Fu Peng 2026 Public Speech: The Crypto World as Seen by Veteran Traditional Financiers Is Repeating the Story of Wall Street in the 1980s

Organized by: Yuliya, PANews

These days, many people are frantically asking me one question: why have I become so close to the crypto world?

Actually, this connection started around 2022, and it’s been about four years now. As a practitioner in traditional finance, we have been closely monitoring and tracking the trends of the entire crypto asset market.

Today, my speech here is driven by a very simple purpose: I just want to tell everyone a story from history. For me, I am one of the main beneficiaries of the last era’s boom. You may see my title as “Economist,” but I am not a pure scholar.

Over the past 25 years, my core experience—what we have been focusing on—is what everyone understands as traditional hedge funds. You might be curious, why are these traditional capital and financial sector people and funds starting to pay attention to crypto assets?

In the past year or so, I have repeatedly mentioned a point: the future will definitely be “FICC + Crypto,” meaning that the traditional major asset classes (FICC) will be combined with cryptocurrencies (Crypto). Many want to know why, and I’ll take this opportunity to share a simple explanation. Once you understand this logic, you might already have an answer in your mind about how the market will evolve and where asset prices are headed.

Today, I will help everyone break through this barrier. We need to go back to the origin of the FICC asset class—roughly the late 1970s to early 1980s. Over the past decade, everyone here has clearly recognized that the overall framework and structure of our world are undergoing huge changes. And this change is most similar to the period after World War II, specifically the 1970s to 1980s. For example, just now, Xiao Feng mentioned artificial intelligence, and the guests also talked about AI integration. As a major technological advancement and productivity boost, every leap in technology and productivity reshapes industries.

“Industries” here include all sectors, naturally including finance. Finance is not static. It’s definitely not like what you see in movies like “The Big Short” or “The Wolf of Wall Street”—traders shouting in the trading floor wearing vests. Or, when some people visit the NYSE, they might still think finance is just people quoting and executing trades on the floor. Indeed, many reporters still like to use such scenes as background for news reports. If you go to Chicago, to the earliest interest rate derivatives markets, or to the London Metal Exchange (LME), you can still see traces of that history. Yes, that was the most traditional finance before the 1960s and 70s. People quoting in vests, using typewriters and punch cards to complete transfers, trades, and payments.

For most Chinese speakers, the impression of trading might still be watching the roulette wheel in the stock hall, staring at prices, filling out orders, and handing them to clerks who then call the exchange via dedicated lines to complete the transaction. But not all finance or trading remains in that era. The biggest transformation in finance has always been driven by technological progress.

In the previous cycle of technological advancement, centered around semiconductors, computers, personal computers, DOS systems, Windows, and so on, productivity and technology reshaped new forms of finance in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Today, the well-known FICC asset trading simply means integrating interest rates, commodities, exchange rates, stocks, and other financial assets. FICC was born in the early 1980s. In the 1970s, we learned about pricing derivatives like options using models such as Black-Scholes. But imagine, without large-scale computer application and popularization, quoting and pricing a financial derivative or asset would take ten, twenty, or even over half an hour of manual calculation. How could we efficiently quote and execute trades under such conditions?

Since 1985, professional investors and institutions have widely used Bloomberg terminals. I probably started using Reuters 3000, and later Reuters Eikon and others, around 1997-1998 during the Asian financial crisis.

In other words, it was the advent of computers, semiconductors, information technology, and data era that created FICC. This gave us richer asset classes, asset fusion, cross-asset trading, hedge funds, algorithmic trading, and well-known “big-name” funds. Without these productivity advances, finance might still be stuck in the era of traders in vests shouting orders.

During that period, JP Morgan became the leader in financial derivatives. They hired Cambridge graduate Blythe Masters, who became a foundational figure in the derivatives and FICC markets, turning FICC into the most profitable segment for Wall Street’s mainstream financial institutions.

Of course, all this was also linked to the turbulence of the 1970s and 80s. Remember: the origin of technological progress often coincides with world upheaval. At certain historical stages, technological leaps are always accompanied by disruptions to global systems and order.

In the 70s and 80s, we experienced the Cold War, Middle East conflicts, the dollar-oil crisis, gold price surges, and systemic decoupling. But human civilization always develops amid risks and opportunities.

While the world order was chaotic, our computers, semiconductors, and information technology rose rapidly. I used to joke that in that era, there was a strange investment portfolio—holding “assets representing the future of humanity” and “assets hedging against the future non-existence of humanity” at the same time.

Think back—no need to go back ten years, just around 2019—you might find your own investment portfolio also holding “the future of humanity” and “assets without a future” simultaneously.

Today, as we all realize that AI, data, and computing power will become the most important productivity factors in the future or even the next era, this “game” is already more than halfway through. And this first half is what we recognize as the traditional “crypto circle.”

Why am I telling all this?

Remember, nothing is static; everything is constantly being reconstructed and reborn through development.

So when we talk about entering this circle—what I call the “FICC + Crypto” era—I don’t know if this will leave an important mark in history, just like Blythe Masters’ mark on FICC. Could this be a pivotal moment, signaling the end of the early 10-15 years of development and the beginning of a new phase?

In this transition, investors, participants, market systems, and rules will undergo huge changes—or rather, they already are. That’s why I said in an interview earlier that the paradigms and mindsets you’ve been familiar with over the past 10-15 years might be fundamentally overturned in the future.

If you’ve been in traditional finance long enough, you can actually foresee what’s coming. Just like in China’s early days, when provincial financial offices set up large exchanges and a lot of financial assets existed. But as regulations tightened, the process of “survival of the fittest” meant that only high-quality assets would be gradually incorporated into financial institutions’ portfolios. Our entire crypto market is experiencing a similar process.

For example, today, everyone is used to trading commodities, but before the 1980s, financial derivatives of commodities were not widespread, and most people couldn’t trade them meaningfully.

Now, trading copper, aluminum, lead, zinc, palm oil, and other assets seems normal, but it wasn’t back then;

People now think currency exchange is very convenient, but it wasn’t then;

Today, we can easily trade government bonds and interest rate futures, but that wasn’t possible before.

Does this feel like when we first introduced stock index futures and options around 2009?

If you have this feeling, you’ll understand that we are at the same historical node. The technological progress then drove the transformation and integration of traditional finance into FICC, and today, the same logic applies—backed by data and computing power.

AI, combined with underlying encryption or blockchain technology, is reconstructing finance with technology at its core. Our financial industry is undergoing profound change, which is why we have been closely watching this field. But honestly, in the early stages, we wouldn’t participate at all.

I often joke that in the early days, this circle needed some “faith,” some so-called “fundamentalism.” But true capital wouldn’t over-participate in “faith trading” early on. Capital only enters when the market matures and becomes more certain.

For example, in the past, would major financial institutions have considered trading red beans or green beans as part of their asset allocation? Impossible. But today, we can turn copper into futures, options, ETFs, and include it in portfolios. This process of formalization and financialization is very similar to what the crypto asset ecosystem is experiencing.

2022 was the first time I truly interacted with the big players in this circle—an encounter of fate. It started from a comment I made during an interview in 2021, when Bitcoin was around $70k.

When asked for my opinion, I was straightforward: based on our traditional finance framework, we simply can’t understand what this asset really is. Because the faith-based narratives you talk about, we don’t accept them; we have our own interpretation. For example, regarding its value preservation function, we interpret it using traditional finance frameworks and language. At that time, I thought it wasn’t the right moment to get involved.

I said we were observing but not fully understanding the logic you’re talking about, and our valuation models weren’t fully developed yet. But I had a feeling. When asked what that feeling was, I said it came from the fact that by then, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and other regulators had already explicitly classified it as a commodity, a tradable financial asset. For me, that was simple: I could understand its asset nature based on this official definition.

I also said something else—I guessed that if, in 2022, with macro liquidity tightening, high-valuation assets in traditional markets would undergo large-scale “devaluation” waves, then if my understanding of crypto assets was correct, they would also experience similar devaluation and liquidity crunches. I guessed it might drop by half. That’s why, by the end of 2022, when it really fell below $20,000, many in the crypto world came to find me, realizing: has the era changed?

Over the past few years of communication, I found that many true crypto bigwigs are actually similar to the old-school traditional finance giants. In the early industry, everyone’s development was rough and wild.

Think back—those early pioneers in China’s commodity futures trading, weren’t they all rough and aggressive? Didn’t they all need to “fight for a chance, turn a bicycle into a motorcycle”? But those who truly succeed are those who, at the “turning point”—note, not “transformation,” but “turning point”—can quickly absorb new things and complete the shift. If you cling to early experiences and refuse to adapt, you’ll be gradually eliminated by the times. As the saying goes, “The era creates you, and the era also eliminates you.”

My personal view is that around 2025 to 2026, this could be the pivotal moment for a historic shift in the crypto asset space. When people came to exchange ideas early on, it was simply about mutual learning: you tell me what you think crypto assets are, I’ll absorb and integrate from a traditional finance perspective, re-understanding this thing; and I’ll also tell you how traditional finance interprets these assets with existing paths and logic.

Over these years of mutual inclusion and integration, a new system has already formed. From the end of last year, from our macro perspective, the new round of liquidity tightening caused valuation compression, and the crypto circle again experienced a story fully synchronized with traditional financial markets. What does this show? It proves that our path is correct. Inclusion and integration will ultimately lead to no distinction. Just like the traditional stock traders in the 70s and 80s in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and those later involved in FICC asset