Kenta Iwasaki was making thousands of US dollars a month before he was 10 years old
Kenta Iwasaki wants to revolutionise cryptocurrency.
The 20-year-old undergraduate, who turned down offers from Stanford University and California Institute of Technology in the United States for an honour degree course at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, believes the field has stagnated.
“There really needs to be something new, a new flavour to what you can do with cryptocurrency”, otherwise the technology will be wasted on basic coin exchange, he said.
And he is not just dreaming. The whizz kid recently raised HK$382 million (US$49 million) to fund a cryptocurrency driven marketplace that aims to change an industry floundering under sinking coin values, and a crisis of confidence.
The marketplace, named Perlin, is based on a blockchain created by Iwasaki himself, a self-taught programmer who as an eight-year old was already making thousands of US dollars a month from online software he developed.
Born to a Japanese and Chinese-Indonesian couple, Iwasaki moved to Hong Kong with his family when he was four years old. He learned programming through a constant process of trial and error.
His school grades suffered as he ran businesses, while also working as a graphic designer and web developer in high school, but he decided to pursue a computer science and engineering degree with a scholarship by Li Ka Shing Foundation.
Now, Iwasaki is set to launch Perlin, which provides a new model for how cryptocurrency is valued, and how companies source cloud computing power.
