Interview with SynFutures Founder Rachel: For East Asian Women, the Most Important Thing in Entrepreneurship is Rejecting "Fear of Weakness"
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Interview with SynFutures Founder Rachel: For East Asian Women, the Most Important Thing in Entrepreneurship is Rejecting "Fear of Weakness"
Rachel shared her thoughts on the cryptocurrency industry and offered advice for East Asian female entrepreneurs.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsInterviewee: Rachel, Founder of SynFutures
Editor: Wu Shuo Blockchain
Whether in the internet industry or the cryptocurrency sector, truly prominent female founders seem few. Traditional expectations around family responsibilities and lower participation in STEM education may be contributing factors. Rachel is the founder of SynFutures, an on-chain derivatives project. She shared with us the project’s current progress, her reflections on the crypto industry, and advice for female entrepreneurs in East Asia. She emphasizes that the most important thing is to let go of the fear of being perceived as weak.
Q: Introduce yourself and how you entered the blockchain industry.
I have a background in financial engineering. After graduation, I joined Deutsche Bank in traditional international investment banking, working in derivatives sales and trading. Later, I learned blockchain while at Ant Financial. After reading the Bitcoin whitepaper, I was amazed—my team and I went to Southeast Asian slums to build blockchain-based remittance solutions and helped launch the first version of a blockchain platform.
In 2018, I joined Bitmain and co-founded Matrixport. Driven by my interest in DeFi, I founded SynFutures in early 2021. It was the first open-market pair listing platform and the first decentralized derivatives exchange (DEX) to integrate a fully on-chain order book. We’ve consistently ranked among the top three in perpetual DEX trading volume and have received support from investors including Pantera, Polychain, Dragonfly, and SIG.
Q: What’s your view on tokens and cryptocurrencies?
Yes, we will push for further decentralization at the right time, but the token itself isn’t the goal.
Airdrops and liquidity mining aren’t free—they’re marketing costs, similar to ride-hailing subsidies. But products can’t rely solely on incentives to attract users. You need to assess whether, once those incentives are removed, the product can still meet real, large-scale user demand. Until now, we’ve focused on refining our product and growing our user base.
Q: Where are the real user needs in Web3 and DeFi?
It’s true that many active users in Web3 today are “yield farmers,” but the real needs are what continue beyond incentives.
The issue is that decentralized products currently lag behind centralized ones in user experience—so why do people still come? From our observations, the ongoing, effective demands on Web3, especially in DeFi, stem from:
(1) Arbitrage: Just like price differences between domestic and offshore foreign exchange markets, on-chain finance today resembles an offshore market for centralized exchanges. That’s why we’ve improved AMM model capital efficiency to deepen liquidity, and insisted on independent pricing power without relying on external oracles for trade prices. As a result, we observe significant organic arbitrage activity.
(2) Unique assets: Early Amazon and Taobao also required registration, card binding, long delivery times, and often failed redirects—yet people endured poor UX because they could buy things unavailable at their local supermarket. Assets are key to platform growth. Our model supports single-token perpetuals, and unique asset pairs like popular memes and LSTs bring us substantial traffic.
(3) Open interaction within digital ecosystems: With AI advancement, the rise of the digital economy will further drive demand. Today, we already see that with private keys, one transaction can span across various DeFi, social, and gaming applications throughout the blockchain ecosystem.
Actually, it’s not that DeFi lacks mass adoption—it’s that the digital economy hasn’t matured yet. But AI will accelerate this process. The digital world is the "real economy" for decentralized finance; if the economy doesn't thrive, finance can't flourish. However, AI will speed up digital economic development. First, AI enables creation in the digital world without full human labor, drastically increasing development speed. Second, with the emergence of AI agents, machines will act on our behalf across different domains. When there's open demand and service supply, programmable, transparent finance becomes essential.
Q: Having built through multiple market cycles since 2020, what insights have you gained?
Our approach could be described as "realistic idealism." On the idealistic side, perhaps because I understand traditional finance, I genuinely believe blockchain can reshape the entire financial system. For the first time in my life, I feel I have a chance to leave my mark in history—to become world-leading in this field. That’s incredibly exciting.
On the realistic side, in a fast-moving industry, survival means you always have another chance. A simple formula is: cash flow income + capital market fundraising - operating expenses.
Cash income: Are tech companies really just burning money? Not really. Most successful companies found sustainable business models early on. Facebook’s ad business powered its growth. The recently popular game *Black Myth: Wukong*’s developer quietly worked on AAA games while funding operations through profitable mobile games. Our entry point—derivatives trading—is likely one of the most viable business models in Web3 today.
Fundraising: My deep insight is that fundraising in our industry must align closely with macro trends—it’s something to prepare for proactively, not react to when desperate.
Operating expenses: One often overlooked risk is financial and fund security. We strictly manage funds through diversified cold wallets, multiple banks, multiple centralized service providers, and liquidity-based allocation. Thanks to this, we’ve never suffered losses during market turmoil.
Q: Were there difficult decisions during product development?
Yes. We built a fully on-chain derivatives DEX, unlike most perp DEXs that operate on their own chain with centralized matching.
We had intense internal debates. Derivatives demand high performance—should we have started with a standalone high-performance chain or rack-based setup for better trading experience? I’m especially glad we didn’t fully copy the centralized route. First, building a single DEX on a single chain is essentially no different from a centralized exchange. Competing against giants like Binance and Bybit, if we only mimic CeFi but can’t match their UX, acquiring users would depend mostly on unsustainable subsidies and speculative airdrop expectations.
Second, we chose a differentiated path from both competitors and centralized exchanges. While delivering capital efficiency comparable to centralized platforms, we can deploy across any public chain, list contracts on any single asset, and capture value from multiple chains and ecosystem partners. As long as the industry grows, SynFutures’ model can grow sustainably.
Q: You're one of the few Chinese projects to secure top-tier investors from both East and West. How do you see differences in Web3 fundraising environments? Some criticize Eastern investors as relatively short-term oriented.
First, there are many excellent institutions in the East too. Whether investors take a long- or short-term view isn’t about geography—it’s determined by underlying capital structure and market maturity.
Western funds tend to be more long-term because (1) they have access to large pools of long-duration capital like university endowments, pensions, and mutual funds, and (2) they benefit from stable, long-term exit mechanisms—from IPOs to active M&A by large corporations—so they’re accustomed to earning returns over time.
Regardless of time horizon, venture capital is one of the most meaningful sectors in finance—and in society. If you study periods of rapid vs. stagnant global development, political systems matter less than commonly believed. Wealth inequality and class rigidity are the true causes of societal stagnation. Venture capital is one of the few avenues that can break such rigidity, giving talented but resource-limited individuals a chance to rise.
Q: As a female CEO, what insights do you have about team building? Any advice for women in the industry?
SynFutures has one of the best teams I know in Asian Web3—top cryptography PhDs, senior engineers, investment banking experts, and seasoned marketing talent from major blockchain firms. But regardless of background, one question I always probe in interviews is: Do you genuinely believe in the blockchain industry and have the ambition to build something significant? Over 30% of our team are women, including core engineers, product managers, and business leads. A potential advantage of being a female CEO is stronger ability to harmonize diverse team members and unify direction.
For East Asian women especially, I believe the key is overcoming “fear of weakness”—a term coined by Japanese sociologist Chizuko Ueno. Women, particularly elite East Asian women, often suffer from this fear: “I’m elite, I’m not weak, every path I took was my own choice.” So when problems arise, they become hypersensitive, blaming themselves, thinking everything could’ve been controlled through effort. If someone dislikes me, it must be my fault—I should try harder to please. But “nothing distances one further from feminism than the idea of ‘self-determination.’”
If feedback is valid, of course we should learn. But we must recognize that many challenges stem from systemic or others’ issues—not personal failure. Only then can we realize: “I am good enough,” “I deserve better,” and “I should step forward.”
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