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January 13, 2022

The Crypto Billionaire Who Just Passed The Wal-Mart Kids

In Today’s Email: 

  • Friends With Benefits launches a music festival

  • The crypto dude worth ~$100B !

Friends With Benefits Festival

For a couple years, I had a membership to The Battery in San Francisco. 

It was great. It’s a private members club. Like SoHo House in NYC. 

In one night at the Battery, I saw Dave Chappelle at the bar and then on my way out I fist bumped Leo Dicaprio’s security guard (true story). 

To be a member, you paid $2,500 per year, and that earned you the right to enter the building. When I was done, I sold my membership for….wait. I couldn’t sell it. Because it wasn’t an asset! It was just a fee.

Well, crypto changes that.

The new social clubs have memberships that are assets. They can go up or down in price. You can re-sell yours after you’re done using it. It’s a new business model for “membership groups”. 

Pretty interesting.

One well known example is  Friends With Benefits (check out their manifesto)

Filled with founders, developers and crypto OGs, it’s known as a “Social DAO”. 

To get in – you buy access (need 75 $FWB Tokens) to get access to Discord.

Ben is a member, and bought in for $1,000 almost a year ago.

But now the demand to join keeps going up, so a membership costs $5k (and A16z invested in it at a $100m valuation).

That’s a lot of money to join a discord group.. Or is it more? 

Well – they host meetups, parties and now… a music festival?

That’s pretty cool. 

Got me thinking – would the next woodstock or coachella start with a wristband that’s an NFT? 

Similar to how Gary V created an NFT (Vee Friends) where the main utility was access to his conference for the next 3 years.

CZ is Now The Richest In Crypto (& 11th in The World)

Wal-Mart kids move over, someone just took your spot.

The Binance Boss Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, is worth $96B according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index (my future home).

That would put him not too far behind Zuck or Warren Buffet.

Craziest part is, that $96B doesn’t include his own personal crypto holdings.

Look at this guy. You tellin' me this guy doesn’t have like 3000 bitcoin in a wallet under his mattress?!

The $96B is mostly just his value in his crypto exchange, Binance, which he founded in 2017 and still reportedly owns 90% of.

He even had a significant stake in FTX (just raised money at a $25b valuation) until he was forced to sell his shares.

Binance did $20B in revenue in 2021. They serve two markets that love crypto. Non-US customers (who live in places with worse currencies than the dollar), and traders (gamblers) who want to lever up and let it rip. 

With how fast the crypto market is growing, this is definitely not the last crypto made billionaire you’ll see on this list.

In fact, I think within a few years 25-40% of Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index will be crypto rich. 

Alright that’s all for today.

Tomorrow I’m doing a breakdown of DeFi Kingdoms, one of the most interesting projects I’ve been tracking. 

– Ben “sticks and stones will break my bones but price dips will never hurt me” Levy 

I want that shirt 😂