Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en have you ever heard of ripple yeah but they they’re shady right okay so ripple was this thing kind of like started pretty early on um and they had this like you know honestly not a bad idea they were like look uh you know the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the swift standard ripple was like we’re gonna be a bank to bank communication layer that uses blockchain right so they’re like we’re gonna use blockchain technology with a real use case which is banks sending money back forward to each other so that was their idea they got a bunch of funding from founders fund and others and they released this thing called xrp that’s the name of their token all right so whatever nobody cares about that how it works nobody cares but the interesting part is xrp has like was worth a lot the founders of ripple became billionaires overnight before like that’s the thing with crypto you can get rich before like this open down has 130 million before they have a product in ripple those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product which is like a really [ ] up incentive and which is why sometimes [ ] doesn’t actually get built in crypto because hey i already got the millions i could just run away i could just do a half-assed job it doesn’t really matter at this point i went public on day one so ripple has a market cap right now of 94 is this right 94 billion dollars i think i’m reading this right 94 billion dollars something like that no no sorry 44 billion dollars 44 billion dollars right that’s like that’s like the market cap of like you know bank of america or some [ ] like that so obviously ripple’s not actually valued at that but ripple had believers and they had early momentum they were very early in the crypto games they had a lot of pr and the ceo would go on cnbc and talk about how this is going to change the game so what happened in the crypto community people were kind of like poo pooing riptile they’re like this is like centralized they they took way too much share for themselves they didn’t give enough to users that’s why these guys are billionaires their product kind of sucks and they’re kind of shady whatever whatever that’s the reputation was ripple anybody who was in the know encrypted crypto pretty much the general consensus was ripples full of [ ] and uh so my buddy had this idea he was like he was like i’m gonna do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network i was like what do you mean he goes look i can see every single person’s wallet who owns ripple i was like okay that’s kind of interesting there you go i go but you don’t know their name and all that because i don’t need their name i was like you don’t have their email address he goes i don’t need their email address i could just put something in their wallet and they’ll wake up and they’ll open their wallet and they’ll see that they have something in it i was like okay he goes so i’m going to go out there i’m going to say xrp is stupid for these five reasons number one the founders took when you wait people anything you can include include a message in the transaction of the thing but like the way you do it is you first drop the token you tell people hey if you held ripple you got this token today and then you write your manifesto on your twitter or your website about what this is all about so you it’s kind of like somebody put a 50 check in your wallet you’re like what’s this all about says go to this website to explain why you just got this 50 so that’s how this that’s how this marketing mechanism works so he was like i’m gonna put some money in there i’m gonna put my currency in all the ripple holders wallet and then i’m to tell them ripple is stupid for these five reasons the founders took too much this other problem this other prop the you know their the right the token is inflationary blah blah blah so i’m going to change all that we only take 10 we are not inflationary we do not do this sketchy [ ] blah blah blah my five-point plan of how to make ripple better um and we’re we’re calling it our own thing and here’s the deal if you own if you send your ripple to my wallet i will send you back five times your value of this if you’re in the first for the first thousand people to do this then for the next ten thousand people that do this you’re going to get four times your your ripple back and for the next ten thousand people you’re going to get three times the ripple back so basically there’s this urgency of like okay if these if this is gonna become the next ripple if i send my money in now i’m gonna get five i’m gonna get a 5x multiplier of my money and what he was gonna do was just he goes when you send it to this wallet we’re gonna just dump it we’re just gonna sell it and we’re gonna put so much cell pressure we’re going to crash the price of ripple so if you do it and then do they do this or so let me finish the story so he goes if you do this early you’re going to get five times your amount and you’re not gonna sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing it’s like a prisoner dilemma game through it was so genius he’s like he’s like here’s the math if you’re if you’re holding this thing you have to assess are other people going to take them up on this offer if they do then the ripple i’m holding is going to go down like crazy i’m going to go down like 5 to 10x if i jump if i jump ship i get a 5x multiplier on my money and i don’t sit there holding the sinking ship and the game theory of this i think was gonna work so he has his plan and he starts and he starts uh and so he’s like okay well he needs to be credible so he went to some very very wealthy people and he got about 50 million dollars lined up to do this hostile takeover and he was like he needed it to be like 200 million and so he’s like i need to create this huge war chest so i can tell people look we have this much money so you this it’s backed by something come on board and he’s like dude he’s like basically i’m going to this investor i’m saying if you give me 200 million dollars i’m going to take down this project i’m going to absorb all the value of this project that’s currently worth 40 billion right so he’s like it’s a huge return for those investors and they and they also don’t even believe in ripple so what was this high stakes [ ] james bond [ ] what the problem was one of the investors that he had went to for this leaked the plan to a journalist this guy uh dan primack or whatever he’s like pretty famous journalist yeah from axios axios axios writes the story ahead of time he says hey there’s somebody planning a hostile takeover xrp and here’s how it’s gonna work and xrp obviously the ripple team obviously sees this and they’re like okay just in case they so they sold some amount of their ripple um to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer so that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price they had enough liquidity to buy back the buy back the tokens and keep the price high so it kind of foiled his plan where the the only the only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise and he could have done it in like a two-day period he could have tanked the price of ripple and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side but because they had heads up they they could create enough liquidity and they could be able to like support their price before somebody could do this to them but how crazy is that dude this is like some barbarians at the gate [ ] like this is like 1980s like drexel um like hostile takeover where they like were like what’s it called the green mailing have you ever read like these like 1980s finance i have i have the book barbarian i haven’t read it yet uh yeah that’s basically what they did like it was like it was like warfare and i was like this is some george soros [ ] you know the george soros broke the bank of england that’s actually what he was telling me he goes this is some george soros [ ] i was like what do you mean he goes george soros broke the bank of england by doing something very similar to this and as he was explaining i was like there’s no way this works he’s like well you know it’s risky but like if it works who who did it and so he didn’t he didn’t end up doing it um but i mean who who’s an artist is it public uh i don’t know if it’s public but i’ll tell you it’s our friend who remember we went to dinner after our live show in miami it’s our friend yeah okay okay yeah that’s crazy i thought uh if if dan would have wrote about it he would have named him yeah i think he didn’t know the name or he i don’t think he included the name of the thing but how [ ] nuts is that that’s crazy if you get if that person could have pulled it off that’s wild this is bavarians at the gate [ ] hostile takeover stuff yeah i love it [Music] you