Moledao founder Helen Liu used the project’s eighth CEO Forum Chinese session to address a broad set of questions around Web3 hiring, cross-functional career moves, data analysis, token issuance and the sector’s longer-term outlook.
The online event was held on Sept. 5, 2026. Liu joined host Hickerzed and community members for a discussion that ran for more than an hour and began with the origins of CEO Forum and Moledao before moving into job hunting in Web3, role transitions, entrepreneurial judgment, risk control, business development, token issuance and industry prospects.
How CEO Forum was set up
Liu said CEO Forum was launched by her in 2025 as Moledao’s flagship dialogue program for global universities and industry leaders. The program is designed to connect entrepreneurs and executives with hands-on experience to younger talent through small-group, high-density conversations focused on practice, judgment and long-term value.
Rather than relying on one-way speeches or large-format conferences, CEO Forum is built around direct exchange. Participants are not only listeners. They also speak with Liu and invited founders about real entrepreneurial paths, business decisions and organizational practice, with discussion spanning leadership, technology, finance and innovation.
According to the session, seven CEO Forum events have already been held at universities including Columbia University, Stanford University, Imperial College London and the University of Hong Kong. Liu described the program as an effort to build a high-quality channel between students, entrepreneurs and industry practitioners across regions.
Why Moledao was created
Liu said the idea for Moledao emerged early in her time at Bybit, when the company had around 100 to 200 employees and was expanding quickly. Hiring blockchain talent was difficult. Five or six years ago, she said, the industry was still young and builders were scattered across different cities and projects. Some wanted to join projects, some wanted paid tasks, and some were looking for ways to turn knowledge and experience into income. Compared with more established industries, blockchain builders often worked in isolation.
That gap became the starting point for Moledao. Liu said the goal was to gather people who believed in blockchain and wanted to build, then give them a place to share experience, join projects, take on tasks and access part-time and full-time roles. Some of the community’s early members later joined Bybit and took on important responsibilities there.
Over the past five years, Moledao has tried blockchain courses, a task-and-reward platform, job fairs, internship programs and career services. Liu said some of the early courses entered teaching settings at universities including the University of Hong Kong and Nanyang Technological University. Hickerzed added that two Web3 internship programs received more than 1,600 applications and brought more than 1,000 participants into the community. Moledao’s Telegram group now has about 2,400 members, while the platform has about 50,000 registered users.
Liu said those experiments expanded the community and clarified its direction. The next step, in her words, is to build Moledao into a “LinkedIn for the blockchain industry” that connects talent and employers while helping people already in the field keep learning and growing. She also said the team currently has only four or five full-time members, with additional work supported by volunteers and part-time contributors.
Getting into Web3 without trying to look “Web3 enough”
On entering Web3 and changing careers, Liu said companies usually give people opportunities not because they are eager to leave their current role, but because they have already shown they can own an outcome. A job that has been “well taken care of,” she said, is one where problems are identified, work moves forward, results can be reviewed and other people do not need to repeatedly check in.
What accumulates from that process is not only a skill set but a form of professional credibility. People start to believe that if they hand over something more complex, it will remain under control.
Liu said most of her own career was in Web2 and that her entry into Web3 was somewhat accidental. Still, the capabilities developed over years of work did not stop mattering when she changed industries. She argued that professional skills are transferable and that people should not be overly afraid of crossing into Web3. Roles in product, marketing, project management, operations, customer service, data, security and development all carry elements that can move from Web2 to Web3.
She also said people do not need to remake themselves into someone who merely “looks very Web3” before trying to enter the industry. Knowledge of assets, projects and on-chain systems helps, but learning speed and an established professional foundation matter as well. Liu compared this to banks, which do not require every new hire to understand every financial product before joining. Web3 companies, she said, also leave room for people to keep learning the business after they arrive.
In hiring, what separates candidates is usually not presentation alone but the results they delivered in their previous role, how they solved problems and whether they can keep learning in a new environment.
From HR to Co-CEO
Liu said her path from HR to Co-CEO was not the result of a one-off promotion outside the rules. It came from dealing with increasingly complex problems over time. The real boundary between functional teams and business teams, she said, often does not lie in formal expertise. Many people are highly skilled, but that same specialization can keep them inside their own department’s frame if they do not try to understand the final business result.
If someone only completes the actions tied to a specific job description, that person ends up defined by the role. Once they start asking why a problem happened, who it affected and what would actually solve it, they begin to gain a view that extends beyond the job itself.
After joining Bybit, Liu first focused on making the HR department run independently and in an orderly way. When founders came to her with problems, she said, she would handle the visible issue and the parts that might have been missed, giving management confidence that the department had been properly taken care of.
The next step was Chief of Staff work. Liu attended meetings between founders and institutions, customer service teams, regional teams and business units. After each meeting, she followed up on action items and then returned before the next meeting with plans and progress updates. That process gave her visibility into how different parts of the company worked and helped her learn the business through execution. She later took charge of the marketing team, and the broader company-level view she had built earlier helped her judge which business lines were worth amplifying in the market and what kind of content the brand should use to establish its place.
Liu used that experience to answer a common question about switching roles. A customer service employee who wants to move into product or marketing may not gain much from simply sending out a resume, she said. But customer service teams often see user problems first, whether that means a campaign link will not open, task instructions are unclear or reward collection is interrupted. If someone reproduces those issues personally, pushes the relevant teams to fix them and keeps producing useful suggestions for product and operations, that person is already building the experience needed for an adjacent role while still in the current one.
She called this kind of accumulation “depth” in work. New opportunities tend to come more naturally once a person can understand problems in the current role, propose solutions and influence other people’s work. In her account, the move from HR to Chief of Staff and then into business management followed that pattern: keep stepping beyond a narrow boundary, stay accountable for outcomes, and move from completing specialized work to owning organizational results.
What still matters in data analysis when AI can produce reports faster
Liu split data work into two layers.
The first is presenting facts: aggregating spot, derivatives and stock trading volume across regions, then comparing changes from one day to the next or one month to the next. She said that kind of work used to consume large amounts of analyst time and is becoming easier for AI to automate.
Managers, however, usually need more than a report that confirms trading volume has declined. They need a second layer of answers. Why did it decline? Is the move part of an industry-wide shift or a problem specific to the company? Did competitors see the same change? Did a campaign fail, did product experience break down, or is a core user group slipping away?
In Liu’s view, those questions cannot be answered by piling on more data alone. Analysts still need to understand the business context, separate correlation from causation, and judge which changes are noise and which signals require immediate action. Analysis also cannot stop at explaining the past. A useful conclusion should identify the root cause behind the numbers and lead to action: what deserves more investment, what needs to be stopped quickly, and where the next opportunity may be.
She said the value of data does not sit in the numbers themselves but in what they allow an organization to understand. AI can speed up report generation, but it cannot absorb the consequences of a company’s choices. The real value of a data analyst, she said, is not merely asking one more “why” than AI asks. It is turning numbers into judgment and judgment into action.
When broad experience helps, and when it turns into a trap
Liu was also asked whether working on too many things at a small project team can blur a career direction and make it harder to get hired by a large company. Her answer was that breadth is neither an automatic weakness nor an automatic strength. What matters is whether someone can use varied work to build a full-picture understanding of the business.
At a small team, one person may write project reports, plan listing campaigns, track data, run communities and communicate with project teams and other partners. Liu said people with that background often have strong execution skills. On the surface, the lack of clear functional boundaries can look messy. In practice, it can also give them a systems view because they see how each link affects the others.
If they later join a major exchange or platform, even in a narrower role such as listing operations, they may find it easier to explain to other departments where a project’s selling points come from, why users care, what the risk team is worried about, and what kind of information marketing, community and BD teams each need. The advantage is not simply having “done many things.” It is being able to speak the language of different teams, translate project demands across functions and understand how a final result is jointly produced.
Liu also warned that breadth can become a trap. If someone keeps taking on new tasks without going deep on any of them, “having done everything” can eventually mean “not having done anything deeply enough.”
Moving from a small company into a large organization requires another shift as well. Small teams rely more on individual initiative and quick reactions because more of the work sits within one person’s control. Large organizations rely more on process, coordination and risk control. At a small company, finishing your own part can feel like the job is done. At a large company, completion also includes approval, coordination and confirmed delivery. Liu said people who come from smaller teams need to learn how to use process so work stays under control and so they can actually influence the final outcome.
For that reason, she said, the value of a career path does not depend on whether each role was narrowly specialized. It depends on whether a person can turn breadth into systems understanding and refine complicated experience into a stable core capability.
What token issuance changes
Liu said Moledao seriously discussed whether to issue a token and ultimately decided to remain on a nonprofit path.
She said a token can bring funding, liquidity, community participation and a wider set of stakeholders, and it can help a project expand its reach more quickly. But a token is not just a financing tool. Once a project has a publicly traded token, its responsibility structure changes as well. Alongside users, product and mission, the team now faces token holders’ expectations for returns and the market’s constant judgment through price.
Price can amplify consensus, she said, but it can also reshape behavior. Teams may begin to prioritize what stimulates trading, maintains attention and supports token price rather than the original problem the project wanted to solve. When short-term price and long-term building come into conflict, what a project chooses to protect will decide what it becomes.
Liu did not frame token issuance as inherently harmful. She said she still supports new projects experimenting with tokens and on-chain products. The real question is not whether a project should issue a token in the abstract, but whether the token genuinely serves the product, whether token-holder benefits come from long-term value created by the project, and whether a team can keep its original judgment when market mood clashes with organizational mission.
She added that similar questions matter when she evaluates whether to acquire or merge with a smaller team. Shared goals are not enough by themselves. The sides also need to understand what each believes, how each makes decisions and what path each plans to take. Goals determine whether two groups can move together, she said, while ways of working determine how long they can stay together.
Does Web3 still have a future?
Asked about fewer Web3 jobs and industry contraction, Liu said the current weakness still belongs to a normal cycle. In the short term, companies cut roles and tighten budgets, and opportunities that once came from rapid expansion become less common. Over a longer period, though, she said crypto still has room to develop in payments, stablecoins, bank settlement and value exchange between AI agents. Traditional financial institutions, in her view, will also gradually absorb blockchain technology and capabilities.
Crypto, she said, will be integrated more deeply into those systems and become part of future forms of money as well as part of next-generation banking infrastructure.
At the same time, Liu said confidence in the sector’s long-term direction does not mean every role, project or company will survive long enough to see the next cycle. Macro trends may help people choose a direction, but they do not build competitiveness for any individual. What people can truly carry forward are the professional capabilities formed in the industry and the scarcity those capabilities gain once they are combined with new settings.
She used internal audit as an example. Traditional audit experience remains valuable on its own. Someone who has done internal audit at a large crypto company adds another layer of experience that is hard to replicate quickly: understanding how on-chain assets move, knowing what new risks come with custody, wallets, access control and trading businesses, and seeing how traditional control frameworks need to be adjusted for crypto operations.
Even if that person later leaves Web3, Liu said, the experience does not disappear with the market’s heat. When banks, payment firms and other traditional financial companies start building digital asset businesses, what that person brings back is not simply a line on a resume saying they “worked in crypto.” It is a composite capability that is still scarce in traditional finance and may be needed in the future.
That, she said, is one practical way to respond to cycles: do not bind yourself completely to a single fashionable job title. Let industry experience settle back into your own profession. Marketing, product, audit, compliance, data and technical skills do not lose their value just because the market cools. What matters is whether the Web3 environment gave your original specialty an extra layer of understanding that others do not yet have.
Liu’s conclusion on this point was straightforward. Industries create jobs in cycles, and they take jobs back in cycles. People who chase positions alone are easier for the cycle to shake out. People who keep building a stack of capabilities are more likely to turn one period in the industry into a lasting career asset.
Selected lines from the session and what comes next
The article also highlighted several short lines from Liu’s remarks, including: 「Whatever you are doing now, do it well and make yourself stand out when selection happens.」 「If you want the next role, first let people see that your current role has already been taken care of well and that you can carry more responsibility.」 「A good data analyst should help others see where the opportunity is and what to do next after reading the numbers.」 「Doing everything at a small project team can become your advantage. You know the selling points at each step and how to explain the key issues to different cooperating teams.」 「Once a project issues a token, it takes on added responsibility to token holders. The business cannot distort itself for token price.」 「We need to recruit, but we also need to keep developing talent so they can truly enter the industry.」 「Blockchain application scenarios have not yet been fully realized, and the technology will become part of mainstream finance in the future.」
According to the article, the session did not try to force every question into a single answer. Instead, Liu placed her own experiences, judgments and their outcomes back into concrete situations such as job searching, changing roles, entrepreneurship and industry shifts.
Outside CEO Forum, Moledao is preparing a practical column focused on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. Liu is expected to share experience from her exchange background, including project building, exchange listings, listing compliance, market monitoring and post-listing operations for project teams. Timing and registration details will be released through Moledao’s official channels.
The article added that a replay of the eighth CEO Forum and information on upcoming events will be released later.