You might have seen his name pop up recently, but probably not for the reasons you'd expect. Fu Peng just showed up at the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival as chief economist of Xinhuo Group, and what got people talking wasn't his keynote—it was the fact that he'd blocked hundreds of crypto KOLs and practitioners on social media right before the event. Polarizing? Absolutely. But it also got everyone asking: who is this guy, really?

Here's the thing—his journey from traditional macro finance to Web3 isn't actually as random as it looks. It's more like he followed his own curiosity and ended up here.

Let me back up. Fu Peng spent two decades climbing the ladder in institutional finance before any of this Web3 stuff happened. He studied at the University of Reading in the UK from 1999 to 2004, focusing on international securities and banking. Then came the part that shaped his entire perspective: he joined Lehman Brothers in London in 2004. He was there when everything fell apart. In September 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the global financial crisis fully erupted. He witnessed the whole thing firsthand—the miscalculations, the cascading failures, the moment when years of optimistic sentiment turned into pure panic. That wasn't just a job experience for him; it was a masterclass in how markets actually work when things go wrong.

After the Lehman Brothers crisis, he moved to Salomon Brothers International, where he became the Global Head of Macro Hedge Strategy Design. He was analyzing derivatives, currencies, commodities—the whole interconnected web. Even back then, he was noticing patterns that others missed. He saw high-risk mortgages being issued to people who couldn't afford them, warning signs that the market wasn't pricing in correctly.

He returned to China in 2008 and spent the next decade building his analytical framework. Deputy GM at Shandong High-Tech Venture Capital, chief macro strategy analyst at Zhongqi Group, special commentator at Galaxy Futures. Then came a crucial phase most people overlook: from 2017 to 2019, he managed money on the buy-side at Hangzhou Chonghe Investment. This is where he learned what institutional investors actually think and need—something most sell-side economists never understand.

By 2020, he became chief economist at Northeast Securities. His style was completely different from the typical securities economist. No scripts, no corporate speak. Just straight talk with dry northern humor that resonated with ordinary people. In March 2024, he published "Witnessing the Tide: Reflections on the Major Shift in Global Asset Logic." He'd survived two major surgeries that year but kept going. In April 2025, he left Northeast Securities to join Xinhuo Group.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Throughout his career, Fu Peng developed this habit of reading young people's economic behavior as a signal. When Pop Mart became huge, he didn't just see collectibles—he saw young people reallocating away from traditional assets like real estate and cars toward high-emotion, low-price items. During the sneaker speculation boom, he noticed how Gen Z and millennials were creating their own trading playgrounds outside the stock market. To him, these weren't just fads. They were structural shifts.

Back in 2021, he started observing Bitcoin and crypto from a macro perspective. He didn't fully buy into the traditional narrative, but he could see the liquidity dynamics. He predicted that if the macroeconomic environment tightened, highly volatile and overvalued assets would face pressure. Then 2022 happened—Bitcoin crashed hard from its highs. His macro framework had called it.

Over the following years, he kept watching. Regulation came in. Stablecoins expanded. Institutional money started flowing in. Crypto assets were evolving from early-stage fringe market into something that could actually be incorporated into asset allocation systems. So when he finally stepped onto the Web3 stage in April 2026, it wasn't an impulsive move. It was the logical continuation of the same analytical path he'd been on for years.

At the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, he laid it out: crypto assets are transitioning from being primarily faith-driven to becoming mature financial instruments. The path looks similar to how traditional derivatives evolved. Technological innovation, institutional adaptation, regulatory follow-up, then inclusion in mainstream asset allocation. He framed it within a larger shift in the global monetary system and financial structure.

The blocking controversy definitely amplified his visibility—people who got blocked talked about it, people who didn't got curious, onlookers started searching for who he was. Love it or hate it, it worked. But the real story is simpler: a macro analyst who lived through the Lehman Brothers crisis, who learned to read market signals from observing youth behavior, who called the 2022 crypto correction correctly, naturally evolved into the Web3 space because that's where the next wave of financial innovation was happening.

Whether you think he's arrogant or just filtering noise, one thing's clear—his path from traditional finance to Web3 reflects a larger shift in how macro narratives and asset markets are evolving. If you see more traditional economists showing up at AI and crypto discussions in the coming years, Fu Peng probably won't be the last.