The person who has recently been flooding social media feeds has drawn attention not because of a speech or a report, but because of a social-media uproar: large numbers of KOLs and practitioners in Chinese-language communities discovered that they had been blocked by him. Ironically, the incident itself became the best introduction—Pu Peng’s name quickly went viral, drawing attention from both the crypto world and the traditional finance world.

So let’s find out who Pu Peng really is, and why he has managed to move from the ivory tower of traditional macro research to the Web3 stage today.

From London to Beijing, Pu Peng’s career trajectory spans three decades. In the early 2000s, a young man was sent to the UK and entered the ISMA College of the University of Reading, majoring in International Securities Investment and Banking. That choice changed everything. In 2004, he joined Lehman Brothers in London, and a year later transferred to Solomon International Investment Group, where he was responsible for global macro hedging strategies. Then 2008 arrived. As someone who experienced it firsthand, Pu Peng witnessed the financial crisis—and learned the most important lesson from it: positive feedback won’t go on forever, and negative feedback won’t either.

After returning to China, Pu Peng rotated through institutions including Shandong High-tech Venture Capital, Zhongqi Group, and Galaxy Futures, building up a complete analytical framework covering everything from exchange rates and commodities to cross-border capital. From 2017 to 2019, he did something that can be easily overlooked in a career but is extremely critical—going back from the sell-side back to the buy-side, truly managing money and doing asset allocation. This experience later earned him the label “chief economist who understands the buy-side best.” In 2020, Pu Peng joined Northeast Securities as Chief Economist. With down-to-earth phrasing and the humor of a northerner, he made macro research understandable even to ordinary audiences. Over five years, through speech after speech and viewpoint after viewpoint, he gradually became a familiar public face.

But what is truly worth paying attention to is what Pu Peng has said over these years. In September 2024, at the Phoenix Bay Area Financial Forum, he pointed out that the core problems in economic operations lie in insufficient effective demand and a decline in investment return rates. His judgment was that this is not only a matter of confidence; it is also related to real return rates and income expectations. The subsequent downward trend in government bond yields, to a certain extent, corroborated his view. In November, at a closed-door HSBC meeting, Pu Peng put forward a key framework—ideology → policy choices → economic structure → asset pricing—which quickly spread across social media. By the end of 2025, at Bloomberg’s annual outlook summit, he talked about the mismatch between productivity and institutions and suggested structural allocation between tech assets and high-dividend assets. While these judgments may not be perfect, both the sense of direction and the logical framework can stand up to scrutiny.

So why did Pu Peng end up on the Web3 stage? The answer is actually hidden in the way he has observed things over the past more than ten years. He has a special perspective: reading economic signals from young people’s behavior. When Pop Mart suddenly exploded in popularity, he wasn’t just looking at a single product—he was looking at the underlying changes in consumption structure. When the sneaker trend took off, he observed how post-90s and post-00s bypassed the traditional stock market and real estate and formed their own ways of competing and strategizing in new trading scenarios. These seemingly speculative phenomena, in his eyes, are all signals of changes in economic structure.

As early as around 2021, Pu Peng was already observing Bitcoin’s pricing logic from a liquidity perspective. His view was that if the macro environment shifts toward tightening, high-volatility and high-valuation assets may face pressure. The crypto market decline in 2022, to some degree, validated this thinking. In the years that followed, he did not directly participate in specific trading narratives. Instead, he continued to observe the space from a macro perspective—moving from early periods of high volatility and high uncertainty, to the gradual introduction of regulation, the expansion of stablecoins into payment scenarios, and then to institutional capital entering, while the attributes of crypto assets were undergoing profound changes. Based on these observations, Pu Peng formed a judgment: crypto assets are evolving from fringe markets into financial instruments that can be included in asset allocation systems.

In April 2026, Pu Peng appeared on the stage of the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival as Chief Economist of Xinhuo Group. He proposed that crypto assets are evolving from being driven mainly by faith into becoming more mature financial assets. The path is similar to the development process of traditional financial derivatives: technological innovation → institutional adaptation → regulatory follow-up → inclusion into mainstream asset allocation systems. He placed crypto assets, stablecoins, and AI technologies within a broader macro framework, and believed that these changes are closely related to adjustments in the global monetary system and financial structure.

As for the blocking controversy, supporters say it is about filtering out information noise and maintaining the independence of an analytical framework, while critics believe it has an exclusionary and forceful aspect. But in any case, objectively speaking, the incident accomplished a large-scale exposure: the people who were blocked discussed him, the people who weren’t blocked observed him, and onlookers actively searched for who Pu Peng is. In the Web3 circle, this kind of controversial way of entering the scene is, in fact, more effective than a single speech at completing a self-introduction.

In the end, Pu Peng’s move from traditional macro research to Web3 may seem like a big leap. But if we return to the core questions he has focused on for the long term, this path is actually not that disconnected. He has simply followed his existing framework—observing young people, observing liquidity, observing the evolution of assets—and arrived here. Perhaps in the coming years, more traditional macro analysts will appear at AI and Web3 discussion venues, and Pu Peng may not be the last.