Mr Zhu said he shrugged off the criticism. On Twitter, he responded to a negative article in The Wall Street Journal by citation John F. Kennedy: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
“I have already created 75 jobs,” he said over dinner in Singapore. “At least these people like me.”
This month, Open Exchange introduced its own cryptocurrency called OX, similar to the animal. The price jumped in a few days. “Getting early 3AC vibes again,” Mr Davies tweeted on Tuesday. “Nothing compares to the energy of a startup.”
Mr Davies has personally encouraged Three Arrows’ creditors to trade their insolvency claims on the Open Exchange. In January he creditors invited at an “ad hoc 3AC meeting of creditors”. But during the conversation, Mr. Davis spoke the entire time, according to two people familiar with the matter; he ended the session just as someone was trying to ask a question.
In Barcelona last month, Mr Davies appeared relaxed and spoke admiringly of the “amazing cafes” on Las Ramblas, a busy street that cuts through the heart of the city. One Saturday night he dined late at Els Pescadors, a seafood restaurant near the beach, ordering oysters, croquettes, local wine and three rounds of whiskey.
By the end of the dinner, Mr. Davis was spouting off business ideas. In Dubai, he said, he has made inquiries about opening a chicken restaurant, possibly in the form of a cloud kitchen, without a storefront. For a while, he and Mr. Ju considered making a movie about Do Kwon and the Lunar Collapse. “Our idea was basically to make a piece about empathy,” he said. “We had a whole team that was going to produce it at Sundance or whatever.”