Bitcoin Asia (HK) 2026 Day 2 Interviews

Hey guys, Stephan Livera here. We are coming to you from Bitcoin Asia here in Hong Kong. I'm here with my friend Piriya. He's a well-known Bitcoin advocate in Thailand. For those of you who don't know, he has various things he's got going on. He's got a conference, he's got a cafe, he's got, you know, consulting, he's got education, he's got the works. I wanted to chat you've got a really cool cafe. Tell us a bit about

that. it's a, it's a small little cafe So anyone would-- anyone who has, any know me should come, can just come and ask questions. And we have like Bitcoin ATMs, we accept Bitcoin, we have books, we have like artworks in, in like Bitcoin art.

Yeah, fantastic. And so obviously, it's a way to get new people to get exposed to Bitcoin, even if they're not already like a hardcore Bitcoiner guy like, like we are, let's say. and I know you've got a few different things going there. So you've also got, a lot of strong focus on the education side. Yes.

I also co-founded Brightshift, which is a Bitcoin education company. Yeah. And at the cafe, we also host, classes, workshops, right? So there's a, there's a whole Like class of fifty people. So we do hold regular classes on like Bitcoin self-custody, multisig, and, seed signing and stuff like that. Fantastic.

And then, I guess you're seeing a lot of interest now, obviously with all this, the post Coldcard and these hacks that we're seeing, you're seeing a lot of interest on that side?

Yes. And I'm actually launching a new company called Mebit, which will be focusing on like advisory, consulting and, you know, collaborative custody. That, that's gonna be a new thing for Thailand. You're

gonna kind of localize it for the Thai model, let's say. Yeah. So

you would hold one key, the user holds two keys, something like that, or what? That's the plan. we're still working with the authorities, you know, trying to get everything right, everything legal, and, you know, the worst case, the user holds three keys, but we can keep in touch and keep in contact.

I see. So you might offer like different models, like where maybe you guide them and they hold their own keys fully, and then maybe Time, for consulting and, coaching. So I guess, well, we'll see how, how you make the model work. I mean, yeah, we'll make it work, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We're also doing a conference. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. So what, what are the dates of the conference you've got? that's, 28th,

29th

November. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. So that's the previous years, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've been, you've

been Fantastic. And so, tell us a little bit about, you know, what are the main topics you've got and what are you, what are you planning for the con- what you're planning for the conference? Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it this time, but, you know, tell us a bit about it for listeners.

Well, today, this year, I think we're gonna shift the focus a bit. for the last two years, we've been focusing more on like the Bitcoin culture, you know, low time preference thinking, stuff this year we want to focus more on like building for the future, like building better custody, method, building like better apps, better users, user experience. so they'll be more focused on like tech and Bitcoin development in general.

Well, while we're on that, let's talk a bit about from a Thai perspective. What are the main- You know, businesses, apps, infrastructure, so people can understand like what's out there in terms of exchanges, self-custody, like what, what's, what's-- Give us a bit of an overview there.

Thailand is, It's, you can say it's well regulated, in the crypto space. So like we have a lot of regulations, we have a lot of licenses. That makes it so that like, if you wanna buy Bitcoin, there are like registered exchanges where you buy it easily. But it also makes it hard for like entrepreneurs to start business because you then would require, you know, multiple licenses to do things. We, we were talking about maybe a bit earlier, to hold a user's key, it's just one or three, you need like, you probably might need a custodian Yeah. So, maybe. I'm, I'm, I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm crossing my fingers, but like, yeah, there are a lot of that, it makes for a safe environment, to, to buy and sell and invest, not so much for like conducting business in it. So that's also something we want to push this year with the conference, you know, we got people speaking like, how to do Bitcoin business, fundraising, you know, navigating this regulatory, regulation landscape.

I see. Yeah, so it's kind of a mix of things there. and then what, what would you say the level of awareness is in Thailand just generally? Like, would they say, would they have a decent awareness of Bitcoin, but there's only a small group who are really like actually holding and hodling, or what?

Well, if you go by the numbers, there are about like ten to thirteen million people in crypto and Bitcoin, those are the user accounts. from what I've experienced, I've-- my, my channel's got about a hundred thousand followers. Small group, but it's, also a relatively big group compared to a lot of other countries. And we do have a lot of hardcore Bitcoiners and people who are living like on the Bitcoin standard themselves. Yeah.

Fantastic. Well, we'll leave it there. guys, make sure you follow Perio and check out what he's doing. Of course, if you're in the area, make sure you check out his conference. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Hey guys, we're back at Bitcoin Conference Asia in Hong Kong. I'm here with my friend Alex from Fulgor. Alex, I know you've, recently been focusing on Asia. tell us a little bit about what you're doing there on the Fulgor side in Asia.

Yeah, sure. So we launched a new fifty million dollar, Bitcoin focused venture fund, specifically for, guys building on Bitcoin in Asia. So I guess the, the idea is that Bitcoin infrastructure across Asia is still quite nascent, it's pretty underdeveloped, especially relative to the West, and we'd like to see that change. We'd like to see more people building on top of Bitcoin specifically in Asia for Asian markets, and so we've launched this new venture fund to try and encourage that.

Yeah. Okay. And what, specific ones are you looking for? Are you looking for like, you know, sat stacking app or lending or wallets, like, what, what, give us a flavor of what you're looking

for? infrastructure in Asia for Bitcoin specifically is so nascent that sat stacking apps, dca apps don't really exist across the vast mo-majority of Asian markets, and if they do, they're quite limited in reach. So what you do have is a huge number of crypto casinos, so guys who might onboard people via Bitcoin but then sell them, you know, meme coin four hundred and fifty-eight, yeah, as a way to clip trading fees. And that's quite prevalent across Asia, as it has been in the West, but there hasn't been this new generation of Bitcoin specific, sat stacking apps or DCA apps, whatever you wanna call them, in these Asian markets, and there's a huge number of people, as Bitcoiners, we all believe that Bitcoin should be You know, maybe the primary savings asset for most individuals and institutions, and the infrastructure to onboard them in a Bitcoin dedicated manner doesn't exist. So we'd love to see that proliferate, for individuals and institutions, and that's two very different product sets as well. yeah,

and tell us a little bit about what countries you're looking at. I know, James, from, you know, Ark is doing something in Sri Lanka as well.

Yeah, so full Asia is targeted at the Asian region, which obviously super broad, covers a few billion people. we're happy to invest, well, Fogo invests globally. Fogo Asia is, I guess, you know, Middle East, Australia, and everything in between. to also help serve that purpose, we're launching an accelerator in Sri Lanka with our friends at ARC. And so if anybody wants to build on top of Bitcoin, they can apply to that accelerator and we'll have a guided program to, help develop that Bitcoin, Bitcoin concept over time and perhaps even invest in those companies if they come up with a viable concept.

Well, I mean, certainly, To me, I was born in Sri Lanka, so it's, interesting. I mean, I'm more Australian than I am Sri Lankan, but still fascinating and, it's just cool to see that, you know, there's a, a focus on this. And, you know, I, I guess, where, where do you see the, the roadblocks? Is it just that you, we ha-we don't have founders who are, who are willing to, you know, take that on, or where are you seeing,

kind of the hurdle? So I mean, one of the problems we have generally in Bitcoin is that we have a lot of focus on, on, building very specific technological solutions for problems that apply to a small subset of people, yeah,

like not a little echo chamber per se, yeah,

yeah, not necessarily always focusing on distribution

or how, yeah,

how you build a brand that resonates with people where they're actually at, yeah. so that's like a more Bitcoin-specific issue that we're getting a lot better at solving across the community generally. Within Asia, you have, you know, thirty, forty different markets different regulatory regimes. Some are a bit more hostile, some indifferent, some supportive, and so, you know, you've got to figure out what is appropriate, what Bitcoin solution is appropriate for the market and for the regulatory regime in that market. Yeah. and so that's like a more of an Asia specific kind of thing, yes.

Okay, so we've got, let's say, the DCA app, and then, is there any other stuff you're looking at on the technology side? Is it like custody, security, any of those other components that are interesting for you or maybe not as, they're not as priority as, as like a DCA app?

Yeah, so, we're happy to invest in anything that moves the needle for Bitcoin. The just really basic message I wanted to get across with the DCA app is even this doesn't really exist in a form that, let's say, we're accustom-accustomed to in the West or Europe. Like a

river or a similar something or a relay or relay or something like that, but in these Asian countries. Yeah.

So like even that doesn't exist, let alone multi-sig custody solutions that resonate with, people

in- And then, I guess just more broadly, like not just Asia, but just Fulgor globally, any other comments on, you know, what you were, what you and the partners at Fulgor are looking at?

So, we now have a request to startups segment on our website, Fogo Ventures, where we're listing and trying to update every so often with ideas that we think are, you know, worth working on and think can be value-creating opportunities. so that's, there's that. We're, we're investing in companies in Taiwan right now, in, in the United States, so we're very much active and trying to deploy, So, there's like a huge number of things that we're interested in, but it's a pretty exciting time to be,

yeah, working with-- I think there are a big investor in many, many Bitcoin companies, so I guess that's also-- you have a very big view of like what's going on in all these pockets around the world, right?

Yeah, I think hundred twenty investments in twenty eighteen in Bitcoin specific infrastructure, and, yeah, we're sort of actively continuing to deploy. Yeah.

Yeah, well, let's, let's leave it there. So, listeners, We want to grow the ecosystem, right? So we want more people to, you know, come in and start being satstakers and being bitcoiners. So yeah, everyone check out Alex from Polga. Thanks for joining me. Thanks. Hey guys, we're back at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong. I'm joined by Shone Anstey from LQWD. He's the CEO and, founder. Shone, probably people will be interested, people in Bitcoin are, are hearing about AI attacks. I mean, people heard what happened with Boltz, the exchange,

late January, we sat the team down and I've been in tech for a long time, I said the very first thing that's gonna get hit is Bitcoin, and make sure we're, we're buttoned down. We've always taken security very seriously. We're, we're a public company, so we get audited every quarter, and, we have a lot of layers in place. But sure enough, I said within six months, you're gonna see stuff start to fall and that we don't even know about yet. And this is, it came The rest of our nodes and Bitcoin were safe, but it is also an incentive to, continue to look for ways to prepare for the future too, where AI models get stronger. But we have a lot of confidence in where it's going. We're not, we're not afraid of it, but it will battle-harden everything in our industry. I, I think it's the other industries of mainstream finance and, and other tech that maybe don't have that drive and ambition to, to, push forward aggressively like the Bitcoin industry does. And so, yeah, you know Financial institutions, God forbid, I hope I'm wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Yeah. So I guess the short version is like, we're gonna need a lot of defensive AI use to scan for vulnerabilities before the black hats get you.

it's an, it's an AI versus AI world now, and I think you're gonna get to the point the open source models are the ones that are, are catching up to anthropic and certainly, GPT six or six point oh, whatever is coming, but they're, they're gonna be good enough to find things we How you can have recovery, making sure that your, you know, your, your keys can be recovered or are safe under two-factor authentication and, and, multi-sig where you can and, and even spreading some things around. So as a public company, we were, obviously, we're very upfront about what we have there 'cause we're audited. We have some stuff at, in, in, on our own, nodes and we have stuff with, custodians as well. We spread it around so our risk is

spread around. Yeah Stablecoins. What about, obviously we're all Bitcoin and Lightning advocates, where's the chance for Lightning as agentic payments?

Well, that's a great question. So we, you know, we run, we run nodes, Lightning nodes in seventeen countries, and for those out there, a Lightning node is the ultra-fast payment layer for Bitcoin. you establish payment channels with other providers, and you-- but you have to have Bitcoin on, on those channels to have it. That's why we, we keep buying Bitcoin. And, but what we look at it is the, it, It's gonna be in the billion transactions per second over time, and it's gonna be used not just for payments, which is what we think, but it'll be used as a form of AI and robots to communicate with each other, to authenticate, to validate by sending a fraction of a, a, a Bitcoin in, in a millisecond. And so yes, pay-- stable coins will be there, you know, the US dollar's not gonna go away, it'll have its use. But if you ask AI and, and you have, which network you wanna use, a network that actually where Especially when it comes to the security and communications, but there is its place and, and we'll have stablecoins over Lightning Network and you're still gonna have Bitcoin as the market that goes across for it.

And

then from

the stablecoin perspective, obviously, you know, we prefer Bitcoin, but let's say for those asset protocols, whether it's Taproot assets, RGB, you know, the Spark one, you know, there's different forms of it. So what are you looking at?

Well, we're looking at Taproot assets, but we're gonna look at all of them Right now, we've actually been working on our own AI, model we call it Project ArcLight, and that is to how do, how do you run our global network of, systems in seventeen countries and do it with, AI running the entire network, rebalancing and, and what have you, but with all the harness and all the structure, well, there's no access to keys or nothing can go wrong with it. But basically taking all of our data and data is the moat, and then applying it. So, you know, it's gonna be a Just massive, and we're at the start of it.

Yeah. on the LQWD side of things, obviously we're seeing a bit of number go up recently. Is that gonna be a tailwind for us? Talk to us a bit on the treasury side,

sure, on the treasury side. So we've always been a treasury company, we're treasury two point oh, we said from the start because we take our Bitcoin and we put it to work, and we actually look to earn yield off the Lightning network, and that yield's been climbing, the volume of the light network's been climbing And also, you know, for, they're even talking about other, other cryptos as well, but it really just, it made our narrative and our story in the public markets much easier to understand, and then people get where it's going. They may not spend it themselves, but they can see why machines want to spend it.

Yeah. Okay. So, what do you see as the, is it, is it, is it gonna be a general kind of big catalyst or is it just more like general growth, a secular

growth in the volumes? Do you see that? Often, what is-- when does a technology get adopted? It's when it's ten times better than what's out there, and, you know, this kind of stuff where it's a hundred times better than what's out there. I, I, you know, Lightning itself is designed as a peer-to-peer network, designed like the internet. and really everything we're doing here is the next phase of the internet. We're, we're inverting the financial system, we're inverting payments, we're inverting trust. Yeah. And, we're doing it at massive All the negatives, and of course, you know, we use it every day.

Yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Well, let's leave it there. Just a quick update from Sean Anstey from LQWD. Thanks for joining me, Sean. Great, thanks for having me on. Hey guys, we are back at Bitcoin Conference Asia in Hong Kong. I'm joined now by Liam Egan from Ideal, known for cryptography work, BitVM, and I guess most recently we're talking about Shielded CSV. So for people who don't know, what is Shielded CSV? Just kind of a quick overview.

Yeah, so, Shielded CSV is a paper that I wrote with, Robin Linus and Jonas Nick a few years ago, for, clientside validated, private payments protocol for Bitcoin. The idea is like, you wanna do private- Like transactions with Bitcoin were very limited, and if you tried to do something like Zcash or something, you have to put proofs on chain, so we, avoid that by making everything client-side validated. It's kind of like RGB or Taproot assets,

So you can think of it, so I guess, and there's like this idea of the nullifiers. So can you give us, so the idea is that, okay, my understanding is you're, you're doing client-side validated protocol, and it's to have like private coins. And so is it sort of like you, send these private coins, you know, off-chain per se, and then where does the nullifier come into it?

Yeah, so, the observation of these client-side validated protocols is when I give you a payment, I can give you the history of that point, and that allows you to check that all the payments in the history of that point are valid. but what it doesn't allow you to check is that I haven't double-spent you. So I could send you a coin off-chain, I could send somebody else a coin off-chain, and they might con- So what the nullifier allows us to do, it's like a deterministic random-looking quantity derivable from each coin. So if I tried to double spend, I'd have to put the nullifier on chain twice. So if I put the nullifier on chain, we're checking it for uniqueness, and that's what allows us to do privacy-preserving double spend prevention, basically. This is all like from the zero cash, zero coin paper,

yeah. And so is it right then to say Say it's gonna be something similar to a Zcash level of privacy in their shielded pool, that's what we could have in Bitcoin with shielded CSV. That's, yeah, it's

very much our goal. So we're working right now on the protocol, the client-side validate protocol, we want it to be as private as Zcash or any other state-of-the-art privacy system. And, we also, in the past, like a few months ago and earlier, we've, we've worked on these like trust-minimized bridges for Bitcoin. And ultimately we, we wanna have both, so we can have like a bridge to a shielded pool that's as private as possible and has very low Unchained footprint. So

gotcha. And I guess kind of obvious upfront things for people who aren't aware, no consensus change required, no inflation, and it's opt-in, right? Like the idea is that you would opt into being inside the shielded CSV and you would, you would bridge some Bitcoin in to then trade around privately, and then if you need to bridge out, can you talk us how that would work? Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. So the, the shielded pool is entirely opt-in. If there's a bug in the shielded pool, then if you don't use shielded CSD, you

aren't

affected.

Yeah. And it would be kind of like the Zcash shielded pool inflation bugs or whatever, like that kind of thing, if there were to be a problem. This is

always a risk with these privacy protocols. It's something people should be informed about going in. I think it's worth it, Depending on what you are doing with it, but, but yeah, and we want the bridge to be as trustless as possible so that people can bridge in and bridge out without any, you know, interference.

Yeah, I see. And so then what would your role-- so would you, would IDL be like the lab behind this? What, like, what would be the model then for you, like, as a company, to, you know, sustain, to make it work for you? So

that's a good question. I'm not sure. there are different models that we've, we've thought about, it's so these bitbeam-style bridges require operators, to function in the absence of,

so you might be an operator of that bridge or

provide services to operators. we, we could, we could also run like a side chain. So one version of shielded CSV that we've originally looked at is putting on nullifiers on Bitcoin. This gives you like a really high degree of security, but there are other versions of Shielded CSV where maybe we store the nullifiers in the sidechain and you have like the option of putting them on Bitcoin or on a sidechain depending on what level of security and fees you want to pay. So we could run the sidechain, but we're still pretty, you know, early in this sort of figuring it out. So

it's still, it's a bit of an open question on exactly what way it gets implemented. So you see it as, you're not necessarily gonna be the only bridge provider, you might be a, a lab or a technical support for the people who want

To be as decentralized as possible and as many people participating in the bridge, many people participating in the sidechain, if that's what we build, yeah.

Gotcha. And then in terms of posting data on chain and things like this, is it gonna be like the bridge needs to, like, talk us through if you are a bridge for Shielded CSV? Like, is it like on a round basis or is it per transaction or how, how would it, or is it only bridging in and out? that's when the only on-chain activity happens in Bitcoin.

So, the way Shielded CSV or Glasscoins would work is every time you make a Glasscoins account transition, you post the nullifier on Bitcoin. When you want to bridge out, the bridge operator proves that, you are able to bridge out according to the rules of the protocol. Okay. And then this is verified by a bitVM-style game, using, for example, our garbled circuits construction, Argo. And this gives you kind of like an optimistic CK verifier. Yeah. Yeah. So that's roughly the flow. Okay. And so

I guess there's a few concepts at play here, because as you said, there's BitVM, and there's been like a fair few versions of BitVM, and then I think there was like, was it, Garbled Circuits, and you said Argo, is that the newest Argo

version? Yeah. Okay, so that's

like your version of BitVM per se? Yes,

it's, there are lots of names for these things, but, people call it like BitVM3, Garbled Circuits. I worked on that previously at Alpen A Garbled Circuit based BitVM bridge that supports many, many orders of magnitude

more, operators. I see. So let's put that into context for an end user. What does it look like for him? Is he just got an app on his phone and that's actually like, a shielded CSV wallet, and he might have like- Normal Bitcoin and then private Bitcoin, and he would like bridge in and out using a bridge operator, and then once you're into the shielded pool, you can trade around inside of that, but then once you need to come back out, you have to bridge back out using the bridge operator. Is that roughly what it would look like?

I think in practice, what it will look like is, there will be like swap providers between the shielded pool and the unshielded pool or like normal Bitcoin, just because the BVM game is like fairly expensive, so these swap providers will use the Balance themselves infrequently, but people will normally just use one of them. However, in the absence of, the swap market, like you can always fall back to the bridge.

Okay. So it's kind of like you have a, kind of like in the idea of L2s that you have a unilateral exit, kind of, kind of that kind of idea. So generally you would use the swap provider or the bridge provider to kind of help you move in and out, but the- Kind of the breakdown scenario, the unhappy path, I can come out on chain, but I've gotta do this kind of, prove a, what's it called, challenge response protocol to get out of my BVM bridge.

Yeah, yeah. I think, these BVM bridges are like very complicated and there are many different designs and they all have different trade-offs and, I'm not sure exactly what version we will use, but, yeah, that's, that's like roughly the shape of the solutions.

I see. Now the other big question people Goldstone Exchange got had all these AI attacks, we're hearing about bridge attacks in crypto land as well as in Bitcoin land. Does that impact you guys on a, you know, the AM

bridging side? Oh no. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the like scope for AI like, cyber attacks, attacks on cryptography, attacks on, bridges is Very different than it was even six months ago. Like, I think that, like, right now we're in kind of like a unstable time where things are changing. For example, for our, our proof system, we're looking into formal verification, which is AI assisted. So I think that, like, AI can be a tool for making systems more secure and for attacking them, as most tools end up working out to be. So I think in the long term things will be more secure because of AI, but like, yeah.

Yeah, but maybe it just kinda changes, how public access some of them are. Maybe instead of being just kind of open public API, they start being more like a permissioned system because that's how they protect themselves from like griefing or other attacks. Is that,

is that possible? It's possible, yeah. I mean, I think We should design systems that are robust to, to AI as, as much as possible. It's hard, but we, that's what we have to do.

Okay.

I think crypto is on like the cutting edge of that in some ways, maybe we're even better situated to deal with it than some traditional software. Got ya.

Yeah. All right, well, let's leave it there. Liam Egan from Ideal. Thanks for joining me, Liam.

Thank you.