Jake Thacker
speaker
130 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jake Thacker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There was nothing in our mind where an entire platform in 24 hours, in 48 hours, could just vanish. It's the cycle that is very difficult to get out of. It can happen to normal people in the blink of an eye.
It's not a Ponzi scheme. The way that Sam Beckman-Fried probably would coin it is a venture venture. gone horribly wrong. But in the eyes of everyone that was involved, it seemed like a total swindle, an unknown investment scheme. And no one had any idea that this could even happen, that it was even fathomable. And the story is the precedent of this thing happening.
But really, at the end of the day, it was an adventure that everyone thought was on the up and up and had the scale of a rocket ship just to realize it was full of air. There was nothing substantial there at all.
Yeah, no. In fact, I, for the longest time, even when Bitcoin was the first one that came out, I kind of looked at it very skeptically as well. It wasn't until the pandemic, really 2021, 2022, when I got into it. And it was really more of proximity to people that were doing it and had kind of egged me on to just try it.
You never know, kind of the green eggs and ham scenario of you can't knock it until you try it. And once I did, it was the training that we were doing or the community that I was a part of was fun. We were creating algorithmic types of bots, grid bots, and so on and so forth, to trade in the sideways market. And it started out as a hobby. It started out as small amounts, $100 here, $200 there.
But then over time, as more success came in and I felt more comfortable, it turned into a real thing and turned into real money and turned into something that I thought I could pivot a lot of my current portfolio into and was sorely mistaken at the end of the day.
It was more traditional.
Yeah, a handful of tech stocks. I worked for a couple of startups and had gotten equity there and was really leveraging that because it was quite sizable. But in all honesty, almost everything that I had in traditional markets ended up going into crypto as far as money that I chose to invest.
Yeah, that's fair to say. And again, the only reason I got into crypto was because the people that, again, I was close to my friends, other people from some of the communities that I kind of wrote in were doing that. And that's what I was interested in. And so that's what triggered my initial stake in the market.
Initially, we all heard about FTX and we all kind of saw their trajectory just go through the roof quite quickly. But in all honesty, I didn't even give them a second thought until it was the beginning of 2024 when the market started to kind of
turn and started to go down and a lot of my other assets that i had outside of ftx were down the whole market was down and when that happens you look at strategies to optimize margins and look at ways to reduce your cost and increase your gains or sustain your gains and ftx their pitch was
We can do all the things that these bigger platforms can do, but we do it in a better, more efficient way at a lower cost to the consumer. Transaction fees are lower. We have all these other tokens and assets that are poised to be even more lucrative than some of the traditional bitcoins or ethereums and so on and so forth. And so it really was that that triggered my
engagement with the platform to begin with.
Yeah, exactly. It was an exchange just like Binance or Coinbase, and it allowed people to commoditize on the market, right? I want to invest X amount on this coin. They take your money, they invest it, they supposedly hold it for you, give you access to your returns, right? It's kind of like a Robinhood.
Exactly. And so, again, that's where the biggest hang up was in the crypto markets was we still weren't free of the traditional or institutional ways in which
money transferred and flowed right and that's to your point of it wasn't hedging or it wasn't in lieu of the traditional markets it was in parallel or in tandem because again at that time crypto was not seen as a quote-unquote currency and so it had to follow some sort of recognized monetary value in the dollar more often than not was the one that we used in the us in exchange
Or wallet, in some instances, a place to store money or coins or tokens that you had acquired and weren't ready to put on the market or weren't ready to pull out of the exchange and put into the traditional market and so on and so forth.
You know, honestly, it put them on the radar for me, but it didn't really give me pause for a couple of reasons. Not so much as all the flash and the glitz and so on and so forth. But for instance, I worked for a company called Under Armour Tom Brady and Steph Curry were both athletes of Under Armour.
I had the lovely pleasure of meeting both several times and it sounds very cliche, but I trusted them and therefore I knew that they had invested in this platform and that as they have financiers and managers to guide them with their money and how to invest it wisely and what seems legitimate and what doesn't, I kind of wrote on that.
I said, well, if Steph's in there, if Tom's in there, it can't be that bad. And my initial approach to the platform was not to use it as a trading platform. It was just to hold funds. I needed a place to hold funds and be able to access them quickly without incurring all these large transaction fees.
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