The Disruptepreneur on Blockchain's Democratization of Finance
We sat down with Jeremy Gardner at his home, the Crypto Castle in San Francisco recently. Jeremy is a serial entrepreneur and investor who works and invests primarily in the blockchain space. Jeremy has always been an individual with a desire to make an impact. While in college, Jeremy created his own major focused on politics with designs on becoming a political operative because of his desire to change the world. The best laid plans however rarely survive first contact.
Jeremy got an inside view into the world of politics, while running a successful campaign for a state attorney general candidate. He realized that the main priority in politics is funding and didn’t want to spend his 20’s focused on raising money for candidates. A career path that he initially saw as a way to create change, was revealed as a money fueled bureaucracy.
During his time at Michigan University, Jeremy’s roommate happened to be involved in bitcoin. It was here, that Jeremy got his first glimpse into the crypto world and joined the local bitcoin club. He connected with organizers of clubs at MIT and Stanford and leveraging his strong networking skills and experience in politics, and formed an organization that expanded on a national and global scale, eventually becoming the non-profit Blockchain Education Network, which still operates today.
Shortly after, the MT GOX scandal broke, which took down 5% of bitcoin in circulation. At a time when Jeremy’s organization was housing a wealth of bitcoin knowledge with dozens of chapters across every habitable continent, this story galvanized young people to get themselves educated in crypto and BEN went viral with students flocking to learn.
Next, taking his learnings on blockchain and crypto markets, Jeremy met and connected with Co-founder and they went on to found Augur, a decentralized prediction market platform. Essentially, it’s an unstoppable online betting platform that predicts the future. It’s a a stock-market for anything, and Auger was one of the first companies to leverage an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) to raise funds and issue tokens, which is now worth 100’s of millions of dollars. Auger runs on Ethereum and even includes Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as one of its advisors.
We went into Jeremy's thoughts on where he thinks crypto markets are headed, the future of protocols and interoperability, crypto as an asset class for investing, and ultimately how blockchain is going to change the world as we know it.
Blockchain technology is the greatest technological disintermediator that has ever been invented. We can remove the need for trusted parties in transactions of value. Whether it’s the deed to your home, the title of your car, the rights to your music.. all of that can really be made a much more sovereign process. It allows the exchange of value to happen with much less friction.
Jeremy is a wealth of knowledge and provided some amazing insights into this technology and its impact on our future. Have a listen!
