On the day the nominees for the 37th Golden Melody Awards were announced, the Taiwanese crypto community not only saw music charts, but also a familiar name in a list of singing groups—not a band, but a song: "Miffy".
The electric folk duo Our Shame is nominated for Best Vocal Group for the first time with their second album, *Hidden Album*. The song "Miffy," included on the album, was written in memory of Chen Mei-hui, a cryptocurrency financial analyst who tragically died in a highway accident in 2024. The ceremony will be held on June 27th at the Taipei Arena.
It's worth noting that this year's Golden Melody Awards explicitly prohibits entries with entirely AI-generated music. This new rule has sparked heated discussions within the industry, but conversely, it also adds an invisible weight to works like "Miffy": this is a song written by a human, dedicated to a real person, used to combat forgetting.
Who are Ao and Shan: An electric folk duo and their "Hidden Album"
Our Shame consists of vocalist Estelle H. and drummer Isan. Their music spans folktronica, synth-pop, and electric folk, overlapping the warmth of acoustic guitars with the detachment of synthesizers, and incorporating elements of samples, UK garage, and techno to create a sound that is both intimate and calm.
The album *Hidden Album* was released digitally on August 4, 2025, with a physical release in early September. Xiao Ao served as the main producer. The album title itself is a double entendre: firstly, it refers to the "hidden album" on a modern person's phone that they don't want others to see; secondly, it refers to "hidden tracks" in the album concept. These two meanings combine to point to the album's core theme—those private experiences hidden from public view.
The album explores themes including self-harm, forbidden love, cryptocurrency crimes, and various forms of addiction. The international production team spans four continents.
- British mixing engineer Jay Reynolds
- Japanese rapper ASOBOiSM
- French electronics producer Odd People Club
- American Grammy mixing engineer Brian Elgin
- Taiwanese R&B creator BRADD
Producers Wu Jianlong, Li Wang, and Bi Zhanying were also nominated for awards this year for their album "Hidden Album." The significance of this album in the music industry may go far beyond a nomination—it is a deliberately preserved record.
The core image of "Miffy": "as if there were light".
"Miffy" was composed by Hsiao-Ao, with the spirit of Chen Mei-Hui as its main theme. The core image of the chorus, "as if there is light," comes from a word left by Chen Mei-Hui in an interview before her death. Hsiao-Ao directly wrote it into the center of the melody, making it the brightest and most somber line in the whole song.
When Xiao Ao talked about her motivation for creating the work, she said:
"I was deeply moved by her spirit. Even though the process of changing the world is very difficult, the occasional glimmer of light is the driving force that keeps me going."
On an imagery level, "Miffy" is not an elegy of lamentation, but rather a relay of spirit. CryptoCity editors described the song's emotional space in a report as "a virtual night of scams, only you can catch their homelessness"—a world where money laundering chains, scam victims, cryptocurrency data, and the darkness of night coexist, and Miffy's role within it is that of someone who chooses to stay and bring light into the darkness.
The minimalist aesthetic of the imagery "as if there were light" perfectly captures the essence of what Chen Meihui did: her work was unglamorous, her reports were for the police, not the media; her name was often not mentioned after a case was solved, but frequently appeared at the center of controversy after the case collapsed. The song's choice to focus solely on that light, omitting the details of darkness, is the most precise way to pay homage.
Why Miffy: A Silent Segment in Taiwan's Crypto Community
Chen Mei-hui is a social activist and one of the few investigators in Taiwan who primarily uses cryptocurrency analysis to investigate crimes. She has long been involved in land justice, judicial reform, and the protection of fraud victims, and has used blockchain on-chain tracking technology to assist in solving numerous specific cases.
Among her most well-known achievements are the money flow tracking of "Creative Private" child pornography cases and the analysis reports on underground money exchange networks used by organized crime—reports that directly became key evidence for police investigations. In short, what she did was: to restore anonymous transactions to traceable individuals.
In 2024, Chen Meihui was involved in a rear-end collision on a national highway and died unexpectedly. However, her death was not just a traffic accident from the beginning.
Prior to the incident, she had just been reported by criminal investigators to the prosecutor's office for leaking confidential information; among those in the car at the time was Huang Yaowen (A-Fu), co-founder of Xrex, who was himself a defendant in the "A-Fu Wallet" money laundering case. These two overlapping clues ignited a conspiracy theory storm within Taiwan's crypto community and civil society. The Prosecutor General of Taiwan subsequently ordered a thorough investigation, and the case quickly became a focal point for the crypto community, the judiciary, and the media.
At the time, BlockTempo News continuously followed the case, covering the initial revelation of Miffy's death, Xrex's official statement response, and the subsequent investigation by the Attorney General. Xrex's statement, "May Miffy no longer be harmed by speculation," itself became part of the controversy.
The case of Chen Meihui has not been fully clarified to this day, but the currency flow report she left behind, the protest sites she visited, and her phrase "as if there was light" have become an indelible symbol.
The intersection of the crypto world and the art world: When Miffy was announced on the Golden Melody Awards stage
This is probably the first time in the history of Taiwanese pop music that a song featuring a cryptocurrency crime investigator has been written and nominated for a Golden Melody Award.
For readers, the significance of "Miffy's" nomination lies not in the music itself, but in the fact that it allows this story to be told anew in another language. News reports have a shelf life of days, or even hours; but a song can lie dormant in Spotify's algorithm for two years, only to be played again late at night, prompting people to search for "who is Chen Meihui?"
Art's intervention in memory is often more indelible than news. For the ongoing money laundering case, for the families who have not yet received the final investigation results, and for those fraud victims who were protected by Miffy's cryptocurrency reports but were unaware of the scam, the existence of this song is another form of demand for justice.
Art has become a rare medium for commemoration within the crypto community. The Golden Melody Awards stage may be the first time Chen Meihui's name has been publicly read aloud outside of news and courtroom contexts—with melody, with "as if there is light," with a musician's quietest tribute to another reformer.
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