BLOCKCHAIN GOLD RUSH:
An estimated 17 million people own digital assets in Vietnam, and only India, the US and Pakistan have seen more widespread usage

As a first-year computer science student in Hanoi, Hoang Le started trading crypto from his university dorm room, egged on by his gamer friends who were making a killing.

At one point his digital holdings swelled to US$200,000 — about 50 times the average annual income in Vietnam.

However, they crashed to zero when the bottom fell out of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the past few months.