Zhuling Chen’s quiet bet on the machinery of money

Before Zhuling Chen began building the machinery of crypto finance, he needed encouragement from someone who knew him rather better than the market did. In 2017, as he considered moving into a young and uncertain industry, his wife urged him to pursue the work if it excited him. He later described himself as conscientious, with plenty of factors to weigh. Her support helped him make the move.

It is an unusually domestic beginning for a career now associated with validators, staking tokens and institutional capital. Chen’s own account gives that encouragement considerable weight. He remembers the decision through the person who stood beside him, rather than through a price chart. For someone whose professional life involves making money productive, his definition of success leaves room for things that do not pay a yield.

“It changed my life,” he wrote of that support. Years later, another relationship would help him make another difficult professional decision. Between those two moments lies a useful way into the RockX founder’s story: the people who helped him move, and the systems he wanted to build once he did.

A factory education, applied elsewhere

Chen’s education began a long way from token economics. He studied chemical and biomolecular engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore between 2007 and 2011, with an exchange at Hamburg University of Technology. He then earned a master’s in manufacturing at MIT in 2012, followed by a research master’s in engineering systems and design at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

His early work involved processes with physical consequences. An ExxonMobil internship included chemical-process simulation and identifying wasted energy. A later collaboration with Infineon Technologies addressed opportunities to shorten factory cycle times. Before blockchain infrastructure became his business, he had worked on the rather less fashionable problem of getting existing infrastructure to function better.

Read together, those early roles suggest a connection to his later work. A factory and a financial network both invite questions about bottlenecks, coordination and dependable operation. Chen’s qualifications gave him a vocabulary for those questions before he had a blockchain company to ask them in.

The money problem that preceded the blockchain

At Roland Berger, where he worked from 2013 to 2017, Chen helped develop strategies for financial institutions and telecommunications companies in Southeast Asia. The work placed him near the organizations he would later try to bring into crypto. His route into the industry began with a practical payments problem.

In 2016, he worked on a project involving electronic money for mobile payments. It resembled a fiat-backed stablecoin in purpose, although it did not use a blockchain. Afterward, a former MIT roommate encouraged him to look more closely at blockchain technology. The sequence matters: a real financial service came first, followed by curiosity about another way to construct it.

By 2017, Chen had co-founded aelf, a public blockchain built around a cloud-computing approach. By 2018, he was also its chief operating officer. The engineer and consultant had become responsible for helping turn a technical proposition into an organization.

Leaving something you helped create

Chen stayed involved in aelf until 2021. Leaving was difficult enough that he later devoted a public reflection to it. He had helped build the project from its beginning, invested years of effort, and reached the conclusion that his contribution was becoming limited. He thought new ideas would be a better use of his time. Making that judgment did not make the departure comfortable.

A close friend helped. This was also the friend who had first brought him into crypto; Chen did not name him in the reflection. The friend had gone through a comparable departure in 2018. Chen recalled numerous calls and conversations about moving on, crediting that support with giving him courage.

There is no need to turn the episode into a tidy founder’s fable. His account allows achievement and attachment to sit together. A project can occupy years of someone’s life and still cease to be the place where that person can do useful work. Chen’s willingness to describe the difficulty makes the transition more interesting than another brisk line in a biography.

“A big lesson that I've learned in recent years is to rely on my friends.”

Zhuling Chen, reflecting on leaving aelf

A business underneath the business

RockX was founded in 2019. Chen became its chief executive in June 2021, after his departure from aelf. That distinction keeps two chapters from being squeezed into a single origin story. The company’s beginnings overlapped with his earlier venture; his move into its leadership marked a later professional transition.

In a September 2021 community conversation, he explained the motivation for co-founding RockX with friends from crypto. Building a public blockchain had shown him possibilities for returning more control of the internet to users. He wanted RockX to help secure promising proof-of-stake networks, make staking participation available to token holders and provide tools for developers.

It is work that sits underneath more visible products. Validators participate in a blockchain’s operation. Access-node APIs give developers a route to interacting with networks. A user may recognize the application on the screen while paying little attention to the infrastructure behind it. Chen chose to make that infrastructure a business.

In April 2022, RockX announced a $6 million Series A at a $30 million valuation. Amber Group led the round, with investors including Matrixport, Primitive Ventures and Draper Dragon. The company also highlighted its relationships with Lido and ssv.network. The funding attached recognizable financial backers to a proposition centered on keeping blockchain services running.

Room for the institution

By October 2022, Chen was arguing that crypto had spent too little effort educating institutions. Much of the industry faced retail users, leaving organizations with different requirements underserved. He saw an opening for RockX in that gap.

His position did not require choosing one constituency and dismissing the other. He believed institutional participation had already helped Bitcoin gain acceptance, and that proof-of-stake networks would create further reasons for organizations to become involved. The argument was about the composition of the market, as well as the technology beneath it.

That outlook helps explain why a former strategy consultant might feel at home talking about a decentralized financial system. Banks, family offices and asset managers bring questions about how a service fits into an existing operation. A working integration needs more than enthusiasm for the underlying idea. Chen’s business addresses that meeting point, where a network’s possibilities encounter an institution’s requirements.

The calendar is part of the infrastructure

Chen’s description of running a distributed team supplies a smaller, more revealing operational detail. In 2022, he wrote about RockX colleagues living in Singapore, Korea, China, Australia and parts of Europe. He enjoyed the range of cultures and experiences, while acknowledging the difficulty of ensuring everyone felt included.

The solution he described was pleasingly ordinary: digital tools, workable meeting times and a shared calendar recording holidays across the countries represented. Team members explained the meaning of those holidays to one another. Slack, ClickUp and Google helped with coordination. He also mentioned the possibility of moving into the metaverse, while conceding that the moment might be premature.

A holiday calendar is a modest object to find in a story about the future of finance. It has the advantage of solving a present problem. The anecdote shows Chen discussing inclusion through an actual management practice, with enough humor to leave the metaverse waiting outside until it is useful.

Keeping the stake, recovering the room to move

Bedrock, launched by RockX in March 2023, addressed another practical constraint: participating in staking while retaining liquidity. Its initial Ethereum offering let users earn staking rewards through a liquid token structure. RockX emphasized an open white paper and smart contracts, along with a PeckShield audit. Those were concrete features of the launch, rather than a promise that complexity had disappeared.

By August 2024, Chen was describing a broader project. Bedrock had developed from an Ethereum liquid staking product into a multi-asset protocol covering Ethereum, wrapped Bitcoin and IoTeX. He wanted to consider the common logic of staking across assets, rather than build only around one asset or process. He also discussed the team’s early technical feedback and testing work with Babylon.

The progression adds another layer to his career: from helping build a blockchain, to operating network infrastructure, to making participation in those networks more flexible. Each stage changes what the customer can do. It also adds responsibilities for the people building the service.

A patient word in a hurried market

In March 2026, as Bedrock’s CEO, Chen discussed its partnership with Cap. The conversation extended beyond staking into credit: evaluating operators, examining deal structures and deciding how to increase allocations over time. Bedrock had started with a $1 million delegation before expanding its participation.

Chen’s advice in that discussion was measured: “Start small. Make it a gradual process. Don't scale aggressively upfront.” The point was to observe how a relationship performed before committing more capital. It gives his continuing interest in financial infrastructure a distinctly operational ending: the thing must work over time.

His public career contains departures, overlapping ventures and an expanding set of technical problems. It also contains a wife’s encouragement, a friend’s patient conversations and a calendar built to make colleagues feel included. Those details give the machinery a human scale. When Chen explains how to build something that lasts, people keep turning up among the components.