Michael Zhao’s
theory of the room

Michael Zhao had been inside his own golf venue more than a hundred times in six months. He was choosing the details, checking how a place imagined on paper felt when someone actually walked through it. There were simulators, private rooms, somewhere to eat, somewhere to talk. The founder of a digital finance business was spending a considerable amount of time on a business with actual walls.

For Zhao, the walls had a purpose. MyGolf Dubai was intended to give people a reason to meet and a reason to return. A golf swing supplied the initial excuse. What happened between swings mattered too. “My Vision was not to be just a facility but a social networking concept,” he said. In a city where a conversation can quickly become a transaction, he was making room for a longer acquaintance.

It is an unusually useful place to begin understanding the founder and CEO of Klickl. His other business brings together accounts, payments and digital assets. The two ventures share a practical question: once people arrive, what makes the place useful enough for them to stay? A simulator and a financial account offer rather different answers. Zhao has put his time into both.

A trader takes the long way round

Before he was designing places for other people to gather, Zhao moved through several corners of finance. His career includes UBS, China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, China Merchants Bank and Intesa Sanpaolo. He holds a master’s degree in electronic engineering and finance from the University of Florida. The combination puts a technical education beside experience in trading, public institutions and commercial banking.

The sequence matters. A trading desk teaches someone to pay attention to movement. A reserve-management institution introduces a different scale and a different set of obligations. Commercial banking brings its own customers and constraints. Zhao’s later enthusiasm for digital assets arrived with this institutional background already in place. He had worked within the systems he would eventually try to connect.

In 2017, he began the business associated with International Digital Currency Markets, or IDCM, and the VGPay crypto payments operation. He later served as founder, CEO and director of Crypto 1 Acquisition Corp, a Nasdaq-listed acquisition company, during 2021 and 2022. His entrepreneurial career kept returning to finance, though the organizational form changed. Exchange, payments business, acquisition vehicle: each provided a different way into the same broad industry.

Dubai was supposed to be a visit

Zhao’s account of arriving in the Middle East begins with an invitation to exhibit at a technology event. His team was based in Hong Kong. Dubai presented a mix of entrepreneurs and a regulatory environment that persuaded them to look more closely. A business trip became a reason to study the local rules and consider staying.

He described seeing a gap between the region’s flows of capital and talent and the everyday financial services available to support them. His proposed combination was concrete: a global account, card services and a compliant digital currency wallet. The appeal lay in putting familiar functions within reach of the same customer.

There is a revealing restraint in that list. An account, a card and a wallet are ordinary objects in the customer’s life. They carry less glamour than the language surrounding crypto. Zhao was describing a product through the jobs it would have to perform. The ambition was international; the starting point was the inconvenience of getting ordinary financial tasks done.

Permission has a date

In September 2022, Klickl received in-principle approval from Abu Dhabi Global Market to operate as a virtual asset broker-dealer and custody provider. Around that period, the group adopted the Klickl name. The explanation was cheerfully literal: it referred to the sound of coins clicking together. Even a company dealing in digital money could appreciate an old-fashioned jingle.

Zhao’s position on regulation was blunt. “the regulated route is the only route,” he said. He connected that position to risk control and compliance after turbulence in crypto markets. It was a statement of how he intended to build a lasting business, with permission and oversight part of its operating conditions.

The next date is specific: 16 April 2024. Klickl International Limited’s Financial Services Permission appears in the FSRA public register under number 220070. The distinction between preliminary approval and permission is central to the chronology. An intention had acquired a formal operating milestone.

By May, Zhao was setting out plans to bring financial infrastructure products to small and medium-sized businesses. His stated aim was to connect digital and traditional financial services within the regulatory framework. For someone with his employment history, that choice has a certain continuity. The vocabulary had acquired wallets and blockchains; the responsibilities of handling somebody else’s money remained.

“the regulated route is the only route”

Michael Zhao · September 2022

Meanwhile, there was golf

MyGolf’s grand opening at Dragon Mart 2 supplied a less abstract picture of building in Dubai. In August 2022, Zhao stood alongside Dubai Sports Council secretary-general Saeed Hareb and Mubarak Bin Fahad at the venue. The equipment was ready for a ceremonial swing. A formal suit is perfectly serviceable for a photograph, although few coaches would choose it for a full round.

The venue had already held a soft opening in April. At the grand opening, its team described 14 Golfzon simulators, six private rooms, meeting space and a private dining area. Zhao spoke about welcoming golfers and non-golfers and giving like-minded people a place to meet. The design allowed for a lesson, a game, a corporate gathering or an evening with friends.

He had spotted the potential for an indoor golf model familiar in Asian cities. The original idea bundled sport, leisure, entertainment and social networking. That last item was part of the business proposition from the beginning. Food, events and private spaces gave a visitor several reasons to use the venue without requiring an impressive handicap.

The room needs people who know their job

Zhao recruited golf professional Stephen Hong to the project. Hong described being approached by the founder and becoming persuaded by the simulator-centre concept. He arrived in Dubai in July 2022 after a career that included years working in China. The attraction, in his account, was a shared vision for the facility.

That recruitment makes the venture easier to understand. A founder can identify a market opening and choose the furniture. Teaching a beginner to strike a ball calls for a different kind of expertise. Hong described a team of qualified PGA professionals and technology that let players review their swings and examine the numbers. The social proposition came with an instructional one.

At MyGolf, the equipment also changes the geography of a game. Courses such as St Andrews and Pebble Beach become indoor destinations. For a customer in Dubai, the travel involved is largely across a screen. It is an appealing small absurdity: a business built around golf reduces the need to go to a golf course. Zhao’s financial work, too, asks which parts of an established experience can be reorganized around the user.

Capital for another kind of connection

In December 2024, Klickl announced a $25 million Series A at a $125 million valuation. Web3Port Foundation and Aptos Labs led the round. Zhao said the funding would support expansion of Web3 banking services in emerging markets, including the Middle East and North Africa. The numbers marked a financing event for the company, with a defined valuation at that point in time.

His investment work runs alongside the operating business. At C1 Fund Inc., Zhao is a co-founder, vice chairman and director, and a member of the adviser’s investment committee. Najam Kidwai, another co-founder, is the fund’s president and CEO. Their professional connection also extends to Crypto 1 Acquisition Corp. The fund is a separate undertaking from running Klickl.

A 2025 conversation with Bill Qian moved between those interests: public and private markets, liquidity, regulation and the prospects for digital banking applications. Near its end, golf appeared again. So did the advice to think big and start small. The order is fitting. After the market structures and the financial machinery, there is still the question of what a founder does each day.

An account of belonging

By December 2025, Zhao was discussing an “Operating System for Future Money” alongside Klickl International CEO Dermot Mayes at a Dubai forum. The phrase gives a name to an expanding set of ambitions. Accounts and payment functions sit alongside digital assets, with a common infrastructure intended to connect them.

In April 2026, Klickl announced participation in China-UAE business activities in Beijing and a strategic cooperation agreement with ADGM. Zhao described a focus on cross-border payments, digital asset services and compliance capabilities linking Middle Eastern and Asian markets. These are stated directions for cooperation, with their value resting on what the parties subsequently build.

In his own public writing, Zhao has framed access in personal terms: the ability to send money, use investments and exercise choice over an economic future. He points to high fees, slow systems and limited opportunities as obstacles. It is a broader aspiration than bringing another person into a crypto market. His proposed customer is also someone earning, saving and sending money home.

The golf venue gives that ambition a useful physical counterpart. People need a reason to enter a place, something worthwhile to do there and enough confidence to return. Zhao has pursued those conditions through financial services and through a room with golf simulators. One involves permissions, accounts and payment networks. The other allows someone to miss a shot, laugh about it and keep talking. Both depend on what happens after the introduction.