This man sold his house, luxury cars and spent his savings to buy a $50m crypto exchange

Photo Credit: Eric Cheng

Singaporean entrepreneur Eric Cheng pulled out all the stops to raise the US$50 million he needed to be a big player in the crypto world. He sold five of his luxury cars: two Rolls-Royces, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and a Porsche. He also sold a multi-million-dollar house and added the profits, along with a chunk of his savings, to the pot.

With the cash, Cheng, the 43-year-old founder and CEO of real estate developer Sevens Group, bought Japan’s FX Trade Financial and its cryptocurrency-focused affiliate BitTrade last month.

He has no plans of turning back.

The purchase was one of the biggest investments Cheng ever made. It also made him the first foreigner to fully own a Japanese crypto exchange.

When I met him at a coffee joint in Singapore, he was decked in designer brands from head to toe. He was sporting a glossy combed-back hairstyle and wearing a black Balenciaga t-shirt, brown Bottega Veneta plimsolls, and an automatic Richard Mille watch.

Cheng’s taste for expensive fashion didn’t baffle me, given the kind of opulent lives that many in the crypto space lead. As we talked, however, his soft-spoken demeanor and easygoing nature convinced me that he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as his peers. And maybe that’s because he had made his fortune in the property market.

Some luck, some grit

Cheng came from humble beginnings. He’s the eldest son of a family of six who used to stay in public housing at Upper Cross Street. His mom was a homemaker, while his dad held jobs in the food and beverage and security industries.

His younger years were unremarkable: after graduating with a diploma in computer studies in 1994, he performed his mandatory two-year military service. Then he entered the corporate world, starting his career as a flight attendant at Singapore Airlines.

Cheng says that like most people, he settled in his new job and became “comfortable.”

Years flew by, and in 2002, he began to feel restless. After a chance encounter with a monk on a plane who told him he was meant to achieve great things in life, Cheng gathered the courage to quit his job as an air steward. That same year, he got acquainted with a property broker who convinced him to join the real estate industry. “I needed to make a change in my life and step out of my comfort zone,” he says.

He continues, “A large plane has over 300 seats, and I was only taking home a fixed income even though I served that same number of people over and over again. I thought that if I were to converse with that same number of people as an agent, the amount I could earn would be beyond my calculations, so I decided to do it.”

His timing was just right as Singapore’s property market was booming. Cheng worked at Property Agent firm PropNex, with his fleet of agents growing to as many as 1,800 people at one time. He later engaged in flipping properties to earn more.

As he grew his network of contacts and amassed a sizeable “pot of gold,” he set up a property development firm in 2005 and started building and selling boutique residential homes. The rest is history.

From property to crypto

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