Interview: Presley, PANews

Compiled by: Nancy, PANews

After leaving Northeast Securities for a year, renowned economist Fu Peng has a new direction. As a well-known economist among internet celebrities in Mainland China, Fu Peng is recognized for his macro insights and straightforward style, holding a high degree of prominence and influence. Recently, the Hong Kong stock listed company New Fire Group officially announced that Fu Peng has joined the company as Chief Economist. This move into the digital asset field has quickly sparked broad market attention and discussion.

On April 23, Fu Peng delivered his first public speech after joining at the Bitfire Day · 2026 Hong Kong Institutional Digital Wealth Management Summit Forum. After the event, he accepted interviews from multiple media outlets including PANews, sharing the reasons for his choice to join the crypto asset field and his thoughts on future financial trends.

Fu Peng pointed out that we are currently in the second major integration period of finance and technology, with a new wave of technological trends centered on AI, data, and computing power driving crypto assets into a new era of institutionalization, compliance, and financialization.

The New Integration of Finance and Technology, FICC+C is an Inevitable Choice

As a senior practitioner in the traditional FICC field, Fu Peng believes that a new major integration is occurring in the financial sector, entering a new situation of FICC+C, where the last “C” stands for Crypto. He hopes that the role he plays in this process can be as milestone-worthy as when Morgan's Blythe Masters promoted the development of FICC (the collective term for fixed income, foreign exchange, and commodities business).

Fu Peng noted that finance has never been static; it continuously evolves with technological advancements. Historically, the trading of large asset classes in FICC truly emerged in the 1970s and 80s, alongside the revolution in computer and information technology. Wall Street began to merge assets like commodities, exchange rates, bonds, and stocks, leading to the creation of innovative products such as derivative pricing, futures, options, and interest rate swaps, which gradually became core profit sources for mainstream financial institutions.

Today’s crypto assets essentially represent a new asset class that has emerged alongside a new wave of technological progress. This technological advancement, centered on AI, data, and computing power, finds its direct manifestation in Bitcoin mining, a natural result of the productivity transformation of this era. Sooner or later, such assets will systematically be included in institutional investment portfolios, just like FICC was in the past.

Fu Peng further pointed out that the GENIUS Act and the Clarity Act launched in the U.S. essentially mark a key punctuation point in the regulatory review of the past decade, with the most accurate positioning being digital assets. Among these, regulations related to stablecoins will relatively separate the payment and monetary attributes, allowing the relevant assets to be more clearly positioned as financial instruments with value storage and tradability. This signifies that traditional financial institutions can truly and comprehensively enter the market for allocations in a compliant manner.

In his view, this journey is strikingly similar to that of the 70s and 80s. At that time, the main battleground for stock trading shifted from the NYSE to Nasdaq, with a massive number of trades executed on computer terminals, and speed moving from minute-level to second-level, millisecond-level, and potentially even future bit-level. Technology not only changed trading methods but also reconstructed the entire financial landscape. 2025 can be seen as the second major integration of finance and technology after World War II, this time driven by computing power, data, and AI, and fundamentally relying on blockchain and cryptographic technology, reconstructing new production relations.

Therefore, everyone’s understanding of the crypto space must be completely different from the past decade. The past was characterized by early wild growth driven by faith, while now it is entering a mature new phase of institutionalization, regularization, and financialization. “FICC + C” (traditional major asset allocation plus crypto assets) is not a simple cross-border undertaking, but an inevitable choice in accordance with this historical trend.

RWA is Just a Tool, Financial Innovation Has East-West Differences

Regarding the current RWA frenzy, Fu Peng believes that RWA is essentially just a tool and not a standalone asset class. It is like derivatives such as options, swaps, and forwards, where the core is asset securitization, simply moving this process onto the blockchain.

It can be understood as the on-chain securitization of real-world assets, or conversely as the securitization of crypto assets. Just like how the stock market, which early on could only go long, gradually introduced short mechanisms, individual stock options, swaps, and forward derivatives, RWA can also be layered on top of any asset, providing more financial functions.

Fu Peng emphasized that blockchain technology itself is also a tool that can be widely applied in many scenarios such as trade document anti-counterfeiting. Ultimately, these technological tools will give rise to new asset forms and applications, but RWA itself should not be speculated upon or simply understood as an independent new asset.

In terms of attracting international capital, Fu Peng believes that RWA and other crypto-related sectors are unlikely to become the main driving force for Hong Kong to significantly attract overseas funds. From a bottom civilizational logic perspective, the Asian region's overall tendency towards financial innovation is conservative. The logic of Western maritime civilization is “whatever is not prohibited by law is permissible," encouraging bold exploration and pioneering, exposing problems during practice, and then slowly following regulatory updates, a “first innovate, then standardize” approach. In contrast, East Asian civilization tends to being “better slow than fast” and waits for others to fully validate the path and risks before cautiously proceeding.

In fact, the FICC business in the East only started in 2009, precisely because it needed to wait for the Western market to fully validate before daring to push forward on a large scale. Hong Kong, as a window connecting East and West, is relatively more open than the mainland, yet still exists in a middle ground, wanting to seize efficiency and opportunities while ensuring fairness and controllable risks, thus often needing to find a prudent balance between the two.

Of course, stablecoins are necessary. Fu Peng believes that if they are not developed, there is a significant risk of being left behind in the next financial era. However, it cannot be completely left to the private sector, so policies often need to strike a balance between innovation and risk control. Regarding the RMB stablecoin, he believes it will eventually arrive, but the timing will be lengthy. It will certainly wait until the external world has fully exposed all risks and nearly cleared all pitfalls before carefully advancing at its own pace.

The Macro Bear Market is Expected to End This Year, Prioritize AI Stocks

As crypto assets gradually move towards the mainstream, macro liquidity is becoming the dominant factor influencing the market.

Fu Peng believes that when crypto assets are officially integrated into the traditional financial system and become a standardized asset class, they will resonate significantly with the financial framework built over the past 40 years, drastically enhancing their correlation, and their trading logic will gradually merge with that of traditional financial assets.

In the past, the crypto asset market was more akin to early Hong Kong stocks or A-shares, where the core driving factors included circulating chips, large holder positions, and market maker behaviors rather than macroeconomics. Investors primarily focused on how many chips a certain address or wallet held, who was selling, who was targeting, needing not to deeply study macro liquidity. This was a typical characteristic of the early crypto space when there was a lack of large-scale institutional participation.

Nowadays, this situation has changed. As the degree of institutionalization continually rises, the performance of large crypto assets is increasingly approaching that of mature markets. For instance, companies like Alibaba and Tencent can no longer exhibit the extreme manipulations solely driven by chips seen in the early days. At this point, macroeconomics and liquidity are beginning to become important influencing factors because they directly impact the large asset allocation portfolios of institutions, which in turn transmits to crypto assets.

Fu Peng pointed out that this resonance phenomenon has already emerged. AI concept stocks (such as Nvidia) and crypto assets are showing significant connections, and the path of liquidity squeeze in traditional markets is having a substantial impact on crypto assets.

Regarding the current market environment, Fu Peng explained that since November of last year, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet has contracted to a certain degree, leading to overall liquidity tightening. While the market generally focuses on interest rate cuts, many overlook that liquidity is not only a matter of interest rate prices but also of the quantity of money. When the liquidity squeeze brought by balance sheet reduction exceeds the stimulation from interest rate cuts, the entire market's liquidity is actually tightening. In this environment, all high-valuation assets will face pressure first. This logic has long been evident in traditional assets, and over the past six to seven years, crypto assets have also clearly been affected in similar ways, indicating that the connection between the crypto market and traditional finance is gradually deepening.

Regarding the current bear market cycle, Fu Peng judges it may last until the end of this year. He believes such macro-driven adjustments do not require precise early predictions; one should take it step by step. When macro liquidity becomes the dominant factor, timing signals will naturally become clearer.

Concerning the Bitcoin four-year cycle theory, Fu Peng clearly pointed out that it is no longer applicable as it was a product of the previous era. When crypto assets enter the era of institutional asset management, the impact of large holder behaviors on prices will significantly decrease, and market volatility will also gradually reduce.

He emphasized that predicting prices for any asset is not advisable. Commodities have cost lines to reference; stocks have corporate profits as support, while Bitcoin currently, although it has a value storage function, lacks the traditional sense of intrinsic value. It is more like a purely valuation-driven, tradeable financial asset with value maintenance functions, which also aligns with the most standard definition from U.S. regulators.

Bitcoin has a hard supply limit, unlike traditional commodities that are influenced by miner production costs and extraction pace, nor like the stock market, which can continually expand total market capitalization through IPOs. This is both an advantage of its scarcity and a limitation on its future maximum proportion in global asset allocation because it cannot increase positions indefinitely like stocks or traditional commodities.

In terms of asset allocation, Fu Peng provided suggestions. If pursuing a more stable value-oriented asset, priority should be given to AI-related stocks; Bitcoin is positioned in the middle, being one of the crypto assets with relatively high certainty, but it will not occupy a high allocation ratio like traditional major assets. If seeking to amplify volatility, Ethereum can be chosen.

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