Kate and I spent the weekend forest bathing. A cabin in deep woods, a river feeding the ocean, tides marking the day. We hiked, watched, listened, and smelled. We let the quiet settle. By Sunday morning, my resting heart rate dropped by 10%. The storms of the modern world were shedding. We were eating lunch inside while looking out onto the serene river, playing 20 questions. As we probed to discover what object the other had identified, we watched several flies struggle against the glass as they tried to get outside. It was beyond their intellectual capacity to understand the concept of glass and to improvise a plan to take an alternative route to get back where they belonged. In our normal gaze we look past the flies to the trees and the river. Kate and I wondered what else we miss moment to moment. Most of it, probably. We are powerful and weak, all-seeing and oblivious, free and trapped. The modern world is our glass. On Sunday morning I asked Kate to draw what she was feeling. She was reading a book and sketched onto the open page, which happened to be the dedication and read “sine qua non”, the one without whom, not. The quiet of the forest sharpened what I could notice. The flies on the window. Kate across the table. A dedication in a borrowed book that became, by accident, hers to me. Are all trapped behind glass we cannot see?

Kate Wang, Manager at Onigiri Capital (@OnigiriVC), is taking the stage at Conviction 2026. How does blockchain go from experiment to real-world adoption? Kate is helping drive that shift across Asia. Her journey began in Southeast Asia’s startup incubator ecosystem, where she worked closely with early-stage fintech companies on go-to-market strategy, partnerships, and capital formation. She later transitioned into the stablecoin and digital payments space, working with institutional partners on cross-border settlement, regulatory-aligned infrastructure, and real-world adoption of blockchain technology. Now at Onigiri Capital, a blockchain venture capital firm, she focuses on investments and strategic development across stablecoins, tokenization, DeFi, payments and financial infrastructure. Join Conviction 2026 to hear from Kate Wang on how blockchain adoption is unfolding across Asia from an institutional lens. ------- 👉 Grab your Super Early Bird tickets now to unlock exclusive insights from top-tier speakers at Conviction 2026: The largest Blockchain & Digital Asset event in Vietnam 📍 Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 📅 Date: August 14–15, 2026 🌐

Princess Kate disembarks from the plane backwards for her safety, as the staircase is very narrow and she is wearing high, thin heels. It's a safety rule for this type of staircase that many people are unaware of.