Malaysia Minute: Three Tigers, One Klang Valley

Two's a company and three's a crowd as Malaysia's deeply undefined Web 3 market remains the Warhol pop-art of attention in the eyes of exchanges from three different regions in the last week.

As the valley welcomed the global circus of events, the KL crypto community saw new crypto exchanges Coinstore, LBank and familiar face ByBit land on its shores, hungry to determine market feasibility.

The presence of global exchanges in the week paired with the vibrancy of (full-house) attendees can easily be assumed as indication of a growing or accepted market. But the assumption that exchanges are opting to start an office and base in Malaysia would also be plausible as they attempt to escape the rising rental costs for offices in Tier-1 finance economies. Either way, both are great for business and the local Web3 scene.

"I noticed that the biggest problem in Web 3 are that companies and communities work in Silos" said Wilson Tay, in his opening speech at the recent Offchain x LBank event.

"However, after watching event attendees grow bigger and bigger tells me that the industry is only getting larger," the Malaysian head of global blockchain group Offchain further added.

Blockhead spoke to employees in Hong Kong based LBank and Singapore based Coinstore about their work situations in the local market and they gave slightly varying but similar responses like an Andy Warhol Marilyn diptych. Same same but different.

The top management are considering setting up offices in the city. Meanwhile, business development teams based in KL have work-from-home conditions. Their tasks are to look for projects and coin listings, and at the same time, cosy up with the local communities and find builders ripe for a launchpad style takeoff.

If this situation was the result from a proactive approach from MDEC for Web3 FDIs, kudos to them. But the moves are akin to observations previously reported that Hong Kong companies are coming to Malaysia to run down low OPEX.

Its an interesting time to be in this can of Web3 soup.

Malaysia Minute: HK & Malaysia Are Rivals? Not Even Close

Crypto Valley Malaysia holds a press conference ahead of the World Blocktech Forum 2023, Malaysian degen whales announce a message and a claim from Cointelegraph’s recent headline about Malaysia might have been written when the author was zooted.

BlockheadNeil Liew

Clear Skies for Cloud Computing

Hong Kong based EDNS was also seen in the market as they held a gathering for the Web3 community to promote their cloud computing services, DeDrive.

The event had presentations from EDNS CTO Mike Ng, along with a presentation from AliBaba Cloud, who boasted their product as the top cloud service provider in the APAC region.

A quick look at DeDrive's product offerings were easy-to-use low-code solutions for Web3 offerings, and were reflective of the crowd attendees. Most of them from software backgrounds looking at the latest market offerings to transform existing businesses into Web3.

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