Exclusive Interview With Annabelle Huang, Partner at Amber Group

In the recent World Blockchain Summit in Dubai, many blockchain industry leaders visited the CoinQuora media lounge. Annabelle Huang, Partner at Amber Group visited us and gave us some insights about what they do at the leading global crypto service provider, Amber Group.

Q. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your projects?

Hi, my name is Annabelle Huang, I’m a partner at Amber Group. Amber Group is a leading global crypto service provider — dealing with everything crypto finance-related, help our clients trade manage, and access crypto. We provide trading, liquidity provisioning, and asset management services to our clients globally.

Q. How have you found the World Blockchain Summit so far?

It’s been amazing, it’s my first time in Dubai so wasn’t expecting such a buzzing scene for crypto here. So, I really do think there’s a huge market here — a lot of opportunities, a lot of people are moving here, based here now. It’s great to see that and as sort of my intro to the Middle-Eastern market so I really look forward to coming back here more often.

Q.What do you think will be the next big thing when it comes to the blockchain and the cryptoverse?

Well, that’s a million-dollar question, right? And interestingly I started in crypto in the DeFi world, contrary to a lot of people from traditional finance who probably went straight into the CeFi land. For me, I was building one of the first-generation decentralized exchanges back in 2018. One could argue that it’s a bit ahead of its time. So, three years later, of course, I’m here very glad to see what the space is like now. There is innovation that came out, yield farming, staking to earn, all of these concepts and I think the future is going to be, a lot of the concepts will be around sort of the staking to earn or play-to-earn narrative where people can really utilize the crypto-economics and be able to actually earn on top of it is a very crypto native way versus what we’ve seen in the traditional finance space. And there’s is so much more space for innovation that can come out of it. So, yeah I think that’s what keeps me interested in DeFi, and we spoke to projects that are essentially financing themselves through DeFi pools and be able to use that funding to do so many interesting things so I think again very bullish on this space.

Q. Is the Amber Group looking to enter the Play-to-Earn space?

Well, we definitely follow very closely and that got us thinking right we were building our platform our app, and web portal really designed for more people to be able to access crypto. And when it comes to fiat on-off ramp as well, we want to make it easy we move all the barriers and this gives us the perfect case for all the Filipino users. Yes, you earned your Axie SLP, you sold them into USDT, and then what? How do you off-ramp? How do you actually convert them to the money you use on a daily basis? I think that’s where we can add a lot of value. So, we look forward to building the entire ecosystem of the infrastructure around DeFi NFT and beyond.

Q. How do you find Dubai?

It’s a lovely city. I came here and of course, I’ve seen all the skyline photos on the internet, but being here again. I’m just really amazed by it. We went on a Desert Safari trip yesterday and it was completely different. We were out in the desert there were sand dunes and the beautiful sunset, like really being in nature and love it here. I think there’s a lot more to be explored, I’m happy I’ll get to spend a few more days here and really get to know the scene.

Q. Do you have any projects that you want people to know about?

At Amber Group, we service a lot of the projects and a lot of players in the market, and for us, we take such pride in being able to help everyone participating in crypto. We’re actually going to announce a major rebrand of our product suite coming up in a month or so. So we’ll be launching a fully integrated product suite under a new name powered by Amber Group and really geared towards users globally it’s not just the US or Europe. It’s really the emerging markets like we spoke about like the Philippines and beyond and being able to help them to actually participate in crypto any way they want in a very easy-to-use fashion.