1 00:00:00,120 --> 00:00:03,660 Eight months later, that $250 was worth $10,000. 2 00:00:04,020 --> 00:00:10,500 And having done no research, having no idea what a theorem actually does, I quickly became a theorem expert. 3 00:00:14,610 --> 00:00:22,660 Not having enough work. Climate change. London finance a shortage of fresh water and transition. 4 00:00:23,400 --> 00:00:26,720 Large scale social disorder. Antibiotic resistant diseases. 5 00:00:27,560 --> 00:00:32,210 Education, employment or private capital for social needs quantum computing. 6 00:00:34,600 --> 00:00:44,830 Today I'm having a conversation with my classmates, right wing Reza, who is going to tell us how he created his own cryptocurrency. 7 00:00:45,280 --> 00:00:49,030 But before we get into that, could you give us a little bit of background about yourself, 8 00:00:49,030 --> 00:00:52,390 what you did for the MBA and that will get into the conversation? 9 00:00:52,570 --> 00:00:57,760 Sure. I before the MBA, I was in Philadelphia where I grew up, spent my whole life. 10 00:00:57,850 --> 00:01:01,270 I was working in very legitimate finance job. 11 00:01:01,480 --> 00:01:08,080 Contrary to the story, I'm about to tell you where I invested money on behalf of a family office and I was previous. 12 00:01:08,080 --> 00:01:14,460 Before that I was worked and worked at a university endowment. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to get an MBA. 13 00:01:14,470 --> 00:01:19,990 I kind of reached the end of that role. The only way to go hire would have been to be part of the family. 14 00:01:20,440 --> 00:01:25,370 That clearly wasn't happening. So I figured it was time to get out of Dodge and see the world. 15 00:01:25,390 --> 00:01:31,370 Having lived my whole life in Philadelphia, I came to Oxford to meet people that were different than just the, you know, the kids that I grew up with. 16 00:01:31,390 --> 00:01:42,070 So I think probably the way I'd love to start is just letting you tell the story of how you created Wakelin, right? 17 00:01:42,400 --> 00:01:50,170 And then we'll dig into a little bit more into your assets to Bitcoins in general, like some of your other items. 18 00:01:50,500 --> 00:01:54,670 And I'm trying to understand kind of your view on it. 19 00:01:54,670 --> 00:01:58,600 And in general, is that what you. Yeah, it's you know, 20 00:01:58,600 --> 00:02:06,100 it's somewhat embarrassing being put on the spot because the process of creating weight coin took all of 5 to 10 minutes, I think. 21 00:02:06,520 --> 00:02:14,740 I think what might be instructive is somewhat the story of how I got to the point where my experience with cryptocurrency started. 22 00:02:14,830 --> 00:02:19,240 So. So where did you stop? It was about a year, year and a half ago now. 23 00:02:19,480 --> 00:02:25,270 I was in work before I came here, and my boss walked out of his office and was like, Mike, you got to buy a Etherium. 24 00:02:25,870 --> 00:02:26,890 It's the new Bitcoin. 25 00:02:27,730 --> 00:02:37,210 So having just cashed out of an account that I had on this predicted dot com website which allows you to gamble on current events. 26 00:02:37,240 --> 00:02:44,410 Okay. I figured I needed another good investment. So taking taking $200. 27 00:02:44,410 --> 00:02:50,560 Right? I bought $250. I bought all the Etherium I could at $18 a coin. 28 00:02:50,920 --> 00:02:56,560 Okay. Suffice to say, eight months later, that $250 was worth $10,000. 29 00:02:56,890 --> 00:03:03,400 And having done no research, having no idea what Etherium actually does, I quickly became an Etherium expert. 30 00:03:04,910 --> 00:03:10,850 Like self-proclaimed or among kind of Internet friends or amongst everyone that knew me. 31 00:03:10,870 --> 00:03:15,460 It's the sort of thing where you don't tell people where you screw up and you only tell people when you make money. 32 00:03:15,490 --> 00:03:20,150 So, yeah, everyone knew I had made $10,000 because I got into a theorem early. 33 00:03:20,170 --> 00:03:27,400 Okay, so. So I actually did the right thing for once and I sold about two thirds of it and pocketed six seven grand. 34 00:03:27,430 --> 00:03:31,509 Nice. So that left me with three or $3,000 to kind of play around with. 35 00:03:31,510 --> 00:03:38,380 And now this was. This was like November, December, when when cryptocurrencies were pretty hot. 36 00:03:39,270 --> 00:03:45,759 Clearly. I'm a gambler and clearly I want to do the only next reasonable thing with the remaining money. 37 00:03:45,760 --> 00:03:51,160 And I tried to find the next theory, right? So that brought me to a coin called Tron. 38 00:03:51,610 --> 00:03:57,520 Now, I have no idea what Tron does. I never learned what Tron does. 39 00:03:57,970 --> 00:04:03,880 But there was a lot of hype. If you go on Reddit, they were all talking Tron, the founder great Twitter account. 40 00:04:05,500 --> 00:04:08,970 And I think even that McAfee guy had tweeted about it a few times, okay. 41 00:04:09,850 --> 00:04:17,079 So in order to buy Tron, you can't do this on Coinbase, which is the legitimate way for U.S. citizens to buy cryptocurrencies. 42 00:04:17,080 --> 00:04:22,720 You have to go on to any of the other ones that host all of the range of everything, all the crap that's out there. 43 00:04:23,080 --> 00:04:30,490 So I buy Tron and No Lie. Within two weeks, the $500 I put into it became $2,000. 44 00:04:30,670 --> 00:04:34,329 It's amazing you couldn't even lose money. I waited an extra week. 45 00:04:34,330 --> 00:04:38,100 It went back down to a thousand, but it was still a great it was a great success for me. 46 00:04:38,150 --> 00:04:42,850 So and and that led to my fascination with fraud courts really. 47 00:04:43,450 --> 00:04:48,909 So everything but the big one. So everything but bitcoin in the theorem I considered all coins. 48 00:04:48,910 --> 00:04:54,190 Now, mind you, I'm not an expert. On what basis what how do you distinguish between the. 49 00:04:54,230 --> 00:05:00,220 Well, there was a lot of people talking about a theorem in Bitcoin and they seemed legitimate based on that. 50 00:05:00,430 --> 00:05:03,520 Right. So so everything else seemed like a fraud. Okay. 51 00:05:04,150 --> 00:05:05,799 I mean, you know, you're talking about, you know, 52 00:05:05,800 --> 00:05:10,180 there's hundreds of thousands of coins out there and they all have, you know, multimillion dollar market caps. 53 00:05:11,140 --> 00:05:20,080 But everything was going up in November and December. So I bought these random coins about things like vechain iota, simple token, all this crap. 54 00:05:20,080 --> 00:05:23,770 And, you know, some of them went up, some of them just kind of stayed how it was. 55 00:05:23,770 --> 00:05:28,150 I even said to my cousins and my friends, you know, let's pool our money, we'll buy some more of this stuff. 56 00:05:28,540 --> 00:05:32,770 So we got a nice little account going on and things were going pretty well. 57 00:05:33,070 --> 00:05:41,860 And then I found out that this is where wait coin comes in, that by transferring my money from this Binance exchange to another exchange, 58 00:05:42,010 --> 00:05:47,920 even less regulated and even less reputable, I could transfer some of this Etherium into my own token. 59 00:05:48,490 --> 00:06:02,510 So this is the the genesis of wave coin. And very simply, I paid about $20 worth of Etherium, and I bought 101 billion Bitcoin at the initial price. 60 00:06:02,530 --> 00:06:08,940 Now to create, we wanted to make it a legitimate, you know, token it had to trade trading. 61 00:06:09,160 --> 00:06:14,860 So fortunately the I think it's called the Waze platform allows you to trade with yourself. 62 00:06:15,280 --> 00:06:24,459 So I put in an order I try to buy one what's it called, one wig coin for the equivalent of $12. 63 00:06:24,460 --> 00:06:31,960 Right. And when that transaction happened, all of a sudden, my 1 billion Litecoin was worth 12 billion U.S. dollars. 64 00:06:31,960 --> 00:06:42,400 So the the story here is that, you know, it's an extraordinarily illiquid thing, and you can't trust the trades to tell you what things are worth. 65 00:06:42,400 --> 00:06:46,240 But, you know, if you see it on a screen, maybe that means you're rich. 66 00:06:46,480 --> 00:06:52,900 So so all of a sudden, I became one of the richest people in the world. And I was purely hooked on these these fraud coins. 67 00:06:52,900 --> 00:06:57,430 I got into these things which were considered these pump forums. 68 00:06:57,880 --> 00:07:03,370 So essentially it's these these telegram groups where where about a thousand people would be on these groups. 69 00:07:03,370 --> 00:07:13,419 And the moderators, they would announce, hey, today we're buying crap coin five and everybody in the group would go running by that coin. 70 00:07:13,420 --> 00:07:19,150 And because there was so much, so much volume in something so insignificant, the price would shoot up. 71 00:07:19,330 --> 00:07:23,020 And the goal was to sell before the price crash down again. Now, 72 00:07:23,020 --> 00:07:29,349 this is known in finance as a classic pump and dump scheme because the moderators had already 73 00:07:29,350 --> 00:07:34,540 bought this coin before the thousand sheep before them ran in and tried to buy into it. 74 00:07:34,540 --> 00:07:38,739 But, you know, again, this was like November, December when coins were doing really, really well. 75 00:07:38,740 --> 00:07:41,830 So and, you know, I had already made a lot and this was kind of funny money to me. 76 00:07:42,100 --> 00:07:47,860 Suffice to say, you know, me and my friends, we lost money every time we tried this because by the time we bought it was at the peak. 77 00:07:47,860 --> 00:07:51,909 By the time we sold it, it crashed. And, you know, so I kept doing this crap. 78 00:07:51,910 --> 00:07:59,139 I had weight coin and I kept buying these [INAUDIBLE] coins for sorry, it's a curse for the next few months. 79 00:07:59,140 --> 00:08:05,470 And you know, I mean, you know, the story that happened come January, February, March, everything crashed. 80 00:08:06,430 --> 00:08:11,889 So where is your friends and family portfolio of crap coins? 81 00:08:11,890 --> 00:08:22,600 One, two, six. Now the friends and family portfolio, which ended up at one point being $500 from a few of my friends and then me, you know, 82 00:08:23,590 --> 00:08:32,950 more than I'm happy to admit I'm getting into the gambling of it and putting in maybe like $2,000 is somewhere around 750 at this point, right? 83 00:08:32,950 --> 00:08:36,669 Yeah. It it hit its peak. It hit its peak at 5000. 84 00:08:36,670 --> 00:08:40,160 And I could do no wrong. I was just set it out. I was setting. 85 00:08:41,340 --> 00:08:45,710 I was sending out, you know, like tips is like see it a lot of Twitter posts on it. 86 00:08:45,720 --> 00:08:50,490 We should probably chop it to that right now. Oh, McAfee's over there. 87 00:08:50,490 --> 00:08:56,729 He's pumping iota corn. We got we got to switch. So investing by Twitter feeds. 88 00:08:56,730 --> 00:09:03,180 Investing by Twitter feed. Right. But but I want to say, throughout this whole thing, I had no illusions that this was actual investing. 89 00:09:03,450 --> 00:09:08,060 Sure. And and I think that's where a lot of people's problems came. 90 00:09:08,070 --> 00:09:16,920 I remember when Bitcoin fell 1 to $2000 in a day, and it was like this week where it just shed a lot of its value. 91 00:09:17,220 --> 00:09:25,440 You'd go on the Reddit cryptocurrency newsfeed and at the top they had pasted to the top the suicide hotline letter, the number. 92 00:09:25,830 --> 00:09:27,659 So, I mean, this is real stuff. I mean, I mean, 93 00:09:27,660 --> 00:09:33,540 you could tell by the seriousness with which people in forums were dealing with these these crypto assets that they 94 00:09:33,540 --> 00:09:40,410 were investing far more than they reasonably should have and far more than they probably reasonably could have lost. 95 00:09:40,800 --> 00:09:43,740 Now, that's kind of when I when I left, you know, following the group. 96 00:09:43,740 --> 00:09:48,600 But, you know, there were people out there that looked at this stuff as a real investment. 97 00:09:48,600 --> 00:09:58,790 And I think that was a was quite dangerous at that time. So can I can we speculate bit and kind of project forward what's going to happen next? 98 00:09:58,800 --> 00:10:03,450 I mean, is there going to still be these kind of hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin is ever 99 00:10:03,450 --> 00:10:08,260 going to make their own little private token or is it all going to consolidate? 100 00:10:08,280 --> 00:10:16,410 What's going to happen? Well, let me let me double back and remind you that I've never done any actual research into cryptocurrencies, 101 00:10:16,650 --> 00:10:20,790 but basically kind of my my little darling, listen, 102 00:10:20,790 --> 00:10:27,600 clearly you pick up things the and as I'm sure in conversations you've had, it is a it is a buzzword. 103 00:10:28,530 --> 00:10:32,850 There are seemingly a few reasons for some cryptocurrencies to exist. 104 00:10:33,300 --> 00:10:36,209 A lot of people say, you know, we do need an unregulated, you know, 105 00:10:36,210 --> 00:10:41,310 a non central bank currency such as Bitcoin, a theory, empower it as a whole blockchain network. 106 00:10:43,080 --> 00:10:50,100 These things will probably stick around. But you know, are we passed the time of them being, you know, a huge bubble asset. 107 00:10:51,100 --> 00:11:00,489 Very possibly, but that that may be a benefit because that may have got in the, you know, the the fluff, the, you know, everything extra out of it. 108 00:11:00,490 --> 00:11:06,490 And then people could kind of focus on the real use and the real the real abilities that some of these coins and more importantly, 109 00:11:06,490 --> 00:11:12,070 the blockchain actually has to offer. And if you had your time again, would you do the same thing again? 110 00:11:12,190 --> 00:11:16,809 Of course I do it again. I mean, I'm you know, I'm out there looking for the the next thing to gamble on. 111 00:11:16,810 --> 00:11:21,370 I mean, it's just one series of crappy gamble style investment after another for me. 112 00:11:21,370 --> 00:11:24,430 So if you have any ideas, you know, it's just kind of fun. 113 00:11:24,490 --> 00:11:27,879 We went to, you know, an MBA and we went to the Royal Ascot. 114 00:11:27,880 --> 00:11:32,590 I mean, I had a great time there. Didn't win a single bet, but man did. 115 00:11:32,590 --> 00:11:38,410 I think I knew a lot about horses. I end of that, so to speak. 116 00:11:38,770 --> 00:11:45,879 Thank you so much for sharing. No, it was a pleasure. I've this is one of those stories that has been kind of whispered about around the NBA. 117 00:11:45,880 --> 00:11:49,360 And it's pretty it got the got the whole thing. Yeah, I have to I was able to share it. 118 00:11:49,370 --> 00:11:54,070 I do want to say I made money on this one. This is a good bet for me that I can still buy with coin. 119 00:11:54,850 --> 00:12:00,429 One could still buy weight coin. Before I got here, I made one final trade so the price doesn't move unless somebody trades. 120 00:12:00,430 --> 00:12:10,180 Okay. Which coin is now worth? $161 trillion is a total market cap approximately three times the total liquid value of all currency. 121 00:12:10,510 --> 00:12:14,940 That's that's around the world. What was what was this African trade. Well, that was the last trade. 122 00:12:14,950 --> 00:12:23,799 Was it? The first one was pretty good know first of all. But the first because I found that I could buy a small decimal of it for $2. 123 00:12:23,800 --> 00:12:31,990 So so we just need to keep trading it, keep existing, pushing the price up. 124 00:12:32,020 --> 00:12:37,380 Exactly. I am officially the richest person in this NBA class, so by quite some way it's good. 125 00:12:37,420 --> 00:12:41,229 So if anybody wants to reach out and get in touch with a very successful person, 126 00:12:41,230 --> 00:12:54,850 I finally got all of my contact details will be late in the description of the podcast if you want any tips on Wall Street safety or crypto trading. 127 00:12:57,700 --> 00:13:15,930 Thank you. So thank you. I really about. Thank you for listening to the ABCs of Future Business podcast presented by the Site Business School. 128 00:13:16,590 --> 00:13:22,590 If you enjoyed this week's conversation, please check out our other episodes on the future of what carbon bubbles, 129 00:13:23,010 --> 00:13:27,270 blockchain banks of the future, and what marketing can learn from the dark web. 130 00:13:28,080 --> 00:13:33,060 To make sure you get every episode, please subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts from. 131 00:13:33,240 --> 00:13:39,630 The Future of Business Podcasts was created by Brady, Middleton, Patrick Kahler, Michael Ballard, Paris Abroad and Emily Burn. 132 00:13:40,260 --> 00:13:47,730 Thanks for listening and goodbye for all your.