Ryan Myher
Appearances
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah, I think it depends on risk tolerance, obviously. I think like the safer, more stable kind of native coins are like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. I think the majority of my cash is in those three. So that's like the honest truth. And then I think that everyone should keep a little dry powder to throw at some memes, you know?
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I think like whether we like it or not, and during the first cycle back in 2016, I thought Dogecoin was the stupidest thing.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
and then i and then i realized i'm like it doesn't matter if it's stupid yeah it's like culturally relevant and therefore it's gonna move um like i literally opened along at like 2am last night on dogecoin and i'm up like three grand when i checked on the uber ride over here um ryan so do you think like dogecoin like it went up just because of elon I think Elon's a piece of it.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
The catalyst right now over the last 72 hours is Donald Trump becoming president. Joe Biden and his administration and Gary Gensler. I have strong words for Gary Gensler. But their entire administration was very anti-crypto. And they can say they weren't anti-crypto, but their actions said otherwise. They were attacking crypto more than any administration had before. And why is that?
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I think it's like uncertainty. I think uncertainty is like a big piece. I also think that the Democratic Party generally hates things they can't control. And I think that, I think, yeah, I think, yeah, that's, I would say that, yeah. And so like crypto generally, I would actually say like crypto, people in crypto specifically, like hardcore crypto people,
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
um it's like a mixture of like you know tech tech guys like like social anarchists like a bunch of weird uh interesting people and you know it split pretty down the middle a lot of democrats a lot of republicans and then uh trump really took the initiative and was like you know what i am gonna be like you know work with cynthia on this bitcoin reserve plan and um you know i i think that crypto like with proper regulation like crypto can be this really meaningful thing and it should happen in the united states because if not the innovation is going to go outside of
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Um, and yeah, I mean, I, it was just like always a passion of mine. And, uh, we kind of graduated high school, uh, went to Duquesne university to do track and that's whenever like things really started moving. Um, and so kind of the first business that I started was, uh, a company called no code, no problem.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
United States, like, you know, even Coinbase, like, and Uniswap and some of these, like, you know, enormous players that have been around for a while. Gary Gensler, this previous administration, attacking them left and right and not even with credible things. It was basically just fluff to scare off people. And it's a shame. It really is. And so, yeah, it's ridiculous.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
But so Trump gets elected and the markets move. So, like, even in the last, like, 72 hours, like, crypto, like, I'll try to give you a specific, like, ETH was at $2,400 72 hours ago. And right now it's sitting at $3,400. Wow. Great. Solana, same thing. Like everything's moving up into the right. So, you know, my friends are always asking me when's the best time to buy. I would say like right now.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
You know, right. Even like with this week. Right. Like I recommended friends by yesterday specifically because yesterday was Tuesday. Right. Yeah. Yesterday was Tuesday. So basically like CPI and a lot of these data points are coming out Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And so Tuesday basically was like the de-risking. Everyone was kind of de-risking. So markets pulled back.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
so it went from like 225 ish to like 207 ish last night um so but like you know those are all nuances whenever soul's at 500 you don't care if you bought it 207 or 215 it doesn't make a difference to you right um so i i think like right now generally is great we're gonna have trump go into office um and i think establish a lot of policies we have vivek we have elon a lot of people that are pro crypto which is amazing um working in his administration so i think that the next four years are going to be the four best years for crypto generally speaking yeah
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
and do you think we're gonna hit six figures on bitcoin before trump actually takes over the office man yeah just the way it is right now because i know he's selected or he gets put in in what like 70-ish days yeah yeah yeah january yeah i think we'll we'll i i i this is a hot take i think we're gonna hit 90k bitcoin within the next 14 days and i think we'll hit 100k by january 1st yeah that's amazing dude there will i think we'll touch 100k i think there will be a sell-off though like usually there's a sell-off in late december uh yeah
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah. Just generally, though, with the debt and things, it's like, reasonably, how can we sit here and look at it and be like, how does this go any other way than just shitting the bed, right? And so I think that... with the Elon and Vivek running the Department of Government Efficiency, if we can establish a Bitcoin Reserve, I actually like have faith that like we can actually figure this out.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Uh, and it was like the, the first, like kind of, you know, my real step into entrepreneurship at the time. Yeah.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
They're like operating the country like a startup, you know, and I think that's what what needs to happen is it's become too bloated. And and and I think
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
uh kamala had like some interesting policies and like ways that she could like fix the country but i think like anything that a politician says around fixing the country is mostly bullshit right um but i think trump actually is putting the necessary pieces in place to like legitimately fix the country and i didn't actually expect it to happen but he's already kind of doing that with like like announcing yesterday like doge and things um
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
So I'm actually really excited to see kind of what happens, because even even if we save like I don't even know what our deficit is at this point, but even if we can save a trillion dollars a year and half of that goes into buying Bitcoin for a reserve and then we have the rest of the world also accumulating Bitcoin, like I think that's like very cool.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And I think that like it's our best shot at like not becoming the Roman Empire.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah, I think I think within the next five years, we'll see a lot of different things that you can buy on chain. Some of them might be considered security. Some of them might not be considered securities. But I do think there will be a lot of things that you can buy a lot of tokens. And I think those tokens will have different types of value and people will want to participate in that.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I think the main use case for crypto more generally is like speculation. And I think that in the next five years, like my goal is to have 10 million people own crypto on Genius. And like I said, like it doesn't even need to be on Genius per se because it's self custodial, right? So you have a Genius account, you can export your private keys and you can take that anywhere you want, right?
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
It doesn't need to be specifically on the Genius platform.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Where was that? That was 2016, I want to say.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I mean, I'm happy to talk about regulation if that's interesting.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
So I think kind of how we operate, Genius, while it feels like an exchange, we're not technically an exchange. And so, as I mentioned, there's all these blockchains, there's liquidity on all of them. We basically orchestrate liquidity across all of these chains to make it easy for everyone else to use. So there's a bunch of complex BS that goes on in the background.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And so there's like kind of two components to Genius. There's Shuttle Labs Incorporated, which is what I'm the co-founder of. And that's a Delaware C Corp. And basically we manage and develop the front end. Genius, Genius Protocol is, which is basically the orchestration of everything is managed and owned and operated by Dow based in the Cayman Islands.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I was 16, I think. Damn, dude.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And that's basically like this permissionless thing where anyone in the world can go build things on top of genius bridge protocol. Um, and they could, they could build genius. Like they could build like what we've built on top of these open systems. Um, and that's, and that's something that's really cool.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And I'm excited about like the same way that like people built the infrastructure for people to build all these payment infrastructure in the United States. Right. Uh, how, you know, you use square to buy things. Uh, we've built basically the rails, uh, for anyone to do a similar thing in crypto, which is really cool. Um, and we've also built like the car as well.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
So we've built our version of the car, but anyone can go build their version of the car as well.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
but regulation is super interesting right like sexes have to have different licensing but the way that we've built uh everything to this point we've been able to do so in a way where we don't have to where yeah we've been creative legally such that like we we aren't an exchange per se like we're not like a licensed exchange because like we're like we said we're not custody because custodying any assets we're basically just helping you buy those things through orchestration so
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
It's just fun. I'm super blessed to be able to have fun doing what I do. And I think I have a lot of people in my life that don't have fun doing what they do. And so I think generally it's one of those things where... I love to build things that people like to use. I think genius is one of those things like we have thousands of people that use it every day. And I think that's amazing.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And I get if something's not working, I get 100 texts when I wake up in the morning, including this morning and we go and fix it. But it means people are using it. And that's that's amazing, right? Like I'm blessed for people to use things that I've built. Like I mentioned to you earlier, like we have a Figma plugin.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
We built the first generative AI Figma plugin, which Figma is like a design software like Photoshop. And yeah, you're familiar.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
um and uh 50 000 people use it which is sick um and so like i think like uh part of the motivation is like one day i want to be able to walk down the street with a genius hoodie on and people know what that is and like be like oh like you know i made ten ten thousand dollars from my genius account like i think that that's like that's like what i'm like yearning for um but i don't think i'll ever stop i think like people that retire die so
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah, you just have to be okay with being crazy, I guess, or like the view that people think you're crazy. Especially like in crypto, you know, I feel like crypto is one of the most cyclical industries. So like the last two years, it's been really tough, right?
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I was messing around with Amazon quite a bit. And I was like, my mind was blown that I could order anything to my house. A funny side story was I ordered a sword to my house and I was at basketball. Cause I was like, oh, you can just buy a sword online. Like, this is really cool. And so I ordered it to my house and I'm at basketball practice and I get a call from my mom and she's like,
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Like there's been some like super low points, even for me, where it's just like, you know, you get up in the morning and you're like, what am I doing? You know, you have friends building an AI and all these other things and you're like,
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
you know but whenever things move everything's fantastic right um but so it is super tough uh it's really hard to stay motivated during those low points but if you can push through it like i think you can come out on the other side um in crypto specifically to like just building businesses in crypto if you want to build a business in crypto it's it's really interesting because uh business and companies and things like they don't operate like normal companies do and like
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
the typical internet world or in real life kind of it's kind of like this weird and i think that'll change over time but um like like whenever you talk to investors right like they only care about like when you're gonna launch a token like if you like it's crazy um and it's it's kind of messed up but it makes sense right like you'll see like a lot of uh venture funds have uh
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
It's actually really popular for venture funds to have two funds, one specifically in crypto and then one in a more archaic industry that has longer return on investment cycles because crypto, the path to liquidity is much shorter. So it's a way for them to average that out to what you'd consider a typical internet fund like Sequoia or something. So yeah, it's interesting.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
But yeah, you basically have to throw away all fundamental principles of business that you know for crypto specifically. It's crazy.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
i mean january's around the corner dude 70 days right that is yeah so you know best time to invest but i i want to educate the folks that are listening to this and watching this man yeah so i'll be candid i don't read uh books i i read i read a lot i read like the wall street journal and the information every day uh i read a lot of things every day but i don't read like traditional books and i actually would not recommend reading traditional books for crypto specifically just because the industry moves so fast
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
By the time that you'd actually publish a book, it'd probably be outdated, which is crazy. But I think there's like two really good places to get information on crypto. The first is a research platform called Masari.io. It's a company just I actually think they're based in Miami, but they're entirely like based on research. They have a lot of reports.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
They have a lot of like like everything that you could possibly want. It's there. There's also a newsletter. What's the newsletter called? I'll give it to you after this. Milkroad, milkroad.com. Milkroad. Milkroad, yeah. It's a carton of milk, but it's a fantastic newsletter for crypto, people that are just getting into crypto. They have like 300,000 subscribers.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
What is this? What did you order from something cutlery? And I was like, oh, well, I'll open it when I'm home. Don't worry about it. So I get home and I unbox this sword with these insane edges. And my mom was so pissed off. My dad's standing in the corner laughing. And so anyway, so I was enamored that you could order anything online. Facebook launches Facebook Marketplace.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
It was really good during the last kind of bull cycle. I love that. 2021, it was really popular. And then a third thing is just being involved. Like I think so much of crypto is like the culture of the different internet spaces that you're in. And so I'd specifically recommend Twitter, like if you're not on Twitter, or if you are on Twitter, engaging with like accounts like,
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I have to be careful with this one. There's an account, our account, Genius Terminal. We kind of talk a lot about things, but also like there's like more culturally relevant people like at Kobe, C-O-B-I-E or at Ansem who are like big kind of influencers in this space. But it gives you a good pulse on like the culture of crypto and kind of what things are going on in the space. Yeah.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And you need that because it does move so fast. Like, You have like ZK, you have all these things that I honestly don't even know a lot about because it's just moving all the time. And so it's just it's like I know what I know about like my very specific thing. But if I tried to keep up with everything, I'd lose my mind, I think.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Insider tips. I can't say I have insider tips per se, but I think that um i think in crypto specifically the best thing that you can invest in is a cult um and so like dogecoin has established a cult and i think you you also like uh there's a bunch of coins that have established cults that aren't listed on centralized exchanges when you say cult what do you mean by cult
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
cult like people that are like insane they're about it yeah like like like mentally ill kind of like i'm like like i don't even like i'm being like like genuine like it's like there's something serious yeah it's it's kind of messed up but yes like like true like like insanely passionate about like that meme and they do exist um
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
there's one right now that's really popular it's called Giga and it's like the Giga Chad with the huge chin and people were like insanely passionate about it I think that's gonna be a big one this cycle and then another one I don't know if I should say it but it's called Retardio it's how you spell it and the community behind it it's a an NFT which they call cousins and then a coin
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
and it's like the most insane cult that i'm personally a part of um and uh and these people are nuts they're they're they're literally insane but like you because of that like they get other people to have equal conviction in it um and that's kind of how you create like a doge effect and so like personally i i hold an irresponsible amount of money in ritardio so so so influence has a lot to do with the mean coins yeah okay
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
yeah meme coins are everything right now like the i think last cycle we saw uh nfts be super popular and and i think the problem with nfts more generally was they were a fun tool for speculation but they i personally don't like find them super useful right um but They were good for speculation.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And I had a bunch of old stuff. And I was like, oh, a bunch of people were selling stuff on here. Let me see if I can sell something. And so I start selling things, mostly just like old knacks, things I got from Christmas that I never used and things like that. And then I realized I was like, wow, like this could be a money generating thing. And all my friends were like joking about it.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And so on the other side of things, right, on meme coins, I think they're basically saying, you know what, we're going to create the same level of speculation, but we're not going to try and attach some like arbitrary value to it. Right. It's just like it is what it is, accepting that it is just a means of speculation.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah. Um, people can find us at trade genius.com. Um, and if you go, we'll create an account, uh, or we'll create a referral code for you if you want. Um, if you want your users and we can, we can give users free crypto or something that could be fun. Um, but trade trade genius.com. Um, my Instagram is at Ryan Meyer. Um, and, uh, yeah, those are like the two main main points. Yeah.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
They're like, oh, like my name in high school or my nickname in high school was Ray J. We don't want to get into that. I love that. But so they would joke around and say it's raised thrift because I was like thrifting a bunch of stuff on Facebook Marketplace. And then they had me selling their stuff on Facebook Marketplace and it kind of just kind of grew from there.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And so I was I was making a couple thousand dollars a month selling shit on Facebook Marketplace, which was which is really cool.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Well, to be fair, I was also doing those things as well. So I worked at Subway, JCPenney's, construction, you know, all the good stuff too.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah. So like I said, I was going to Duquesne for track. Next company we started, which never really became like large, but was like a cool thing was I really got into crypto. I was following like crypto prices 2016. We walk into 2017. I'm with a friend, Evan Gruss. We're at a basketball game and we were just talking about crypto.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And we're like, what if we just start like, you know, buying crypto for our friends and family? What if we get them all kind of bought in? And so we were doing that. We had another friend at Carnegie Mellon, a really smart guy named Kay. And we all kind of got together and we were like, oh, we could launch like an alternative to Bitcoin.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And then that basically turned into us building the first decentralized hash exchange in the world. And basically what that is, is I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with like Bitcoin mining. But if you have like one miner, that's usually not enough like, you know, power to like really get any kind of.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
reward um so you can rent power basically online and the reason why being decentralized like means anything is because um basically there was a competitor called nice hash they had all these funds flowing in and out of a centralized wallet had like 80 million in it it got hacked all these people lost 80 million dollars and we were like if this was peer-to-peer and we just took a little fee on the side like it would solve that problem there wouldn't be like one centralized vector to attack you know so that's so we started that yeah
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
First crypto I ever bought. Oh, God. Probably. And I'm ashamed to say this now because it's, you know, but XRP. Yeah, Ripple. Somehow it's still like one of those tokens that people love. Like I'll get calls from friends. They'll be like, my mom just asked me if she should buy $10,000 in Ripple. Like her friend from work said that she needs to put 10K in it.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I'm like, dude, I don't even like Ripple.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
where do you think bitcoin's gonna end up dude as far as price uh i've this isn't financial advice by the way no no it's not financial advice guys we're just two guys here chatting yeah yeah i i don't know i think like i think it can be a million to several million dollars a coin yeah i think like we are in this time where uh donald trump just got elected president and uh he and cynthia loomis who's the senator in wyoming she's very pro crypto shout out to cynthia
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yes, more or less. More or less, yes.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
um she uh they want to start a bitcoin reserve in the united states um and obviously there's nothing done concretely yet for that but if that happens uh i think he the goal is to basically own over the next five to ten years five percent of the bitcoin supply and have that in like a reserve system kind of like backing the dollar um
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And I think if they accomplish that, I think one, the minute they announce it, many other countries are going to adopt Bitcoin and kind of create their own strategic reserves. And I think it's going to go through the fucking moon. Yeah, no, it's going to be insane.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And not only that, but I think like I think most countries will hold strategic reserves and those that don't will suffer because of it. And a hot take that I have is I think in the next decade, 50 years. I think there will be a tier one country, like most likely European. Um, and I think that they will be so in debt and they'll need to bail out.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And I think that the person that bills them out will actually be a country that's adopted Bitcoin. That's maybe like tier three. Um, and they'll swap some sort of defense equipment for Bitcoin. That's my, my prediction.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
it crashed yeah you know what was it like a year two years ago whatever he was he was like right under a mill dude right now he's probably like at four yeah just just because it's up exactly damn yeah like good for you you know when to buy crypto when when everyone's talking about how it's dead yeah that's that's if you're looking for a time to buy it it's like oh crypto is dead it's like i need to buy it like yeah
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I'm not going to show you crypto, I promise. No, it's good. Thank you so much for having me.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
I think that... I think it could. I think, like, it's hard for people in America to understand the problems that crypto really solves for. Like, I tell my friends, they're like, well, I just use my credit card. And I'm like, well, you have to understand, like... the people that this is really solving a problem for are not in America.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And I think it's going to start with outside adoption, many other countries, and it'll kind of come back to the United States and come full circle, especially as we move towards a global economy, right? So you need a way to seamlessly pay anyone in the world instantly.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And so like a lot of our engineers in India and we have a guy in Venezuela and France, we pay them in USDC, which is like a dollar pegged equivalent backed by like treasuries and things. And I can pay them instantly, right? Like I actually pay them on Genius. So I can send them like their pay USDC on Genius instantly. There's no like five, 10 day wait. There's no like clearing house.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
There's no, none of that BS. It's like I send it to their wallet and that's it. Yeah.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Sure. Assets. I think the best way kind of to start that topic would be going like basically talking about centralized exchanges and decentralized and then kind of talking about how we're different. That works. Yeah. So I think you have Coinbase. Everyone's familiar with Coinbase. It's a centralized exchange and basically they custody funds, right?
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
So you put $100 on Coinbase, they're custodying those funds for you. So they're not like really yours. They're kind of, you're lending them to Coinbase. And so whenever you're buying things on Coinbase, the problem with centralized exchanges is I'd say two main problems. The first problem is there's listing teams. So you can only buy what they tell you you can buy, right?
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
So they have to list certain things. And while that's good to some degree, it's like a lot of the opportunity space is not on centralized exchanges or not on Coinbase, right? By the time that gets there, they're already like $50 billion plus tokens, right? And the second thing is they can freeze your funds whenever you want.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Like my co-founder, Armand, he had his funds frozen in Coinbase for over a year. It basically just proves the point that you don't really own your money. And it goes into the problems with third world countries as well, where it's like a lot of these banks are corrupt and stuff. So it's like having full custody of the dollars that I send you is really meaningful to a lot of people.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
So that's like centralized exchange. Then we have decentralized exchange, which is, how's the best way to describe it? So there's a bunch of blockchains and all these blockchains have different tokens. And so an example could be there's a blockchain specifically for real world assets, right? Where they tokenize real estate.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And if you want to buy tokenized real estate, then you have to buy the tokens on their blockchain. But that's liquidity fragmentation. And so you can use an exchange on that specific blockchain. But like, then you have to, there's a bunch of processes. I mean, basically what I just said, it's complicated, more or less. So we're basically like, okay, this is great.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Centralized exchanges kind of solve this, but then there's these caveats. So we were like, how can we build the best of both worlds? How can we allow you to basically have full custody of your funds, buy anything you want on any blockchain without having liquidity fragmentation or... Gas fees, what the fuck's a gas fee, right?
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Signing transactions, all of these things that nobody cares to know about. They just want what they want. And so that's what we've built. We've built the first platform that exists in the world that basically is a liquidity orchestration layer across all blockchains that serves like an exchange where you can buy any token on any chain instantly without worrying about gas fees.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
Yeah. So basically started off in central Pennsylvania, small town called Johnstown, Pennsylvania, an hour and a half east of Pittsburgh. And just like a cool minor town, nothing crazy. And just always kind of loved the hustle.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
and any of those other issues.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
So right now and in full transparency, we're meme coins are really hot. And so we make it.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
more or less it's it's like no different than sports gambling right it's like yeah but it's like betting on culture kind of right like all memes all meme coins are are cultural relevancies um whether it be doge and then the doge now with the department of government efficiency efficiency uh and uh like pepe and you have all these tokens and there's a lot of meme coins like these that are you know valued a lot less right now yeah um and they'll eventually get centralized exchange listings it's like how can you get
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
or how can you give people access to these at their earliest stages um and so that's kind of uh that's the number one reason for people using genius right now um i think like you know all of like these idealistic ideas that i have about like tokenization of real estate and all these things they're happening behind the scenes but they're not what people care about right now um and in other countries that's not true there's like uh what do they call them uh
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
The name escapes me, but basically they're just a one to one pegs giving like access to like U.S. stocks, for example, in like Ecuador or countries like that where there's not like traditional financial systems that allow you to easily buy these. So you can buy basically like crypto pegs. So there could be like a Tesla coin and the Tesla coin is basically like one to one mirroring Tesla stock.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And the person that's issuing that Tesla coin is also holding Tesla stock on the back end as the collateral for that. So there's really interesting things. But I think that's all idealistic. And I think that right now, people like to gamble. Meme coins are fucking great. And yeah.
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
uh more or less so you know whether that be selling people uh cards i was one of the early uh facebook marketplace sellers and um always enjoyed just like trying to figure things out and then i really got interested in technology um probably whenever i was like 15 or 16 and uh this is kind of foreshadowing but i was always looking for a way to build apps without code
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
yeah so i think like right now it's meme coins obviously that's like our focus um but uh i think in the future uh as everything kind of becomes global i think there's going to be there's going to need to be a global kind of exchange of value because i think i'm of the opinion that a lot of things are going to be tokenized so whether that be real estate intellectual property like everything's going to be tokenized to some degree
The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Small-Town Hustler to Crypto Innovator: Ryan Myher’s Journey
And there needs to be one place where you can go to like basically buy and sell like the global exchange. Kind of like how you have the stock exchange in New York. There needs to be that but for this new global economy for tokens. And that's kind of what we're building. Yeah. And so if we can accomplish that, then we've done our job.