The first market Dato' Eric Cheng studied was visible through a shopfront. Growing up as the eldest of four children in Singapore's Chinatown, he would pass money changers and watch the buy and sell prices move. The spread intrigued him. Two numbers could describe the same currency, and the sliver between them could become a business. Long before property, crypto exchanges or venture capital entered his biography, he had noticed the durable fact beneath all three: value depends on timing, context and the person prepared to act.
He did not inherit a family company or a ready pool of capital. At 20, he chose work that paid comparatively well for someone his age and became a flight steward. He stayed for more than eight years. In the polished shorthand of entrepreneurship, this can look like the chapter before the story begins. In practice, the cabin was a business school with narrow aisles. It taught him presentation, composure, standards and the small acts that make service feel personal.
A chance encounter supplied the nudge. Cheng has recalled meeting a monk on a flight who told him he was destined to accomplish something significant. Prophecy is an unreliable career adviser, but timing occasionally dresses well. Cheng left the airline and entered real estate, a field where the product was larger, the stakes higher and the customer still wanted to feel understood.
A sales floor with a very long runway
Property suited him. He learned pricing, negotiation, presentation and strategy at a large Singapore agency. Within his first two years as an agent, he had made his first million. Accounts of the peak size of his organization differ, but they agree on the shape of the achievement: he went from individual seller to leader of a large network. The lesson was no longer how to close one transaction. It was how to build a system in which thousands of other people could perform.
In 2009 he launched his own agency. It grew into a group spanning property services, development, consultancy, valuation and asset management. That same year, he published Get Rich Through Property Investment, which appeared on The Sunday Times bestseller list. Books on business leadership and property investment in Asia followed. Writing gave his method a public vocabulary: preparation, negotiation, market selection and the conviction that knowledge should precede the wager.
“I always believe that your network is equal to your net worth.”Dato' Eric Cheng
Awards arrived, including Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2011 Asia Pacific Entrepreneurship Awards, recognition among JCI Singapore's Ten Outstanding Young Persons, and a Platinum Category Award at the 2012 Promising SME 500 Awards. They marked the visible result. The more revealing artifact is his rule for partners: trust, urgency and quality. Trust protects the relationship. Urgency preserves the opportunity. Quality prevents speed from sending an invoice later.
The books also show an entrepreneur turning experience into instruction while the experience was still accumulating. His first volume dealt with the practical mechanics of buying, negotiating and renting property. The second widened the aperture to mentality and leadership. The third looked across Asian markets. Their titles promised wealth with all the subtlety of a billboard, but the contents emphasized workaday questions: Have you prepared? Do you understand the country? Can you spot the common pitfall before paying for it? Cheng has always enjoyed a bold facade. Behind it, he keeps a checklist.
A partnership has to survive difficult information and competing incentives.
Opportunity has a half-life. The team must be able to respond while it is alive.
Fast work still has to endure, whether the material is concrete or code.
The house has several voices
Cheng's property ritual is delightfully inconvenient. When a place interests him, he may return three to five times in a day: morning, afternoon, evening, midnight, sometimes 3am. He says houses communicate with him, and that their voice changes with the hour. Strip away the poetry and there is a rigorous field test. Light shifts. Traffic fades. Neighbours become audible. Privacy changes. A floor plan admired at lunch may irritate at bedtime.
His homes reflect that mixture of theater and use. He has talked about positioning pools for privacy, arranging multigenerational spaces so parents and children remain connected, and preserving original doors in a restored terrace house. He likes a “wow” factor, but he also asks whether daily life works. The flourish gets attention; the plan has to keep earning it.
Technology, to him, cannot carry the whole experience. He learned this after being early to install touchscreens in properties, only to watch the feature become ordinary. His conclusion was blunt: technology expires. A screen that looks futuristic at launch can date a house faster than stone, proportion or shade. He did not reject new tools. He put them in their place. The lasting product was the feeling of ease, not the gadget used to produce it. It is a useful restraint from someone who would soon invest in technology itself.
Seven, meanwhile, became his private punctuation mark. Licence plates and phone numbers carried 7777. He once bought a property because its address was seven. The attachment eventually supplied the name Sevens Group. Luck may have furnished the name, but the company was built around design, quality and service. Cheng even joked that its Singapore and Australian ambitions could leave one country for each of his two sons to manage.
“If a risk isn't calculated, then it's pure gambling.”Dato' Eric Cheng
From physical foundations to digital rails
The jump into technology was less abrupt than it appeared. Cheng held a diploma in computer studies, and one of his early ventures developed software and hardware to improve property operations. Buildings had taught him to think in systems: architects, builders, regulators, buyers and money must arrive in a workable sequence. Financial technology simply replaced some of the concrete with code.
service
sales
and design
and CapitalX
In May 2018, he acquired FX Trade Financial and its affiliated cryptocurrency exchange, BitTrade. The latter was one of a small number of domestic exchanges licensed by Japan's Financial Services Agency. The transaction made Cheng the first foreign investor to own and operate one fully. A few months later, Huobi Japan took a majority stake in BitTrade. Cheng had moved into a highly regulated market, found a strategic buyer and moved again.
That year he also launched CapitalX to invest in applications of blockchain. In 2019, a CapitalX-led consortium acquired a majority interest in Singapore digital-asset exchange ECXX. By 2021, CapitalX was participating in a proposed custody venture as the partner expected to bring technology knowledge, experience of licensing and connections in financial technology. Cheng's role in these transactions was not the distant financier admiring a spreadsheet. It was the operator-investor bringing scar tissue from regulated exchanges.
Regulation is the unglamorous architecture of that chapter. An exchange can have polished software and eager users, yet access to a market depends on licences, identity checks, custody and the confidence of institutions. CapitalX's value in the custody proposal was described in those operational terms. The firm was expected to help with processes, requirements and the adoption of fintech systems. In other words, the investment thesis came with plumbing. Cheng had learned in property that a beautiful room still needs water pressure.
His attraction to blockchain rested on workflow as much as speculation. He described a future of streamlined, connected and transparent systems, and feared regretting a failure to enter the field early. This is the same instinct that made a Chinatown child watch currency spreads and a developer visit a house after midnight. Study the system from more than one angle. Notice where friction becomes margin. Move before the conclusion feels universal.
What actually travels
A varied career can be mistaken for restlessness. Cheng's looks more coherent when read by capability rather than sector. Airline work sharpened service. Property sales taught persuasion and pricing. Managing agents taught scale. Development demanded patience, taste and coordination. Regulated exchanges added technical and legal complexity. Venture capital asks him to combine all of it while judging people before their results are obvious.
There is an appealing contradiction in his method. He speaks about instinct, yet he revisits the house. He acts quickly, yet describes risk as something to calculate. He likes bold first impressions, yet insists on after-sales service. The tension is productive. Instinct without inspection becomes impulse. Calculation without a deadline becomes avoidance. Design without care becomes a photograph of a problem.
Family supplies the quieter measure. After selling his earlier property interests in 2014, Cheng paused, briefly, to spend time at home. Later he began bringing his sons to building sites so they could learn by proximity. He has said he hopes they might take the business further if they choose, and he has also expressed the simpler wish to spend more time with his family. Succession, in his telling, is an invitation rather than a command.
In July 2025, he appeared before a sold-out Singapore audience for a conversation about resilience, risk-taking and execution. The subject fitted. His useful story is not a straight ascent and not a collection of trophies. It is a series of rooms entered with the same questions: Who can I trust? What is changing? Where is the margin? What will the customer feel? How quickly must we move?
The markets will keep changing their numbers. Cheng has spent a career reading the spread.