Built in Malaysia, used by the world: our hidden crypto giants

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.