Del Wang and the 23 days between confidence and crisis

Twenty-three days separated the announcement from the suspension. On 25 May 2022, Babel Finance said investors had valued it at $2 billion. On 17 June, customers learned that withdrawals and redemptions were being paused. Del Wang, its co-founder and CEO, had spent years moving toward the financial future. Suddenly, the pressing question was whether customers could get their money back in the present.

That interval gives his career an uncomfortable precision. A financing announcement can describe years of work in a few optimistic paragraphs. A withdrawal notice can undo the mood in a few sentences. Between the two sits the work of running a financial business, where an attractive account of tomorrow must survive the obligations of this afternoon.

Wang’s path to that moment began in banking, passed through payments and microfinance, and arrived at a business built around crypto assets. The later chapters include a corporate restructuring and a personal legal dispute that ended in his favor. Following the sequence matters. Otherwise, the funding round becomes the whole achievement, or the crisis becomes the whole person.

The banker before the Bitcoin business

Wang attended China Agricultural University from 2007 to 2011. His early professional life included the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, where he worked before starting fintech businesses. An agricultural university followed by a large bank is a less theatrical opening than the usual technology-founder mythology. It has the advantage of being his actual route.

Before Babel, he founded BowenPay, a payments and tokenized-points system built on Ripple, and 0fenbei, a data platform aimed at microfinance and people without access to conventional banking. These were different attempts to put financial tools to work beyond the bank branch. They also establish a continuity in his career: the technology changed, while the business remained concerned with moving, supplying, or organizing money.

BowenPay gave him an early connection to blockchain. By 2018, he and Flex Yang were building Babel Finance. Wang brought experience from banking and previous ventures; Yang became the company’s public-facing CEO during its earlier years. Together they entered a market whose enthusiasm for new assets had run ahead of the financial services available around them.

A miner cannot pay the electricity bill with conviction

Babel’s early customers included Bitcoin miners in China. Their problem was wonderfully ordinary for such an unusual industry: expenses arrived in money they needed to spend, while the assets they wanted to keep were digital. Selling Bitcoin could pay the bills, but it also meant surrendering exposure to any later rise in its price.

Borrowing against crypto offered another route. Babel could lend against holdings, helping miners obtain working capital without immediately selling their coins. A business surrounded by talk of a new monetary system had found a recognizable customer need. Somewhere beneath the vocabulary, an electricity bill was waiting.

For Wang, this was a move from one kind of financial intermediation to another. A lender connects somebody who has resources with somebody who needs them now. Crypto changed the collateral and the market rhythm. It did little to simplify the duty of making sure that money would be available when promised.

In November 2020, Wang and Yang joined Mable Jiang for a Mandarin-language episode of her 51% podcast. The conversation covered their growth, entrepreneurial experiences, Babel’s changing positioning, and the place of centralized finance alongside decentralized finance. It lasts just over an hour. The title, “Babel Finance and their Dream,” preserves the ambition of a company still explaining what it intended to become.

Banking arrives in the hiring plan

In May 2021, Babel announced a $40 million Series A backed by investors including Sequoia Capital China, Tiger Global, Dragonfly and Zoo Capital. Wang described an ambition to match the scale and breadth of Digital Currency Group in the United States. His proposed tools included investment, acquisitions and partnerships. The horizon was a financial services group with international reach.

The hiring choices made that direction tangible. Babel appointed Edmond Lau as chief financial officer that summer. Lau’s background included Citigroup, Foxconn Mobile and SF Express. Wang welcomed the corporate finance, investment and acquisition experience he would bring. Building a broader financial company required people familiar with the machinery behind one.

In September, Babel announced a Singapore business headquarters under Babel Asia and appointed Shanshan Yu its CEO. Yu had worked at Bank of Singapore, DBS and United Overseas Bank. Wang emphasized the combination of banking experience and entrepreneurship she brought to the job. The expansion put conventional finance experience close to the company’s intended institutional customers.

There is a revealing consistency here. The company was operating in crypto, but its recruitment notices spoke the language of banking: experienced executives, compliance, corporate finance, relationships. Institutions wanted access to a new asset class through an organization they could recognize. Wang was helping assemble that organization, one appointment at a time.

Twenty-three days

By May 2022, Wang was speaking as Babel’s co-founder and CEO. The next funding announcement paired an $80 million Series B with a $2 billion valuation. Jeneration Capital and 10T Holdings joined a round that also included existing investors Dragonfly and BAI Capital, alongside Circle Ventures and family offices.

“The crypto financial market is full of opportunities and hidden risks.”

Del Wang · 25 May 2022

Babel presented itself as an institutional specialist, concentrating on Bitcoin, Ether and stablecoins. Wang acknowledged the possible attraction of higher margins elsewhere while arguing for long-term development through institutional financial services. The pitch had the restraint of a banking proposition, even when the market around it could be anything but restrained.

Then came the June suspension. Babel’s notice described liquidity pressure and said redemptions and withdrawals would be temporarily halted. For a customer, the importance of the announcement lay in the action itself. A financial product had become a wait.

It is tempting to treat a large valuation as a reservoir of ready cash. The two describe different things. A valuation records the price investors assign to a stake in a company. Liquidity concerns the resources available to meet obligations when they fall due. An impressive number attached to the first offers no automatic answer to the second.

That distinction sits at the center of Wang’s story. The founder’s language reached toward an industry’s future. The customers’ claims reached toward specific assets on specific dates. A lender has to make those time horizons coexist. The calendar takes very little interest in the ambition.

The story acquires a case number

The aftermath moved into restructuring. In 2023, Babel entities sought protection in Singapore while developing a scheme combining creditors’ claims. The proposed consideration included recovery tokens or contingent value rights. A recovery coin represented a claim on a fund intended to receive proceeds from investments, future contributions and possible litigation recoveries.

Parastate objected to aspects of the process, including disclosure and creditor classification. The court permitted a scheme meeting to proceed. These were questions about handling an insolvent group and its creditors, with procedures and proposed recoveries replacing the old language of expansion. A business once describing its next market was now negotiating its existing obligations.

Separately, Parastate pursued Wang personally over a $5 million investment. On 1 September 2026, Singapore’s High Court dismissed its remaining claims in their entirety. The claims concerned dishonest assistance, fraudulent misrepresentation and unlawful means conspiracy. That outcome belongs in any account of his career, alongside the collapse that gave rise to the dispute.

The same judgment records his appointment as CEO on 6 December 2021 and removal as a Babel Holding director on 28 December 2022. The legal victory concerns the particular claims brought against him. It does not establish that Babel’s customers recovered their money or settle every question arising from the company’s failure.

Two clocks, one promise

Wang’s public outlook before the crisis combined a long-term belief in Bitcoin with an acknowledgment of short-term speculation. He saw a role for financial products that would help institutions manage uncertainty and cash flow. The attraction of that work was its practicality: companies participating in a volatile market still needed ways to plan.

His earlier ventures make the trajectory more interesting than a simple leap from banking into speculation. Payments, microfinance data and crypto lending all concern access to financial activity. Across them runs the hope that a new arrangement can serve people or businesses that an existing arrangement serves imperfectly.

The harder question arrives after access has been granted. Who holds the assets? What obligations have been created? When can someone leave? Those questions can seem less exciting than a new market, right up to the moment they become the only questions anybody asks.

Wang’s career now contains both the ambition of building Babel and the consequences of its failure, followed by a favorable judgment in a specific dispute. There is no need to force those chapters into a tidy moral. The dates already do useful work. They show how quickly confidence can meet a deadline, and how much longer it can take to decide a claim.