Nick Tomaino: The Future of NFTs, What Will Happen with FTX & Who Should be Held to Account | E1076

The people that got sucked into this perception game that FDX was playing, the, you know, the politicians, the regulators, the investors, they all now are trying to just sweep it under the rug and say, "Oh, I didn't know about this financial fraud." It wasn't just a financial fraud, right? It was a fraud of perception which they all played a role in, and I think ultimately, like, people will realize that.

Nick, I am so excited for this. I saw your Tweet, and I replied like, "Man, this would be such a good show."

Yeah. (laughs)

I'm so thrilled that you agreed to do it with me, so thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Harry.

Not at all. But I want to start with a little bit of, kind of two origin stories really. One is obviously how you found crypto for the first time, and then obviously is on the fund. Just take me back on the crypto side. How did you first find crypto and come to join Coinbase?

So I've always been an internet person. Like, in middle school, I was really interested in sneakers. I was, you know, buying and selling and collecting, uh, Jordans and Nikes, and, uh, I played a lot of basketball, so I was super into sneakers. I was spending a ton of time on Nike Talk, which was kind of the early sneaker head forum. I've just always kind of been in- gravitated towards the internet. Um, and even more so than, like, the, the, the physical world around me in some ways. I think I'm kind of unique in that sense, where, you know, when I first heard about Bitcoin, it was this, uh, Wired article talking about this magic internet money that was being used to buy guns and drugs on Silk Road, right? That was kind of the early media narrative. And if I asked the people in the physical world around me, you know, what they thought, um, like everyone else at that time, they would have thought it was stupid, and they would have told me not to spend any time on it, right? But I, uh, wanted to see who was on the internet talking about this, um, and I stumbled across, uh, Bitcoin Talk, which was the first, uh, online forum, uh, for Bitcoin that was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the, the founder of Bitcoin. I saw on Bitcoin Talk that, um, you know, the media narrative is one thing, right? Talking about this, you know, magic internet money that was being used for illegal stuff, and, um, but, but the reality was very different. I saw kind of this community of people from around the world. They weren't aligned by physical location, but they were aligned by shared belief system and economic incentives. After spending some time, uh, on Bitcoin Talk, that's kind of what led me down the rabbit hole and, uh, ultimately decided I wanted to make a career out of, uh, out of the space.