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This Week in Startups

Tether: Crypto’s Black Swan? Plus Alternative Asset Roundtable featuring the founders of Masterworks, Fundrise & Rally Rd | E1232

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.21.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2021

⏱️ 87 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jason kicks off the episode with research into the claims against Tether Limited, the company behind USDT, the world's largest "stablecoin" and 3rd largest cryptocurrency (1:30). Then Jason is joined by 3 founders of Alternative Asset investing platforms (25:49), Chris Bruno of Rally, Scott Lynn of Masterworks, and Ben Miller of Fundrise. They discuss inflation, supply & demand, expanding company roadmaps (59:56) and more!

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, everybody. Hey everybody. We got an amazing show for you today. We're trying something very new. We are going to do a roundtable today with three people in the alternative asset space. As you know, that exploded in 2020 with people being really interested in crypto currency, real estate startups, equity crowd funding art, maybe NFTs, baseball cards, all of these alternative assets have exploded. And I thought we have a number of people in our orbit who are experts on this.

0:29.8

What if we put them all together in a roundtable, not just similar to what I did with the all-in podcast with my friends who I play poker with. Now, these aren't my besties. These are people I know from the industry, including Rally Roads, Chris Bruno, now Rally Road, as you know, has been on the program before and Mark Schuster, their investor has been on the program. Very cool. We can buy fractional ownership in a Lamborghini or a Corvette or something, some famous car, and they've done other assets as well. Masterworks, Scott Lynn is on the program. He is now one of the largest

0:59.8

buyers in the world because he buys a Picasso, or a Monet, or a Basquiat, or a Warhol, and then he lets you buy in and buy shares of that artwork. And then we have funderizes Ben Miller on. And they've been doing massive amounts of real estate investing. And the three of them are extremely smart and are at the forefront of this. And it's an amazing discussion. But before we get into that discussion, I wanted to kick off with a new story. And we've been waiting for what would cause the next

1:29.8

bubble or this bubble to burst. In other words, what would be the next.com bubble or the real estate and the great recession and the real estate collapse of 2008? We all believe this happens every seven to 15 years. We get one of these. And at least in our lifetime, I've lived through three of them. Three major ones, I should say. And it feels very bubbly right now. A lot of assets feel inflated. And in fact, we're doing an asset roundtable here. And some of those assets feel inflated.

2:00.6

There is something that everybody in the cryptocurrency community has been talking about for many years. And it seems to be bubbling up again. And sometimes when I feel this, I decide to go all in on it. And I did this with Nikola, the EV company that has lost a massive amount of value that felt like a scam.

2:21.9

And I had the founder of that company on the podcast. And y'all were like, wow, Jacob, great interview. You kind of put all this rope out there. And this guy just kept wrapping it around his neck. And then we had a John Kerry rule on the program after his first story about Theranos. And that story created a bunch of interest or him being his appearance on the podcast. He told us later when he came on after the book bad blood came out. He told us that he had more sources come forward after they saw his interview with me.

2:51.9

Of course, before that, we saw Bernie made off. So I've watched different scams in our industry. And I've seen them unfold. And I'm starting to get that spidey sense with tether.

3:04.4

And the reason I'm getting this is because there's been a lot of great reporting on this stable coin. So it's incredibly complex. We're not going to be able to cover this in one episode.

3:17.0

So I'm announcing today of this week and startups investigation. That will be a crowdsource investigation. We're going to have a number of guests on the program. And we're going to get to the bottom of this. I should have probably done this Theranos, which I knew was a scam. It was just obvious to everybody that this was like some sort of scam. So we're starting today. And we'll cover tether every week on the pod until we figure out if this is a scam.

3:42.7

Or this is not a scam scam. Not a scam. Tether is going to be our focus. And I'm going to need your help as the audience to start researching this. Start finding information. And we're going to see if this is the next Bernie made off.

3:56.7

If this is the next Elizabeth Holmes or if this is reality. So today we're just going to explain what it is. And basically what people, what has people concerned?

4:06.7

What are the red flags? And as I said, tether super, super, super complex. All right. Let's do the work. Let's get into it.

4:14.7

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4:29.7

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4:40.7

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4:52.7

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5:00.7

Tether claims to be a stablecoin. A stablecoin is a virtual currency aligned with another asset. In this case, the US dollar and tether claims they have a one to one ratio.

5:11.7

Every tether equals a one US dollar. That's the claim. And tether currently has the third highest market cap in all of crypto at $63 billion.

5:20.7

Tether is number one. Obviously at $750 billion and Ethereum number two at $300 billion. Fill potter, one of tether's founders owners called tether paypal for the blockchain in an interview with what Bitcoin did in 2019.

5:34.7

Tether's virtual coins are supposed to represent actual money and that you can redeem them at any time. And the idea is that stablecoins would help build liquidity into crypto exchanges.

5:44.7

That's a website where you can buy and trade cryptocurrencies like coin base. But there are many, many more coin bases in the world.

5:53.7

And some of them are regulated in a very deep considered up and up fashion. And some of them are the wild west.

...

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