Crypto boss eyes second act for Malaysia’s Forest City after closure of Network School

KUALA LUMPUR - A Malaysian crypto investor is weighing a plan to revive the tech campus left vacant by the abrupt collapse of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School, potentially giving a second life to an experiment that drew hundreds of entrepreneurs to the country.

Jeff Yew, a Malaysian motorsport enthusiast who previously headed Binance Australia, is considering establishing his own technology campus at Forest City, the US$100 billion (S$128 billion) development in southern Malaysia. His vision would take a different tack from Srinivasan’s, with a “Malaysia first” approach.

Yew may offer a lifeline not just to the empty campus, but to Forest City – a man-made island that’s struggled to live up to its billing as a futuristic new metropolis – and to Malaysia’s broader ambitions to build a technology economy beyond data centres.

For almost two years, school leavers, graduates, professionals and young families enrolled in Srinivasan’s Network School, which offered a curriculum blending practical skills with an ideological vision of how technology and society might evolve. Srinivasan, a prominent crypto investor and former Coinbase chief technology officer, chose Forest City as his testing ground, though he frequently referred to the location simply as being “near Singapore.”