AI-native systems and blockchain trust infrastructure. Everest Global has offices across Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, and Abu Dhabi, and my next guest has spent over a decade building tech unicorns at this frontier technology intersection. Welcome to the show, Allen Ng.
Hi Lucy. Thanks for having me.
You have a particular overriding philosophy at Everest Global around AI-native systems and blockchain trust infrastructure. Can you talk about that?
When we started Everest in 2018, we had a singular vision — we want to work at the intersection of different technologies, and we want to make frontier technology easier to understand and easier to use for everyday people. Blockchain is where we really started. We saw potential in digital ownership, digital asset tokenisation, making things easy to settle and transact. And starting last year, agentic AI has now transformed many parts of our life and work. Both technologies are still in a very early stage from an adoption angle and there is a lot more potential to be explored. We took a holding company approach because it allows us to share operating experiences, engineering resources, and commercial context across continents, and to take a very long-term view of where technology is going over the next 5 to 10 years.
You have offices in Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, and Abu Dhabi. What is the philosophy behind that footprint?
Silicon Valley has historically been the first tech hub — centre of tech capital and frontier innovation. China emerged over the last 20 years, from mobile internet to now software, physical AI, and many other areas. But we also saw huge potential in the Gulf area — particularly Abu Dhabi. Whenever a big tech boom happens, you need a few key ingredients: a visionary government and leadership, a stable and trustworthy business environment, capital that thinks very long term, and talent willing to work there. We saw those ingredients assembling in the UAE over the last 10 to 15 years. It is going to become a really important operating hub for technology entrepreneurs and investors globally.
You have been in blockchain since 2016. Is this cycle different from previous hype cycles, and how does AI fit in?
Blockchain technology, if you put it on a hype cycle chart, is past the peak of hype and into real adoption — being picked up by enterprises and end users. You are seeing tokenisation embedded into many layers. Institutional adoption for settlement and payments is finally happening. And there is a big convergence with AI. Agentic payments is going to be a very exciting area. There is a report from Cloudflare — a month ago, there was already more internet traffic from bots and agents than from humans. In three to five years, 90% of internet traffic is going to be agents and machines. So trust and identity has become a very important question — because blockchain and blockchain-enabled businesses will play a vital role in solving that.
When comparing agentic AI across China, Silicon Valley, and the Middle East — what are you seeing?
China historically had very strong internet businesses and talent built up over 20 years by amazing big tech companies, so applications really thrived in the early days. The infrastructure was already built out, though they have a disadvantage now in chips and compute. In the Middle East, infrastructure is the first thing governments, sovereign funds, and builders are pouring capital into — which is the right starting point. Use cases and applications are now being encouraged alongside it. As for revenue — vertical-specific agents with a clear use case are generating revenue today. General-purpose agents trying to fully replace human work will take longer to earn the trust of mass market users.
Alan, that was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining Fintech TV today.
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
