E47: Inside Vietnam’s blockchain takeover: Cris D. Tran on grit, growth and gaming
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It's always been a bit of an underdog Vietnam, hasn't it? It is, yeah. We are a little bit like underdogs and I love it. I love it. We took people by surprise. Welcome to You Don't Know Vietnam, the show that demystifies Vietnam for global audiences by talking to the creatives, trendsetters and business owners who are taking on the market. Forget what you thought you knew about Vietnam. It's no longer that, as you're about to find out.

I'm Ian Paynton, co-founder of We Create Content, a content marketing agency that helps global brands connect with Vietnamese consumers. We make global brands relevant in Vietnam with always-on, hyper-local content.

On this episode of You Don't Know Vietnam, I'm talking to Chris Tram, a leading voice in Vietnam's blockchain space. He's the head of growth at Sandbox, an application that connects brands with gamers in the metaverse. He's a Web3 strategic advisor and is also involved in the Blockchain Founders Fund in Singapore, a VC fund that backs blockchain products all around the world.

Today, Chris tells me why Vietnam is so well positioned to become a blockchain powerhouse in the region and some of the challenges it faces along the way. He shares some of his favorite Vietnam-made blockchain projects to date and his vision for Web3 applications as Vietnam races full throttle into its future. Chris Oi! Hi, how are you?

Good, thank you. Thanks for joining me on You Don't Know Vietnam. Yes, it's my pleasure. I hear a lot about Vietnam becoming a powerhouse in blockchain technology. I know the government has got plans to make it a leading powerhouse in the region. From where you're standing in your role at Sandbox, how does that look like for you in terms of putting Vietnam on the map for blockchain? I think it's more like an official announcement because on the ground I have

probably see it that way. Like we are actually one of the powerhouse in the region for sure and globally easily among the top 10 market in terms of software development, project development right now. I think one of the area that Vietnam is a little bit lack of is the regulation and the infrastructure of policy

behind these amazing startups and business. So I think have the support from the government just making it become so official. So you've seen it already being on the way and it's just government support and infrastructure that's just going to boost that. Yeah. To elaborate a little bit further, I can give you a very easy to understand example is that when it comes to blockchain projects,

If you're actually running a project, there's a lot of funding invested in your company. There's a lot of treasury that your company hold on to. And where the policy is not regulated yet or supported yet, it's impossible for these startups to hold the funds or

to keep the funds inside of Vietnam. So they actually have to keep their funding or treasury outside of Vietnam. And sometimes, you know, when they're receiving revenue or a service fee, it doesn't go directly to Vietnam right away, but go through a third country, like potentially Hong Kong or Singapore before going back to Vietnam. So I think, you know, when the government doing this, you actually gather a lot of, you know, momentum that Vietnam has seen for the past few years.

And now it's become more direct into the country. What is it that makes Vietnam such a promising prospect for blockchain technology, do you think? I think Vietnam is such a vibrant startup ecosystem with a lot of promising, hungry startup founders. That's number one. But...

Traditional startup, like non-blockchain startups, I think they probably face a difficulty in fundraising locally. The local environment does not support the local startup as attractive as other neighbor country for normal startups, right? So you have to depend on local VC funding supporting from big enterprise locally. But the birth of blockchain technology and

For our audience, you can understand that if you are a blockchain project or a blockchain company, if your project is good, you actually can fundraise anywhere in the world. It's decentralized, right? So this actually helping almost the same group of startup founders who are hungry, who are good at developing things, that now they figure out a way to develop products and

and project without entirely depends on the local funding. And if you have a good project, you just pitch it to the global audience. And so far, they have been very successful by convincing and proving that we can build like world-class product. And they do not depend on the local funding anymore. I think that's one of the very critical elements that why

Blockchain is such a thing in Vietnam because it just innovates the way that the startup founder can figure out how to fundraise for my own project. And there are so many startup founders, aren't there? Like Vietnam's so entrepreneurial. I do love that entrepreneurial fire. Everyone's just hungry to do their own thing. Why work for someone else? I always told my friend that I think one of the measures how exciting is the local startup environment from the founder point of view or even the end user point

point of view. You just have to go see some of these local technology meetups or sometimes conference, right? I think the crowd in Ho Chi Minh, in Hanoi is nowhere to be found in the region minus Singapore because I think Singapore do have a unique position in terms of regional connecting hub so you can't really compete with all of that. But locally, I think the demand to get to know more about technology

to try stuff outrageous. I mean, like from the local community. So every single small event you go, you can see there's a good crowd, good engagement. People come to you for question. People asking you like, oh, you did that. How do we do the same? Stuff like that. You can feel the hunger within the community. High energy, isn't it? Absolutely.

Because you've had experience working across the region, right? Yes. Is there anything else you think that Vietnam's got over these other countries? I think one of the components that Vietnam extremely crush other countries is that we have such a quality developer talent pool compared to any other country out there. And I'm not saying you're willing to pay big bucks for good talents. Then, of course, that's the case of Singapore.

but for such a high cost. So for the same amount of dollars, probably you can attract two or three or four same quality of developer here in Vietnam. So it means that if you have a good idea and you know how to build it,

Your speed and acceleration is much faster in Vietnam, and it's nowhere to be found in Malaysia, Thailand. I wouldn't say those countries, they don't have developers, but developers for emerging technology like blockchain, they probably have a challenge on that.

Stuff moves so quickly here. So quick. I always have a joke with my foreign friends regionally. If you come here in Asia, like in general or coming into Vietnam specifically, if you can survive with the chaos and if you can survive the speed of the environment, then you're good to go. But sometimes it's not the case for...

a lot of the foreign friends because they are used to working in a more, how do I say, stable, comfortable environment where there's not that many uncertainty, solving puzzles every day, racing with the traffic to get office, send a project in and stuff like that. It's become more like the norms of these Vietnamese startups that they have to get over things, they have to solve things.

in such a quick turnaround. Yeah. So it's chaotic. It is part of the job. And I think you feel the same because as a foreigner living in Hanoi, I think you can see the chaotic every day. Yeah. And you know what? I think the pace of life, the chaos, the speed, it somehow increases your bandwidth to deal with shit. Yes, yes. I love to do that, especially with my, you know, youngster teen because...

Put it in computer perspective, like that's when their bandwidth and like brands is still empty. And you haven't know yet about your limitation because limitation is purely on perspective. So until you can see if your brain and your energy, your daily routine can take up to threefold of normal people, you will never know. So to be able to flourish in an environment that they can test out all of those like stamina,

ability, it's actually strengthened them in the long run, like healthy racing and competition with other regions. I feel like if you can do it here, you go to somewhere like Singapore where things are much more predictable, you can do it anywhere, really. If you can do it in Vietnam, I feel like you can do it anywhere. To be fair, it's not like we are exceptionally competitive because I think we have to look at some of the weaknesses of the local market as well. And it's quite straightforward. I think if

If you compare Vietnam in general with countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, probably I would say international languages and culture involvement probably are still quite new to all of them. So be able to be successful more in the regional scenes, they need to probably improve on language skill and the ability to adapt into new culture and requirement of those new economy as well.

So I think the core talents are there, but there are some extra skills they still have to acquire to become more and more successful in the regional scenes. What other challenges do you think Vietnam has with regards to becoming a leading powerhouse in blockchain? What would stop it? There's a lot of Vietnamese startup founders haven't really seen the success of pushing their product to the global scenes. So sometimes they tend to look quite medium-sized.

in terms of how their project can grow. And

It seems like they may lost some motivation, loss of way of how to do better things midway because they haven't really seen the long runway after five years, after 10 years or something like that. I think you have to think big and roll big and act big and execute big. Think slightly more long-term as well, perhaps? Yes. Would you say it's fair to say, and this may be unfair actually, that the Vietnamese...

tend to think quite immediate, quite short term, get stuff done real quick. It's fair to say so. It's not really too clear yet, but you can say so that I think so far we have seen that they quite satisfy a lot of these company enterprise and even a slightly bigger company. They're quite satisfied with being a leading project or company locally.

And either they don't have the intention or they lack a passion or they lack of visions how to get out of the country and expand further. Doubt the horizon is probably true. And it goes back to the result that I haven't seen

enough cases that Vietnamese startup will become such a household name in the region. You did mention about some successes in blockchain though, regionally and globally from Vietnam. What sort of products are we talking about? I don't know if you noticed, but one of the biggest frenemies of the sandbox at the global stage is actually XInfinity, one of the very big Web3 blockchain games.

And the entire product was built in Vietnam. And the entire core team is here in Ho Chi Minh City with their headquarter. That's one of the very proud projects that we have a chance to call it Vietnamese-related. Another project, I would say Kyber Network. So Kyber Network belongs to

The first batch of blockchain project was created from Vietnam, 2016, 2017. They successfully raised over 15 million US dollars at that time. And they're one of the leading, put it in non-technical term, a very convenient payment gateway for different kinds of crypto and blockchain in one place. So they're creating convenience for people to change tokens.

token from one platform to another platform to another layer easily and with the most transparent and cheapest, I would say, transaction fees. And go back to my very early share, none of their legal entity actually in Vietnam. Which surely doesn't benefit Vietnam, right? So it makes sense to start putting these infrastructures in place. Yes.

And you mentioned about Sandbox then. So what's your role at Sandbox? And what successes are you having there in Vietnam and regionally? So I think one of the reasons why I like joining Sandbox a couple of years back because

For a lot of the available products in the blockchain space out there, the sandbox product is one of the easiest for traditional people like you to understand how blockchain works. And the way that they're doing it is so exciting that they're converting brands and IP and marketing strategy into gamification or short games.

So they're helping brands to, if they are not so strong or they would like to explore like a space to build digital engagement with the community and user, they collaborate with the Sandbox to build a metaverse or a digital space that help the brands to actually engaging with audience and community from anywhere of the world. And by doing that, brands suddenly have another tunnel to expand

interact with their audience beyond just social media, press, like television. Now you certainly have a game throughout your brand and it doesn't change the way that you should approach your marketing strategy by putting rewards, putting like prices, community campaign to the sandbox. So now you have a proxy to do that. So my success in Vietnam and in the region is that we have built

quite a good amount of proper education program inside the universities because I still believe in if you have the right infrastructure in terms of talent and creator, it will help the industry as a whole and my company as a whole to grow further down the road. Because if you notice, the entire market size of the blockchain industry is like just 1 or 2% of whatever you can see out there in real life. So just imagine

another 1%, another 2% of the traditional world start exploring and go into blockchain, then boom, you have significant growth easily. And we are witness all of that.

Then in the region, we got a chance to sign really big brands that are very famous in the space. For example, Innisfree, a very famous cosmetic brand in Korea. AirAsia, their global budget allies. And even Sport, we signed with one championship from Thailand, one of the billion-dollar unicorn in Sport. So all of them,

already famous brand and they would like to engage with their audience a different way, a more engaging way. And especially for you, Ian, you're working in a marketing field, a content field, you will see the new trends that the younger generation, the Gen Z, they interact and they

got attracted by vision and mission like slightly different from where we're coming from. So they have to be able to enjoy and

and explore the brands in a very digital way. And all of these brands and enterprises, they're still exploring new ways how to do so. Do you have many Vietnamese young people exploring the sandbox metaverse? It is. I think this is one of the broad statistics that I was able to do since taking over the job. So when I took over the job for the regional and especially Vietnam as well, so in Vietnam we have about 30,000 players globally.

And when you say young people, I say players. Within less than a year, I think that number right now is 300,000. So we increased almost like 10 times. And I think one of your previous speakers, Mr. TK Nguyen from GAM Esports, they are actually one of the brands that currently exploring and working with us right now to bring the engagement between their esports team with the fans,

into a more digital space because right now they can't do it like beyond just Facebook, Instagram. They need a space like really more engaging and more communicative and more in-person fueling so that they can interact better with their community. You talked about your players and I guess they're probably Gen Zed?

Gen alpha? Partially correct. So statistically, 45% of them are Gen Z, as you said. This is the global statistic, and that's why we are very convinced we are on the right direction. So 45% of our current 7 million users globally are in the young population from 18 to 28. And the next big chunk is 28 to 35 is around...

30% and then the rest is everything else. So it's a no-brainer for brands all over the place to start exploring this channel because I think the younger generation is probably the upcoming spender for your product, right? So they would love to explore and see how they can do things in this channel.

What surprised me about Vietnam was I read a stat that it actually has the biggest percentage of adult gamers in the world as well. It's quite a gaming country, isn't it? It is. I think one of the benefits why we grow so fast because I think it fits the flavor of the population itself. And I think it's good.

on both sides of like gaming production as well as gaming consumption. People willing to play games after they view a couple ads quite easily and I think it's the culture thing that not only games but digital apps when they go to Vietnam they should pay attention. You know like in some other country it's a norm that people willing to pay slightly premium fees to

Let's say remove the ads or do not bother me. Right. But in Vietnam, it's common that, yeah, let me view the ads a little bit so that I can have extra life, extra rounds and stuff like that. So ad consumption market, I think is one of the good market to go to.

I always wondered if maybe gaming is something that could put Vietnam on the map, whether it's esports competitions or gaming production. I think you're right. It's coming. Because for every business sector to really grow significantly, you need to have both sides, just like the blockchain, right? You need to have the builder side and you need to have the consumer side.

For traditional gaming, I think the consumption power is really good in Vietnam and people willing to explore and try out new products. So if you are a gaming company and you have good games, don't forget Vietnam is such a huge population. You can easily gather very good traction from your local home grow ground and then attack.

like globally. Tell me a little bit more about what you're doing in the universities. Cause you must be meeting a lot of young Vietnamese people, right?

So the young people at university, especially Vietnamese, they hungry to learn more and they understand that they probably in the right position to attack a little bit more regional job opportunity. But the challenge is when you have such a new industry like blockchain, it always come with risk and potential scam and improper information and eventually you can get

cheated, you can get scammed in a very easy way. So the things that we try to do in the university is that we try to invite and have collaboration with the proper technology partner and bring them over together with us into these universities so that at least number one, we can share about proper knowledge about how the industry are revolving

And if you would like to start stepping into this industry, either as an investor, either as a user, either as a contributor and builder, how do you start? Where do you start? What sort of skill? Okay, which company do I go for? So we also participate in career development, connecting companies and job opportunity back to the school that we're working with so that these bright talents have a chance to

have really good regional international experience when they are still at school. I saw a stat by We Are Social recently that said Vietnam is sixth highest adopter of cryptocurrency in the world at 16% of the population, which is probably about 16 million people. Do you think these crypto users are understanding truly what the blockchain is?

I think there's two points I can pick out of that statistic. I think the real number can even be higher than 16%. The second point is that, yeah, you're probably right in the questions that I don't feel like the entire 16% will understand properly about

the real blockchain and cryptocurrency yet. So a lot of them get in because they see the fluctuation of token price. And it means that potentially could be a very good investment product if betting it right or seeing the right direction of the token. And that's one of the things that here the government, they try to really quickly come up with the proper policy and regulation so they can protect, you know, like end user tokens

and set the tones for local startups. This is how you do it. So at least they can protect people locally because out of those 16% market adoption, we have seen a lot of bad cases, how people got tricked into a wrong destination of investment. It's interesting, isn't it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but blockchain is a place that promotes trustlessness.

but you've also got distrust with regards to, like you said, scams and perhaps rug pulls, bad investments, volatility. How do you think the blockchain is going to affect the fabric of the way Vietnamese do business? Because Vietnamese business is very much based on trust, isn't it? It has to be a progress. And blockchain technology itself is completely trustable. It's immutable to all kinds of hack and everything. But

The challenge of all of these games will fall into the Web 2 component of the people who's running the project. So they tend to sugarcoat the project with Web 3 component, promise you outrageous return because it's a blockchain project. But we have to understand in fundamental that everything takes time and everything needs to have proper product, proper security, check everything.

to be considered as a good investment or a good project, right? And let's go back to my previous point that not everyone can really detect

If this business and this promise does sound viable, because it's such a crazy world where blockchain and crypto are right now, because anyone can promise anything. And sometimes people without proper technology ability to evaluate ideas and tokens, it's almost impossible to stop these guys unless you have a proper regulation.

And we've talked about blockchain, Web3 in the gaming world. Can you think of any other examples where Vietnam might really benefit from blockchain technology? Perhaps in development, supply chains, logistics? There are many types of blockchain applications. And my flavor and my expertise will fall more into the application angle of blockchain and less on trading and investment for now. So when I say application, it means that

any business can apply blockchain into their daily operation. And I think Vietnam is one of the excellent country to apply blockchain and it start going to that direction right now because blockchain built around trust, right? And it can execute itself efficiently

almost automatically because of whatever the nature of the technology. So it will help developing country like Vietnam where there are a lot of complexity in payment, in operation, in law, in compliance into a more automatic like places. And by doing that, it's bring more transparent to the operation. It bring more efficient in cost saving for

for a lot of the local enterprise and business. So there are absolutely a few areas I feel we can apply blockchain right away in the local business, financial and banking, because blockchain will help you to fight like fraud, hacking. That's number one. Supply chain, very much. So supply chain, I'm looking at like

food traceability, agriculture traceability, and then even international trade. Apply blockchain in one of the areas that I think it's quite crucial to start exploring blockchain right now is on a lot of the government application because one of the

challenge that we have seen a lot in Asia and Vietnam is nothing different from other developing Asian countries that you can see a lot of frauds in official documents, IDs being faked, people's IDs being used for wrong purposes and everything. So if you can build a

a blockchain application layer outside of those ID, those documents, your personal ID will be protected by blockchain. And by doing that, it's strengthened the governance environment in Vietnam and in any developing country. So what I'm saying is, if you're an up and coming developing country like Vietnam, Indonesia, those blockchain application layers

coming in full effect because there's so much gap and room for increase in operation efficiencies. You won't see the same amount of gap for European company or society in the US, something like that, because everything is well structured. All of their system already very systematic, very like fundamental. So there's not much room for improvement.

But for a country like Vietnam, absolutely yes. There's a lot of spaces. So you think it can bring some order to the chaos, maybe? Yes, yes, yes. Or make chaos more comfortable for everyone because sometimes the chaos that we are facing every day, it's purely the result of the unavailability of some of the features out there that can help your life better. I can give you one example. If you go to see a government agency and

and they want to see a piece of paper and they can't really tell that piece of paper is real or not. Imagine that document being timestamped and verified by blockchain. The government just scan the barcode and they can tell, okay, your document is good to go. You don't have to go to one place to another place to get your document verified. And that's what happened right now in Vietnam. So digitalize these documents.

having your ID tied into a blockchain record will start preventing people from wrongdoing and they start having the record of everything. Yeah. You said earlier that it's a process and I must admit,

I feel like the adoption of Web3 and blockchain has been slower than I thought it was going to be. True. What do you think the timeline looks like? I mean, Vietnam government's got a strategy from 2025 with a vision to 2030. But realistically, what's the timeline whereby Vietnam will be adopting much more of this technology? We're talking longer than that, aren't we? I think sometimes they see that innovation can cost them a lot of time and money.

And sometimes if the local regulation is not available yet, then they're probably too early in investing in these things. So the adoption got slower a little bit. But I think this year, 2025, is one of the years that I start seeing real growth

engage like discuss and the government really aim for the first sandbox for regulation and policy meaning that like local company or local startup will have a designated area of activities and function that they can play around with new emerging technology like blockchain and it means that yeah you can try and do these things and we're not going to penalize you

And it looks like this year, we're probably going to see something out of the sandbox of regulation. After that, I think the adoption will be, I can't really tell how fast it's going to be, but it's going to be fast.

Is there anything that you think that global audiences might get wrong or misunderstand about Vietnam as a place to do business? I speak for the blockchain industry first, I would say. I think a lot of the global audience couldn't really understand

believes that such a tiny country in Asia like Vietnam can be such a vibrant crypto economy of itself. And they have produced quite a good amount of quality projects at the global scenes as well. And a lot of the users are coming from global. That's number one. And for general audience, I think Vietnam economy is such a

bright star in the entire Asia, that it's a result of such a fast-growing, hard-working economy combined with the proper direction by the government. So I think if you look around Southeast Asia, Vietnam is probably one of the very stable from the government direction point of view. And it's really...

allowing a lot of local company and foreign company going to the country and feel safe and feel comfortable investing and doing what they're supposed to do. Because if you can't really feel secure enough to invest further into a market, it really slowed down your growth and involved with the local market. So I think government direction, stability of the regulations,

support from the government, really putting Vietnam into a position that we only can grow much faster as well. And combined with the local, very good talent, really hardworking young generation, I think Vietnam is really in a proper position to surprise everyone right now. I agree. And sometimes I feel like

the world can't really see what I can see, like from being on the ground, you know, like. Yeah. You have, you have to come here to witness this. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's something you have to live and breathe and feel the energy of. I speak to a lot of football brands about the Vietnam market and

I spent some time in Singapore and they're like, yeah, we have a lot of regional conversations and no one's really talking about Vietnam. And I'm just like, why not? Why aren't people as bullish on Vietnam as I am? It feels like maybe it's quite an opaque market for outsiders to immediately understand. And there's a little bit of fear around it. This challenge is quite similar to Thailand that for a lot of the global audience out there and people interested in new economy, new culture, I think the language barrier is very,

one of the items, right? When you try to search more about Thailand, it's come up in Thai and same in Vietnam. So people have certain limitation in

access to this kind of information. And I think the government, the media start realize that. And we have been more vocal and more upfront in terms of message and image so that our international counterpart can start seeing things and feel things and see that Vietnam is more

well-represented at the global scenes. It's always been a bit of an underdog Vietnam, hasn't it? It is, yeah. We are a little bit like underdogs and I love it. I love it. And we took people by surprise. What are you most excited about for Vietnam's future?

It's not exaggerated, but I really tell to a lot of my friends, both locally and then friends I have overseas, that I share how much happy I am to be in Vietnam right now, to be Vietnamese and to be able to speak Vietnamese. Because I feel like we just have such a unique, favorable component that's happening around us right now, regulation-wise, government-wise.

talent pool, the growth of the economy itself, the culture. I think we haven't talked enough about the culture that if it's such an attractive market in terms of economies, but what if you come here, you don't feel like home, people treat you not so well. But you can speak from your experience, Ian. I think it's one of the countries that you feel like you still can handle your business and people around you make you feel like family. Right.

I think those combinations become more and more clear to a lot of, at least like the regional friends. So I hope it's even clearer to the bigger global audience that you should explore how to get involved with Vietnam one way or another.