SINGAPORE — On a cold winter’s night in 2014, a Wall Street trader and a programmer were having a rigorous discussion over a few glasses of beer at a borough in New York.
In spite of being situated in the Big Apple, widely regarded as the heart and pulse of the financial world, the two enterprising individuals were mulling over the underserved and unserved people on the other spectrum.
They had realised that the current world of finance was excluding a wide range of users — those who either had too little money to open an account or, due to circumstances, those who fall short of being involved in the financial world.
Amid the drinks, Mr KC Chng and his friend, Mr Anthony Claret Eufemio — who were aged 28 and 37 then — spouted the idea of selling gold, a universally-accepted and recognised stable asset, through the use of digital currencies.
The late night discussions spun the creation of DigixGlobal, a business representing physical gold bullion as transferable digital blockchain tokens on Ethereum. Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract functionality.
The business was incorporated two days before Christmas in 2014 in Singapore. It became one of the early adopters in utilising cryptocurrencies in the Republic.
Source/More: Singapore a hotbed for cryptocurrency startups | TODAYonline
