(Bloomberg) -- A little over a year ago, China declared all cryptocurrency transactions illegal, the final salvo in a crackdown that had been gathering pace for years. 

The government’s move sent convulsions through the local crypto industry, with everything from Bitcoin mining to trading slumping. According to its central bank, China went from accounting for some 90% of global Bitcoin transactions to just 10%.

While some entrepreneurs chose to stay in China and try to operate within the confines of the new regulatory regime, many others decamped for places like the US, Singapore, Thailand and Dubai. Bloomberg News spoke with four of them about their experiences and views on everything from web3 to cultural biases in crypto. Here are their stories:

Diane Dai, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Dodo 

Dai, 25, started Dodo, a decentralized crypto exchange, in 2020. She left China this year and during the summer settled temporarily in Bangkok before moving to Singapore. Like many fellow crypto nomads, she’s traveling from country to country, often timing moves with major industry conferences. Dodo counts Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Digital and Pantera Capital among its backers. 

The lifestyle has several challenges, from navigating language to culture and biases, she says. Even so, Dai says the most-discussed topic among Chinese crypto entrepreneurs living overseas is how to secure a work visa, foreign residency or citizenship. 

“Chinese crypto entrepreneurs are a big group, so you are not fighting alone. In crypto, building a community is very important. Small habits like posting memes might come naturally for English-speaking founders, but for us it’s something to study and train for.

Without the protection of the Chinese Great Firewall, we must face global competition on Day One.”

Suji Yan, founder and CEO of Mask Network 

Yan, 26, a college dropout, founded web3 social network startup Mask Network in 2017 . The service allows users to send encrypted messages and tokens via Twitter and Facebook. After leaving Shanghai, Yan has spent time in Singapore, and says his goal is to not stay in any one country for more than half a year. Yan, who earlier initiated a Github campaign against what he views as the excessive “996” work culture in China, sees web3 as a revolution against centralized power. 

“When Chinese citizens participate in crypto, they are gaining a new identity - they are citizens of China, but they are also citizens of a digital nation. They even pay two sets of taxes: income tax and web3 tax in the form of gas fees.” 

Yan, who also founded Mask’s venture arm Bonfire Union, says a major challenge for Chinese crypto entrepreneurs is getting the attention of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who often don’t bother to respond to pitches:

“It’s a violation of crypto’s fundamental ideology - to be international and borderless. I often comfort other Chinese founders who get rejected by American VCs. I told them ‘they are nationalists, and they don’t deserve to invest in internationalists.’”

Jerry Huang, co-founder of STEPN

Huang, 37, was among Chinese tech founders who rode the country’s smartphone boom about a decade ago, churning out quick-to-market mobile gaming hits. He’s lived in Sydney for the past nine years.

In December, Huang’s startup launched a fitness app called STEPN, which lets users buy virtual sneakers in the form of nonfungible tokens, which can then be used to earn digital tokens. Just a month later, STEPN raised $5 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Sam Bankman-Fried ’s Alameda Research. 

It didn’t take long before STEPN was forced to make changes to avoid irking Chinese regulators. In May, the startup said it would cut off users in mainland China by blocking them based on GPS location. Huang says his firm never offered downloads or marketed to Chinese users; nonetheless, they accounted for about 5% of STEPN’s 2 million-plus users at the time.

“We targeted global markets and didn’t anticipate Chinese users to be as enthusiastic. But after we became sizable, it came to a time when we needed to self-censor to avoid systematic risks.”

Even so, Huang says he supports China’s crypto ban because it’s designed to protect retail investors:

“When your regulatory framework isn’t quite intact, and when your users aren’t that sensible, you’d better not open the market too soon. But I think it will change over time.”

Zeng Jiajun, founder of Soul Wallet 

Before moving to the US in mid-2021, Zeng, 29, worked as a product manager for content moderation at ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Now a graduate student at Northeastern University, Zeng has founded Soul Wallet, a smart-contract wallet that allows users to change private keys. 

“My Chinese background is very important and can add diversity to the Ethereum community. For a while my pinned tweet was ‘the separation of state and internet,’ and that’s what Ethereum was trying to do. What Bitcoin achieved was the separation of state and money. Now it’s about the separation of the internet from the state.

In the core Ethereum community, values is a huge issue: Do you care about anti-censorship, network’s credible neutrality? To many people the ideology is not the first [priority], they care more about tech and secondly the business prospects. So that will make them less easy to fit in with the crypto punks who are often idealists.”

If you do anti-censorship work in China, it will be difficult. I don’t think web3 is going to happen until China becomes a democratic country. Fundamentally, blockchain’s essence is to build a decentralized, anti-censorship thing. If it has to co-exist with censorship, it loses its flavor. Then you might as well use your own servers and machines.” 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.