Share this article

Most Influential 2021: Serey Chea

Project Bakong stands apart from other nation digital currency experiments. Chea brought Cambodia’s moonshot into being.

Updated May 11, 2023, 4:31 p.m. Published Dec 9, 2021, 8:25 p.m.
(Adam B. Levine/Pixelmind.ai)
jwp-player-placeholder

Serey Chea is deputy director general at the National Bank of Cambodia, which is taking a unique approach to a central bank digital currency (CBDC), with its Project Bakong. Chea is adamant that the nation’s digital currency, built on the Hyperledger distributed ledger, isn’t a CBDC, but is working to bring basic financial services to Cambodia, where nearly 80% of the population is unbanked.

The Complete List: CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021

Read more: Meet the Woman Behind Cambodia’s Moonshot Blockchain Project - Leah Callon-Butler

(Kevin Ross/CoinDesk)
(Kevin Ross/CoinDesk)

More For You

Pudgy Penguins: A New Blueprint for Tokenized Culture

Pudgy Title Image

Pudgy Penguins is building a multi-vertical consumer IP platform — combining phygital products, games, NFTs and PENGU to monetize culture at scale.

What to know:

Pudgy Penguins is emerging as one of the strongest NFT-native brands of this cycle, shifting from speculative “digital luxury goods” into a multi-vertical consumer IP platform. Its strategy is to acquire users through mainstream channels first; toys, retail partnerships and viral media, then onboard them into Web3 through games, NFTs and the PENGU token.

The ecosystem now spans phygital products (> $13M retail sales and >1M units sold), games and experiences (Pudgy Party surpassed 500k downloads in two weeks), and a widely distributed token (airdropped to 6M+ wallets). While the market is currently pricing Pudgy at a premium relative to traditional IP peers, sustained success depends on execution across retail expansion, gaming adoption and deeper token utility.

More For You

Crypto money laundering balloons to $82B as Chinese-language services dominate, Chainalysis says

Money Laundering (Frank van Hulst/Unsplash+/Modified by CoinDesk)

Chinese-language networks now handle a disproportionate share of global crypto money laundering flows, according to a new Chainalysis report.

What to know:

  • Onchain laundering has grown from $10 billion in 2020 to over $82 billion in 2025, Chainalysis estimates.
  • Chinese-language money laundering networks now account for roughly 20% of known illicit flows.
  • These networks rely on Telegram-based marketplaces, money mules and OTC brokers to move funds at industrial scale.