Michael Feng is a co-founder and a board member of Hummingbot, an open-source framework created for building cryptocurrency trading strategies and bots. He is also the co-founder and a board member of CoinAlpha, a fintech software engineering company that created Hummingbot. ^[1][2]

Early Life

Michael Feng was born in China but grew up in Florida as his parents went to graduate school in the US. ^[3]

Education

Michael enrolled in the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania from 1997 to 2001. It was here that he earned his Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees, and also participated in a half-year study abroad program, where he studied Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University. ^[3]

In 2010, Michael joined a postgraduate program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.He graduated in 2012 with a Master of Science in Management Science and Engineering. ^[3]

Career

Finance Career

From July 2001 to March 2007, Michael worked as an Analyst/Associate at Citi in New York and Hong Kong. During his five-year and nine-month tenure, he specialized in structuring and trading CDOs backed by residential and commercial mortgages. ^[4]

Following that, from April 2007 to September 2008, Michael served as a Vice President at J.P. Morgan in Hong Kong. He was recruited to establish JPMorgan's CDO business in Asia, although his plans were disrupted by the unfolding financial crisis, leaving him “disillusioned and depressed”. ^[4][5]

Michael Feng's feeling of discontent following the financial crisis stemmed from his original attraction to finance, driven by the potential to use math and financial engineering to create better products. However, he found himself working on financial products that contributed to the crisis and the suffering of many. To pursue a fresh start, Michael left his finance job and enrolled in a master's program in engineering at Stanford University. Interactions with classmates and exposure to computer science and entrepreneurship courses enabled his transition from finance to technology, empowering him to embark on a new career path. ^[5]

“After the financial crisis, I was really disillusioned and depressed. What originally drew me into finance was the use of math, statistics and financial engineering to create better products that were more optimal than what previously existed, but instead the opposite had happened. I had spent my entire career thus far creating products that cost millions of people their homes and jobs. It was a horrible feeling."

"I was fortunate to get into an engineering master's program at Stanford, so I quit my cushy finance job and went back to school. Meeting my Stanford classmates and taking classes in computer science and entrepreneurship really helped me make the transition from finance to tech.”

Tech Career

Starting his tech career, Michael joined FourWinds Capital Management in Hong Kong as a Director from March 2009 to June 2010. His role involved promoting clean energy private equity funds to Asian and Australian investors. ^[4]

Moving forward, Michael became the Co-founder and CEO of doxIQ, a document analytics startup based in San Francisco, CA, from November 2012 to July 2015. doxIQ gained recognition for winning VentureBeat's GrowthBeat 2014 startup competition and developing one of the first apps, called Docmunch, that utilized computer vision to detect and extract tabular data from PDF files. ^[4]

Following the acquisition of doxIQ by Nitro, Inc., Michael assumed the position of Director of Product at Nitro, Inc. in the San Francisco Bay Area from Aug 2015 to Feb 2017. In this role, he led Nitro's product management team and oversaw the flagship product, Nitro Pro. ^[4]

During his time at doxIQ and Nitro, he quickly gained interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies after the release of the Ethereum whitepaper. He realized the use potential cases of smart contracts, especially in terms of implementing financial products on the blockchain, which he thought would be revolutionizing - leading him to start a company in the web3 industry. ^[5]

“It wasn't until Ethereum whitepaper came out in 2014 that I really started paying attention. I realized that smart contracts had the ability to put financial products like derivatives, loans and everything else on the blockchain, which could make a more efficient, transparent and open system. Having experienced the 2008 financial crisis firsthand, I knew that one of the things that exacerbated the collapse was the fact that no one knew what their exposure to Lehman Brothers truly was.”

Blockchain Career

Since August 2017, Michael served as a Board Member and co-founder at CoinAlpha, Inc., a company supporting the Hummingbot ecosystem. CoinAlpha offers market making and engineering services to exchanges, token issuers, and blockchain protocols. ^[4]
Since Oct 2021, Michael has been working full-time as a Board Member at the Hummingbot Foundation. This not-for-profit organization maintains the open source Hummingbot code repository and oversees the HBOT token governance system with the mission of democratizing high-frequency trading. ^[4]