CRYPTO

I lost money in crypto in 2022. I showed it on camera. The people who pretend they didn't lose anything are the ones you should trust least.

Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.

We are all very lucky to be in this industry at this time. The blockchain industry is still in its infancy.

Every time I see a new regulation, I think to myself: there goes another business opportunity.

Funds are safe.

We want to increase the freedom of money globally.

SAFU.

Number go up technology is powerful. Do not underestimate what people will do when they see a number going up.

Crypto is not a trade. It is the largest wealth creation opportunity of our lifetime.

The biggest mistake I made in 2017 was not taking profits. Do not repeat my mistake.

In a bull market, everyone is a genius. In a bear market, you find out who actually knows what they are doing.

Crypto is the most accessible wealth creation tool in history. Anyone with a phone and an internet connection can participate.

In crypto, the people who survive the winters are the ones who build the next bull run.

The mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. An open financial system is a human right.

Bitcoin changes everything. It's the native currency of the internet and it will eventually be the currency of the world.

Bitcoin is a fraud that will ultimately blow up. It's like tulip bulbs. It will end badly.

Not everyone on Wall Street is going to make it into the digital asset space, but I think Fidelity will.

I believe that the blockchain is the next great network. The same thesis that led us to Twitter and Etsy led us to Bitcoin and Coinbase.

Crypto is not a bubble. It's a new financial system being built in public. The volatility is the price you pay for getting in early on something that will eventually be worth trillions.

Digital assets are not a sideshow. They are a fundamental shift in how value moves across the world.

Crypto is not going away. The technology is too compelling, too transformative.

I slept on a beanbag next to my desk at the office. People thought it showed dedication. In hindsight, maybe it showed that nobody was watching.

We went from a $32 billion valuation to bankruptcy in ten days. I genuinely did not think that was possible. I was wrong.

I think most people in crypto are well-intentioned. That said, there are clearly some bad actors. It's important to separate the two.

Yield is just a word for where the money is coming from. And if you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield.

In crypto, attention is the most valuable currency. You can build the most technically perfect blockchain in the world and nobody will use it if nobody knows about it.

I paid $4.6 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett. People called me crazy. But 7 billion people talked about TRON that week. Best marketing spend of my life.

Security isn't a feature. It's the product. If your exchange gets hacked, nothing else matters — not your UI, not your fees, not your coin listings. You're done.

Regulators don't understand crypto yet. That doesn't make them the enemy. But it does mean we have to educate while we comply, which is exhausting and expensive.

The crypto industry has a trust problem, and it's entirely self-inflicted. Every exchange that gets hacked, every founder who rugs — they make it harder for the legitimate ones. We're paying for other people's sins.

I flew to Tokyo after the Mt. Gox hack and saw the mess firsthand. That's when I decided — someone needs to build an exchange that actually works. That someone might as well be me.

We've been told we're too early to every trend we've ever been part of — social networking, Bitcoin, crypto regulation. Being early is painful. Being right is profitable.

I don't think crypto replaces banks. I think crypto makes banks better. A bank that can settle in seconds instead of days will outcompete a bank that can't. We're giving banks that tool.

I put $100,000 into Coinbase when people said crypto was a scam. That check became worth more than everything I earned from Illmatic.

We got delisted from the stock exchange for being too bullish on crypto. We framed the delisting notice.

Tether is the most traded asset in all of crypto. More volume than Bitcoin. More volume than Ethereum. Let that sink in.

I invested in Coinbase before most people knew what crypto was. The returns spoke for themselves.

I believe crypto is here to stay. It gives people a way to participate in the financial system independent of traditional institutions.

My Luna tattoo will be a constant reminder that investing requires humility.

Crypto is volatile. Get used to it. If you can't handle a 50% drawdown, you don't deserve the 500% upside.

The beauty of crypto is that you can build financial systems that don't require trust in any single institution.

I don't debate the poor.

Terra is not an experiment. It is a movement.

95% of coins will die, but there's entertainment in watching them die too.

Leverage in crypto is just a tool. Used correctly, it amplifies returns. Used incorrectly, it amplifies destruction.

We are in a crypto supercycle. Traditional valuation frameworks do not apply to this asset class.

The institutions are coming. This isn't 2017. This is a permanent structural shift into crypto.

I still believe in the long-term thesis for crypto. The execution was the problem, not the vision.

Bitcoin is going to be the currency of choice for the world.

Bitcoin is digital gold. It will eventually hit $500,000.

Most investors undersize their crypto allocation because they treat it like speculation rather than conviction.

Coinbase was obvious to us because we believed crypto networks would be as important as the internet itself.

Crypto and NFTs are the future. I got in early. Some of those bets were wrong. But the direction is right.

Crypto is volatile, but the underlying technology of decentralized networks is the most important innovation since the internet.

We didn't die after FTX. We shipped code. That's all that matters in the end.

I raise bison and llamas on a ranch in Wyoming. If that makes me weird by crypto standards, crypto has a problem.

Most crypto projects are Ponzi schemes with whitepapers.

Crypto is more than a hedge. It is a new asset class. We should treat it as one.

The Internet changed the flow of information. Blockchain will change the flow of value. Those are equally important transitions.

Companies that try to dodge regulators don't build lasting businesses. The ones that engage — even when it is painful — build moats.

We didn't settle with the SEC early because we believed we were right. Walking away from that fight would have set a terrible precedent for the entire crypto industry.

I own XRP. I'm long XRP. I want XRP to succeed because I believe in what it can do for payments globally.

We are building the internet of money. Value should move as freely as information does today.

When Mt. Gox went down, I thought — someone needs to build this right. That someone was going to be me.

Proof of reserves should be standard. If an exchange won't show you the money, there's a reason for that.

Bitcoin is not just a better payment system. It's a better money. There's a difference.

The regulatory environment in the US is increasingly hostile to crypto. We've been considering what a Kraken without US customers might look like.

The mission of financial inclusion isn't a soft goal. Two billion people don't have a bank account. That's a solvable problem.

We built crypto and blockchain into SBI while the big banks were still calling it a scam.

They allow communities to govern themselves, their economics, and rally a community in powerful ways that will allow open systems to flourish in a way that was previously impossible.

As a result, I believe governance is the most vital problem in the space.

I am excited to announce that I am joining Paradigm as a Research Partner, to help Matt Huang, Fred Ehrsam, and Charlie Noyes build a new kind of investment firm.

Crypto is not just a new asset. It is a new way to build the internet.

Decentralized finance is rebuilding the entire financial system in the open.

The breakthroughs in model quality sparked a new wave of generative AI, and that will have an incredible impact on cryptocurrency.

If fundamental investing does not come to this industry, it just means that we failed.

We are strong believers that regulation is necessary and we just have to have smart regulation.

Andreessen is the only one of the large platforms that I even considered joining because I felt they were the only ones who actually got crypto.

A lot of what is happening in the ecosystem is at the frontier of cryptography and protocol design and token economic design. These are not trivial things to do.

Criminals are great beta testers of all technologies.

Stablecoins are really interesting and really important to this ecosystem to hedge against that volatility.

Had there been rules of the road in place, there would have been a framework, clear rules for what is a security, what is a commodity, and what are the consumer protections around that.

If the collective group of people on the internet believes something has value, it has value.

There are the trading markets, which trade 24/7, 365 days a year.