About

Aw Kai Shin

Most people obsess about money without first understanding the rules of the game. The question of what financial infrastructure should look like remains a mystery to most even though it affects every facet of modern life. Whether this was by design or historical circumstance, I've spent more than a decade at the intersection of institutional finance and decentralized finance to find out.

At the core of my obsession with finance was a single question: what are the incentives and who does it serve? Financial technology continues to evolve but also shifts the power structures with each iteration. The incumbents are justifiably protective of their position built on years of established practices. Nevertheless, how does an industry that only deals with abstract numbers pay significantly more than most of the people they are supposed to serve?

In retrospect, my path here could have been predicted as I was always interested in social coordination, which is the core function of money. Having begun my professional career in property, it started with a curiosity about how people were affected by the cities they lived in. From designing physical cityscapes, my attention rapidly turned to digital financial infrastructure as cryptocurrencies and blockchain entered the lexicon in 2016.

The shift from centralized databases to peer-to-peer ledgers is as boring as it sounds but the implications on power structures were significant. My time as a blockchain technical specialist at both IBM and DBS Bank is a testament to this as the technology went from a curiosity to something institutions could not ignore. Since then, more institutional money has flowed into the space, but the core tension still remains: should users have full control over their finances or do they need an intermediary to protect them from themselves?

My move to more open financial rails came through KyberSwap, where I worked on bridging the knowledge gap as a technical writer. The gap between what the technology could do and what most people understood was widening by the week. Instead of presenting to corporate clients, my focus shifted to educating a wider spectrum of users from developers integrating the code to users trying to understand the risks. Having to approach the same subject from multiple perspectives gave me a better appreciation of why the technology was so divisive.

Being fully in the DeFi space, I had the opportunity to really deep dive across the whole ecosystem to understand the various financial primitives (money markets, DEXs, etc.) which led me to eventually become the Head of DeFi at Factor.fi. Factor is the composability layer allowing anyone to drag-and-drop various DeFi primitives into a single financial product. Building the infrastructure required understanding how liquidity flows on open rails where anyone could just plug into various financial building blocks.

I'm currently the Chief DeFi Officer at Mandate, which is building the intelligence and execution layer on top of Factor. Given the structural limitations of probabilistic agentic systems, the role of AI here is to translate complex financial instructions into simple-to-understand English and vice versa. The technical infrastructure provides the execution reliability that financial strategies demand while allowing users to always be in control of their own funds. It's another step closer to real personalized finance while opening up the design space for permissionless shareable strategies.

This site is the place where I try to write honestly about what that experience has taught me, without the constraints of institutional communication or the incentives of the industry to present everything as progress. The space deserves more honest accounting than it usually gets. That is what I am trying to provide.

Conflicts of interest

I currently work at Mandate as Chief DeFi Officer, a role built on Factor.fi's protocol infrastructure, where I remain Head of DeFi. That is a real conflict of interest for anyone writing about decentralised finance, and it is handled here rather than buried. Two standing rules govern how it is managed.

First, this site never covers Mandate, Factor.fi, or their direct competitors in evaluative terms. Nothing here should be read as a recommendation for or against any protocol I have a professional relationship with.

Second, experience from my current roles appears only as anonymised material about how the industry works from the inside, never as commentary on specific products. Where an essay draws on that experience, it says so.

Nothing on this site is financial advice. The full record of professional work this writing draws on is on the work page.

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