Meet The Women of The Blockchain: Audrey Chaing, Founder of Blockchaing
By: Yitzi Weiner
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Founders

I had the pleasure of interviewing Audrey Chaing, Founder of Blockchaing. Audrey is a cryptocurrency trader, developer, and blockchain analyst/consultant, and runs the news site blockchaing.org. She has been trading Bitcoin since 2013 and previously co-founded 2 companies. She has a decade of experience on Wall Street as an investor, trader, and research analyst at companies like Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock. Audrey has a degree in Computer Science from MIT with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence, earned her MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is a frequent speaker at events like Google International Women’s Day, Global Blockchain Forum, Crypto@Dropbox, LendIt/Blockfin, CryptoHQ, and OneWorld Blockchain at Davos. She created the MIT Applied Blockchain Series, helping founders get from idea to demo-able product.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your “backstory”?

I studied computer science at MIT and graduated during the 1.0 dotcom bust, so ended up on Wall Street for about a decade in investing, trading, and research. In 2013, I decided that I’d like to start my own companies so thought it would be a good idea to brush off the old programming skills. I took Stanford’s Startup Engineering MOOC, which happened to be taught by Balaji Srinivasan, who is now the CTO of Coinbase. Our final project was a Kickstarter clone and you moved up on the leader board by number of Tweets and Bitcoin funding. Friends and family wanted to support my project but had no idea what Bitcoin was, so I told them to tell me the amount they wanted to contribute in dollars and I’d trade the Bitcoin for them. This is how I first got involved in Bitcoin, realized the price is very volatile, and started playing around with trading it. In small amounts only unfortunately! People at work would make fun of my weird little hobby.

Can you tell me about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

I’m working on two large projects at the moment. The first is helping Precursor Ventures, a traditional early stage venture capital firm in San Francisco, structure and launch a cryptocurrency fund. The other is acting in a CTO capacity providing technical advice to create a new blockchain protocol.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My family has been a real driver and supporter of academic and career achievement. I really didn’t enjoy it at the time, but my mom would buy 5th grade textbooks and make me do extra homework from them in 3rd grade, for example. I understand girls, especially back then, were not necessarily encouraged to pursue math and science growing up in the US and this was simply not the case for me. I had better bring home straight As, particularly in math and science, or bad things would happen — this all came from a place of love and wanting to equip us with the right future tools. My aunt, who is a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, helped introduce me to real lab work and I interned at the National Eye Institute when I was 16, where I got to do things like run protein electrophoresis gels and contribute to cutting edge cataract research. This background helped lead me to MIT for college, where analytical thinking was ingrained into my thought processes. I have a horrible memory but can figure out most problems if given some time.

What are the 5 things that most excite you about blockchain and crypto? Why?

1) Not having to trust 3rd parties — Companies have a pretty dismal track record of being our stewards, from cybersecurity hacks leaking our sensitive information to companies selling or otherwise distributing our personal data without clear and explicit consent or compensation. It’s exciting that we now have the opportunity to transact directly with one another, without having to trust one another or some company/government in the middle.

2) Doing things we were never able to do before and can’t even imagine now — At the dawn of the internet, could anyone have imagined the resulting impact? E-commerce shopping is now commonplace, the amount of information available with a simple quick online search beats those of the most expensive encyclopedia sets, etc. Blockchain will enable us to do things we don’t know we can do or want to do — and that’s the exciting part.

3) Tokenomics, a brand new discipline. Crypto, a brand new asset class. Digital Assets, a brand new category of data — It’s not every day that we have entire new fields and asset classes created. Tokenomics examines the cross section of economics, incentives, and digital assets. How do I structure a system such that even if nobody has “control”, it is incentivizing behaviors we want? From an investor’s standpoint, blockchain and cryptocurrencies is a brand new asset class, and there is a lot of opportunity to build value and an ecosystem. An issue with digital objects and data in the past is it is really easy to copy and there was no good way to tell whether something was an original or authorized copy. Blockchain allows discrete digital assets, the most famous example probably being CryptoKitties. It’s not hard to see the potential for owning and controlling distribution/use of digital things, especially when digital assets can now own other digital assets, as in the case of a Crypto Kitty owning a hat — you own the cat but the cat owns the hat.

4) Increased Efficiency — In any case where we are able to do things faster or more cheaply, we can do more with the same resources. In a world of constrained resources, this matters. A simple example of cross border payments: it used to cost 5–10% of the amount you are sending and up to 10 days to send money via bank transfer or Western Union, and now we can do this at a fraction of the cost and almost instantly with cryptocurrency. Doing things more efficiently enables us to also bring products and services to people who were formerly unable to access these products and services, which brings us to the next point-

5) Inclusion/access and social change — Already we’re seeing some success in offering financial services to the unbanked and digital identities to refugees. Similar to how developing countries skipped right over landlines to mobile phones, blockchain tech has the possibility of providing access and a voice for millions of people who do not have that kind of access now. It’s no secret that power and wealth are concentrated today. Since this is a brand new field, we have the opportunity to shape the culture from the ground up, create a more distributed power structure, and dismantle some really un-useful stereotypes. It’s a worldwide movement and since it’s so new, anyone with an interest can get involved now and not be too late to the game. We can also use the characteristics of transparency, immutability, and decentralization to positively affect policy and governance. It becomes much harder to hide corruption, to censor, and to secretly advance private interests with these 3 characteristics in force.