Edison Lim

Edison Lim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Based (BasedApp), a Web3 consumer SuperApp, and Co-Founder of Suberra, a crypto payment acceptance platform. His career also includes engineering leadership roles at Zilliqa and Alta Exchange. [1]​[2]​

Early Life & Education

Edison Lim pursued a Master's degree in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon University. [1] Prior to that, he completed his Bachelor of Science at Singapore Management University, graduating Summa Cum Laude. [2]​

Career

Early Career and Education

Edison Lim worked as an intern at Salesforce in Singapore in 2013 and at Alexandra Health System from May to July 2015, where he held an analytics position. In 2016, he joined Accenture in Singapore, working on corporate finance and the implementation of technology information systems, including SAP, which served as a foundation for his later work with digital assets.

From January 2017 to May 2018, Lim was a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University, supporting a course on data science and big data that covered Hadoop, Spark, Python, and Pig. He also worked as a Software Engineer at the university from August 2017 to June 2018. His responsibilities included developing data repositories, maintaining code for extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes and data mining, and managing scheduled data loads.

Zilliqa

Lim entered the Web3 industry around 2018, developing software for smart contracts and digital asset custody systems using Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX).

He joined Zilliqa in July 2018 as a Developer, working on the blockchain network's mainnet implementation and software tools for developers. His contributions included TestRPC, a JavaScript software development kit (SDK), testing frameworks, test suites, documentation, and tutorials. He also conducted workshops on smart contract development using Scilla, Zilliqa's smart contract programming language.

In February 2019, Lim became Engineering Lead for Applications. In this role, he led the development of a custody solution using Intel SGX and a tokenization application for hg.exchange, a private securities exchange in Singapore. He served as the technical liaison between the exchange and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) during the licensing process. The exchange obtained a Capital Markets Services (CMS) license.

Lim also worked on Project Proton, an initiative associated with Mindshare that applied blockchain technology to programmatic advertising. As lead architect and developer, he worked on a system that used smart contracts in advertising operations. A test campaign involving PepsiCo reported a 28% improvement in efficiency.

From December 2019 to August 2021, Lim served as Head of Engineering at Zilliqa. He led teams working on applications and advertising technology projects within the company and its associated businesses, including Aqilliz. His responsibilities also included research into differential privacy and federated learning, as well as participation in Project Ubin Phase V, an initiative involving blockchain infrastructure and financial institutions. The work included testing payment applications and developing infrastructure according to production standards used by banks.

Alta Exchange

Following his work at Zilliqa, Lim led engineering at Alta Exchange, a regulated private securities exchange in Singapore. His work involved custody software and a tokenization platform. During this period, the company engaged with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and obtained a Capital Markets Services license.

Suberra

Lim co-founded Suberra in September 2021, a company that developed cryptocurrency payment acceptance tools for online merchants. Its products supported cryptocurrency payments at checkout and recurring subscription transactions, including integrations for online commerce platforms such as Shopify.

Suberra also contributed to Ethereum payment infrastructure through EIP-5827, a proposed standard for extending token allowances to support automatic recurring payments. Lim's tenure as a co-founder ran from September 2021 to December 2023.

Based (BasedApp)

In June 2023, Lim co-founded Based, also known as BasedApp, a consumer application for cryptocurrency trading, equities, and prediction markets. The application integrates these activities through a self-custodial wallet and includes a Visa debit card that allows users to spend stablecoins. The company is headquartered in Singapore and uses infrastructure associated with Hyperliquid.

In April 2025, the company had approximately $200,000 remaining in its bank account following an incident involving card fraud, according to Lim. He stated that the team reduced the scope of its application and released a version focused on trading approximately two months later. The change shifted the product's emphasis from Suberra's payment services to trading and consumer financial applications.

In February 2026, Based announced an $11.5 million Series A funding round led by Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and Karatage. The fundraising process began in the fourth quarter of 2025 and concluded in February 2026. In 2022, when the company operated under the Suberra name and focused on cryptocurrency payments, the team had announced $2.7 million raised across two funding rounds.

At the time of the Series A announcement, Based reported more than 100,000 registered users, 30,000 monthly active users across five regions, approximately $40 billion in cumulative trading volume, and nearly $14 million in revenue. Lim stated that the company employed 15 people and planned to expand its workforce, with recruitment across marketing, product development, and engineering, as well as artificial intelligence engineering and legal counsel specializing in payments regulation.

Product and Infrastructure Development

Based expanded its technology offerings through Based Cloud, a service that allows partners to deploy customized interfaces for perpetual trading and wallet applications using the company's infrastructure. HyENA, a perpetuals trading platform operating within the Hyperliquid ecosystem and built with Based's technology, processed more than $1.5 billion in trading volume within months of launch.

On June 5, 2026, Based launched Based Research, a product providing data on perpetual markets on Hyperliquid. Its initial features included seven-day average funding rates, long carry profit and loss (P&L), funding-rate arbitrage strategies, and changes in open interest.

On August 13, 2026, Based introduced Infinity in research preview. The system combined a reasoning model trained further on publicly available Hyperliquid on-chain trading data with an agentic framework connected to 16 live data sources. A planner model routed user queries to relevant sources. Infinity was made available through the Research section of the Based mobile application, the company's website, and ai.based.one.

Lim has described agentic commerce as a future area of development for Based. He has also discussed an intended market extending beyond active cryptocurrency traders to include people who conduct financial transactions but have limited experience with cryptocurrency. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}

Interviews

Edison Lim Discusses Based’s Shift to Hyperliquid and AI Payments #01

On Mar 22, 2026, Edison Lim, co-founder of Based, was interviewed on Drops, a podcast published on When Shift Happens YouTube channel. The discussion covered his professional background in the cryptocurrency industry, the development of Based, and his views on the relationship between digital asset infrastructure and artificial intelligence.

Lim began working in the blockchain industry in 2018 as an engineer at Zilliqa, where he contributed to the development of consensus protocols and applications. He later became involved in decentralized finance (DeFi) and co-founded Suberra, a protocol operating within the Terra ecosystem. Following Terra’s collapse in May 2022, Lim reported losing approximately 95% of his net worth. The event also affected the protocol’s operations and led the team to reconsider its business model.

Subsequent development efforts included a payment gateway designed to facilitate stablecoin transactions and a non-custodial smart contract wallet linked to a Visa payment card. The team encountered challenges involving merchant adoption, market competition, and fraudulent transactions. In 2023, it explored integrating wallet and payment services with trading functionality before concentrating its product development on the Hyperliquid ecosystem.

According to Lim, this change in direction involved developing a trading platform for retail-pro traders, a user segment characterized by trading activity involving relatively large positions and a preference for interfaces that provide access to advanced trading information. The platform supports trading in digital assets and other markets available through the Hyperliquid ecosystem.

During the interview, Lim reported that the platform had recorded approximately $40 billion in trading volume over a period of eight months. He discussed the company's successive product changes and described revenue generation, market demand, and product-market fit as factors in evaluating business direction.

Lim also discussed the potential use of financial applications by autonomous artificial intelligence agents. He outlined a possible development path in which digital wallets could provide agents with controlled access to trading and payment functions. The proposed applications include automated transactions, payments for computing resources, and virtual cards used to make purchases on behalf of users. He described the development of financial infrastructure for both human users and AI agents as a future direction for the company. ^[5]

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