Jeffrey Huang is an entertainer, serial entrepreneur, and DeFi pioneer. He is the founder of Cream Finance. He's very popular for being a member of the Taiwanese hip-hop group, L.A. Boyz. He also founded a Taiwanese entertainment company, Machi 17 in 2017 and Mithril Cash in 2018. ^[1][2]

Education

Jeffrey Huang studied at the Art Center in Pasadena and graduated from University High School (Irvine, California).

Career

LA Boyz

At the age of 18, Jeffrey Huang joined the Taiwanese hip hop group, L.A. Boyz, with his brother Stan Huang and cousin Steven Lin. They learned to dance from parties around Orange County and Los Angeles, and borrowed their sense of style from Compton and South-Central LA. They were first discovered and signed by Pony Canyon Records. The group is single-handedly responsible for bringing hip hop to Taiwan. Their first album, SHIAM! 閃, sold 130,000 copies and subsequent releases were met with similar success. They released 16 albums in total and were active for seven years.

The group gained popularity shortly after a pop group that was ruling the scene called Little Tigers dissolved due to a member getting drafted. They were profiled in the Los Angeles Times in 1993 in an article titled: "Rapping to a Bicultural Beat: Dancing Trio From Irvine--the L.A. Boyz--Scores a Hit in Taiwan." ^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]}

Awards

LA Boyz were nominated for Singapore's Billboard Awards Best Performance Group category, Hong Kong Billboard Awards Best New Artist category and have been praised at the Golden Melody Awards. Steven Lin won Best Mandarin Male Singer in the 2005 Golden Melody Awards for his solo career.

Breakup

The group broke up to pursue other interests. Steven Lin pursued a solo career and became an orthopedic surgeon, while Jeffrey Huang entered into the tech business, starting an Internet company that merged with a Japanese software company in a $60 million dollar deal. Huang also owns an ESports team and has participated in League of Legends tournaments at the professional level under the name Big Brother.^[10]

17 Machi Entertainment

Jeffrey Huang co-founded the startup 17 Media in 2015. Singapore-based dating app Paktor acquired a controlling stake in 17 Media in late 2016 and the companies merged to form M17 Entertainment. In November 2020 Jeffrey sold his shares back to M17 to focus on new ventures and they rebranded as 17Live.^[11]

Cryptocurrency

Huang's first venture in crypto was Mithril (MITH), a blockchain competitor to WeChat named after Mithril, a powerful and malleable metal from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He considered naming it Uru, the metal that makes up Thor’s hammer, but it didn’t roll off the tongue.

In 2019, he started Cream Finance, an open financial system built on smart contracts. The platform was sewn together from pieces of other quality DeFi projects including Compound, Balancer, Curve Finance Uniswap, and BlackHoleSwap. In late 2020, they announced a collaboration with Andre Cronje and the yEarn ecosystem.

He also launched an Algorithmic stablecoin called Mithril Cash (MIC) that is based off Basis Cash. The coin is inactive now.^[16]

When entering the crypto space, Huang dug back to his hip hop roots, dropping apps called "Lit" and "Swag", the "YOLO" Alpha reward pool for Cream Finance (cryptocurrency), which is itself an homage to Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)" and even the ticker for Mithril Cash is $MIC. To make it official, Method Man rapped the Cream Finance theme song. ^[12]

NFTs

In August 2022, he came into the limelight when he sold 13 MAYCs for about $350,000 and transferred 1,496,600 ApeCoins to Binance within nearly a week. He stated on Twitter that he sold his MAYCs because he was not interested in staking for $APE, but he still wants to keep all his BAYCs. To this date, he holds NFTs worth $9,526,662 in his Ethereum wallet associated with machibigbrother.eth . ^[13][14][15]

Personal Life

Jeffrey Huang moved to the US with his family when he was only two years old. Musically, Huang was inspired by the defiant attitudes of early rap acts like the Beastie Boys, NWA, Run–D.M.C., Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine. As an advocate of Freedom of speech and Democracy, he was able to find that same attitude in the cryptocurrency and DeFi (Decentralized Finance) space.