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

Early Life and Education

Jeffrey Huang was born in Taiwan on November 7, 1972. Jeffrey Huang moved to the US with his family when he was only two years old. He studied at the Art Center in Pasadena and graduated from University High School (Irvine, California). 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.

Career

LA Boyz

At 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. ^[4]

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 was nominated for Singapore's Billboard Awards Best Performance Group category, Hong Kong Billboard Awards Best New Artist category and has 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. At the same time, 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.

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.^[10]

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-making 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) which is based on Basis Cash. The coin is inactive now.^[13] 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. ^[11]

NFTs

In August 2022, Huang 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. As of June 2023, he holds NFTs worth $9,526,662 in his Ethereum wallet associated with machibigbrother.eth. ^[12]

Defamation Lawsuit against ZachXBT

A conflict emerged between blockchain investigator ZachXBT and Jeffery Huang, culminating in legal action. As a result, Huang initiated a lawsuit against ZachXBT on June 17, 2023. The lawsuit came after Huang accused ZachXBT of "publishing and maliciously promoting an article that falsely presented him as a criminal that had embezzled millions of dollars of cryptocurrency and manipulated markets". Huang requested that the post and associated tweets be taken down by ZachXBT, but the latter refused. ^[14][15][16]

Huang's lawsuit pertains to an article titled "22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang)" published on June 16, 2022. The author, ZachXBT, claimed that Huang, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur, and former musician, allegedly embezzled 22,000 ETH ($37 million) from Formosa Financial, a treasury management platform, in 2018. The article also discussed Huang's involvement in multiple unsuccessful cryptocurrency and NFT projects since then. ^[17][18]

While announcing the lawsuit to his followers on Twitter, Huang wrote:

“I have consistently maintained that the allegations in his article are false,  look forward to proving through the lawsuit that @ZachXBT unlawfully defamed me."^[19]

ZachBXT responded to the lawsuit by saying:

It’s unfortunate I have to make this thread but I am being sued by MachiBigBrother for an article I published in June 2022, Today Machi filed the defamation lawsuit. The lawsuit is baseless and an attempt to chill free speech. I intend to fight back & defend free speech. ^[20][20]

Huang's Blur Trading

In 2023, Huang experienced a significant loss in Ethereum (ETH) while attempting to farm tokens using Bored Ape non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Huang actively participated in the trading activities on the Blur NFT marketplace, which involves the buying and selling of a large number of NFTs to earn Blur tokens as rewards. Huang incurred realized losses of approximately 2,400 ETH, equivalent to $4.2 million.