relies on.
Sitting in that breakout room two weeks ago, it struck me that the three founders on stage had, between them, built the price list, the search engine and the best-price finder that millions of crypto users lean on every day, and that all three companies started right here in Malaysia.
It's about time we celebrated them like the world-class builders they are.
The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.