Xuan Bach Mai

I was 17 when COVID froze the world. Like millions of young people, I found myself stuck physically, mentally, and professionally before I had really started. University began online, lectures arriving through a screen to a room that felt smaller every week. The future, which had always felt like something you walked toward, suddenly felt like something that might not show up at all.

I used that time the way curious people do: I went looking for what was moving. And in 2021, one thing was moving faster than anything else: blockchain.

After one year of university, I made a decision that most people around me didn't fully understand: I took a gap year and joined a blockchain venture capital and advisory firm in Ho Chi Minh City. I was 19.

I didn't go in as an intern waiting for instructions. I went in as someone who needed to figure things out—fast. Within months I was analyzing tokenomics and business models, assessing crypto projects, building community channels from scratch. A crypto-focused community I helped grow reached over 10,000 Facebook members, 7,000 Telegram users, and 3,000 YouTube subscribers in four months. I learned what it means to build something with real stakes attached.

By 2022 I had moved into business development at a blockchain media company, leading a 10-person team, closing partnerships with major conferences, and building media revenue from the ground up. Meanwhile the broader crypto market was entering one of its worst downturns in years. Projects collapsed. Companies disappeared overnight. Colleagues left the industry entirely.

I didn't leave. Instead, I doubled down on understanding—why things collapsed, what separated resilient models from fragile ones, and what the technology still genuinely offered beyond the hype. That period taught me more about financial markets, risk, and human behavior than any single course could have.

After 1.5 years of real-world experience, I made another deliberate decision: it was time to go back to school, properly this time, and on a bigger stage.

I arrived in Sydney knowing nobody. No network, no familiar faces, no safety net. Just a decision I had made and the discipline to back it up.

I enrolled at Western Sydney University to complete my Bachelor of Business, majoring in Applied Finance. The gap between me and my classmates wasn't just age or background. I had spent two years in the real market while many were learning about it in theory for the first time. That created an edge, but it also created pressure: I wasn't going to settle for average after everything it took to get here.

I graduated on the Dean's Merit List with a GPA of 5.92/7.00. Not because university came easily, but because I refused to let it not.

I didn't stop at the bachelor's. I went straight into a Master of Financial Analysis at UNSW—one of Australia's top universities and placed 20th globally. I finished with a distinction average in finance subjects, a WAM of 76.4. Alongside my studies I worked as a Casual Academic, supporting over 300 students per term in courses covering cryptocurrency, DeFi, and blockchain technology. I was teaching the same industry I had learned to navigate by doing.

That combination of market experience, academic rigour, and the ability to explain complex systems clearly is not something you can manufacture. It comes from living through all three phases.

I'm back in Vietnam now, and I'm not here to start over. I'm here to apply everything—the market instincts developed during two years in crypto, the analytical foundation built across two degrees, the cross-cultural fluency earned from living and working across Vietnam and Australia, and the relentless standard I've held myself to since I was a teenager figuring out what mattered.

But returning home also gave me a clear view of what's coming next. I've seen this pattern before. In 2021, blockchain arrived and most people were still debating whether it was real. By the time the skeptics came around, the early movers had already built, lost, learned, and rebuilt. AI is following the same curve, except the scale is an order of magnitude larger, the speed is faster, and the impact on finance and crypto specifically is only beginning to be understood.

I'm currently building at the intersection of AI, finance, and crypto, combining everything I've accumulated over the past four years into something I believe the market actually needs. The details are still taking shape, but the conviction is the same one that took me from a gap year in Ho Chi Minh City to the Dean's Merit List in Sydney to a Master's at UNSW: identify where things are moving, understand it deeply, and position yourself at the center of that change before everyone else catches up.

Finance and crypto are converging faster than most institutions are ready for. AI is accelerating that convergence. I've spent the last four years living at that intersection and I'm not done yet.