Henri Arslanian, Nine Blocks Capital
The bridge between BLOCK KONG and ARABIAN CRYPTO.
Arabian Crypto: UAE tells the story of how the United Arab Emirates came to become the world’s crypto capital, why it is attracting the industry’s top talent and business ideas, and how newcomers can get a foot in the door.
Your authors are Charles d’Haussy, an industry insider running a foundation for a decentralized exchange, who moved to Dubai in 2022, and Jame DiBiasio, a writer with a career covering tech, money, and history.
You’ll find our chapters, like this one, focus on the personal story of someone who has built their crypto career in the UAE. Through the accounts of these pioneers, you will get an idea of what is happening in the UAE, and you will learn how to get started in the region.
Although there are more “must-know” people in the UAE crypto world than we could include, we tried to bring you a sample of people with diverse backgrounds, useful stories, and excellent connections.
It wasn’t a random decision to begin by featuring Henri Arslanian. Henri moved to Dubai in 2021 to launch a crypto hedge fund, Nine Blocks Capital Management. What we want to highlight is where Henri came from: Hong Kong.
Charles and Jame know Hong Kong well. Charles used to represent the government’s initiatives to attract fintech companies to the city, which he leveraged into his start in crypto, running Consensus’s business for Asia. Jame rocked up to Hong Kong in 1997, six months before control passed from the UK to China, as a young financial reporter. In 2017 he launched his own media business focused on fintech and digital assets (which he sold), and today he’s a full-time author, still in “the 852”.
Anyone in crypto, fintech, and finance in Hong Kong knows Henri Arslanian. From 2014, he caught the crypto bug and began proselytizing for regulatory reform and institutional discovery. As a partner at PwC, Henri led efforts to enable it to provide the first serious audits of crypto companies by a Big-Four accountancy. PwC rewarded him by making him an equity partner and letting him build a 250-strong global team. Henri advised Hong Kong and other regulators, served as inaugural chair of the Fintech Association of Hong Kong, and became a content monster, with TEDx talks and more than 500,000 LinkedIn followers.
Henri was the face of an emerging blockchain industry centered on Hong Kong and its ethnic Chinese networks.
Most of these activities were hidden from view, although for a time, Shanghai-based BTCC was the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange. Hong Kong, under the one-country, two-systems formula, is part of the People’s Republic of China but maintains a separate system of UK-based commercial law, and its currency is pegged to the US dollar. As Beijing clamped down on cryptocurrency, the flows shifted to Hong Kong, Singapore, and beyond. Even today, other than Coinbase, the major crypto exchanges are owned by members of the Chinese diaspora.
But back to our story: Charles and Jame, based in Hong Kong, wanted to bring human faces to the Asian crypto story. We collaborated on a project, BLOCK KONG, which profiled 21 local blockchain entrepreneurs. (Why 21? You guess.) The project rolled on for two years, with each chapter serialized on Jame’s fintech media site, DigFin (which he later sold to AMTD Group), before being collated into a book.
Henri was, of course, one of our Block Kongers. He was both a global figure as crypto’s cheerleader as well as local mover and shaker, at a time when Hong Kong’s networks were quietly the center of the biggest crypto trading volumes in the world.
It’s notable that the year we published BLOCK KONG, after a delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is when Henri moved to Dubai. Today the UAE is challenging Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and other centers for the crown of non-US crypto activity. Although this book is about that story, not about Hong Kong, it’s useful to understand how the UAE could come out of almost nowhere in such a short period of time to become (as we argue) the new global hub of crypto.
Who better to begin this story than Henri Arslanian? To read what Henri has to say about crypto in the UAE, Hong Kong, and the world, be sure to get a copy of ARABIAN CRYTPO. Subscribers can get a free advance copy, once we’re close to publication! So smash this button: