Kraken
Summary List PlacementDan Held discovered Bitcoin, like many things in life, by chance.
In 2012, after a friend paid him back for a beer with a facetious coin — a gold coin with the Bitcoin logo emblazoned on it — Held went down the rabbit hole of digital currency.
Immediately, the message of Bitcoin's supply limit at 21 million and its potential as digital gold resonated with him.
"I was going through finance undergrad studies when the 2008 financial crisis happened, which very much shook my faith in the system," Held said. "Bitcoin was built as a solution to the central-banking problem, and that's what really resonated with me."
In 2013, he moved to San Francisco and became part of the original Bitcoin meetup group that also included the founders of Kraken, Coinbase, Litecoin, Ripple, and others.
"It was funny because no one cared about Bitcoin when it was worth about $10 — only a dozen people in San Francisco," he said. "When the price went from $10 to $260 in March 2013, 150 people showed up at the meetup."
That's when Held decided to build his first product, called ZeroBlock, a mobile app that provided real-time market data of how Bitcoin prices were moving. He eventually sold it to Blockchain.com and became the first product manager of the crypto wallet and exchange.
In the following years, Held built ChangeTip (a tipping service acquired by Airbnb) and worked at Uber before returning to the crypto world to build Interchange, a crypto-asset accounting and reporting tool.
In 2019, when Interchange was acquired by Kraken, the serial entrepreneur became the growth lead for the world's fourth-largest crypto exchange by trading volume.
How Bitcoin might reach $1 millionHeld first bought Bitcoin at around $10. It was the Wild West days of Bitcoin during which Mt. Gox was the only crypto exchange around, but he was bullish from the start.
"When I first bought Bitcoin, my accumulation strategy was around how much would I want to acquire given this future potential of it being a gold 2.0," he said. "And the answer was most of my net worth."
Since then, Held and many other bitcoiners have been on "a lonely journey" as the price of the token swung and skeptics predicted its demise throughout the years.
"We were considered a little bit crazy by the mainstream world," he said. "All these negative narratives kind of came at you in waves over that period of time. You had to really believe in it, otherwise, you would have washed out a long time ago."
Held's mentality of "HODL," a Bitcoin slang that's come to stand for "hold on for dear life" even when the price drops, has helped steer him through many crypto winters. Right after he sold ZeroBlock and took the payment in Bitcoin, the price of the token plunged 80%.
Such levels of volatility in Bitcoin remain today as the digital token fell sharply from $60,000 to around $52,000 over the weekend. But Held is looking past the near-term ebbs and flows.
In an extremely bullish take, he thinks Bitcoin might reach $1 million by the end of the year because of what he calls "a supercycle."
The gist of his theory is that Bitcoin's previous market cycles did not occur in a recession, but a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, which spurred rampant money printing from central banks, highlighted why Bitcoin is necessary.
"When people see the iceberg way in the future, they're like, 'I don't have to worry about that right now.' But once in a while, the bidding on a seat on that lifeboat would spike up," he said. "When we actually hit the iceberg, all of a sudden, people start to bid a lot for the seats on those lifeboats, and Bitcoin has 21 million lifeboats to escape."
For Held, Bitcoin has never had a better moment to shine. As institutions such as corporations, hedge funds, and university endowments continue to recognize the digital currency as a store of value, people will seek to understand it and buy it.
"All of that together gives credence to an idea that I called the supercycle where Bitcoin may not act like it has before. This time is very much different," he said. "It's possible we blow past those targets that are $200,000 to $400,000. We might hit $1 million in Bitcoin by the end of the year."
Dogecoin, a $51 billion memeWhile Held is personally only interested in Bitcoin, he is fascinated by altcoins, having mined Primecoin and others back in the day.
Right now, he is particularly intrigued by how fast Dogecoin, which was invented as a joke token, has become a $50.8 billion meme by market cap.
Beyond the funny facade of the token, he thinks the phenomenon speaks to how narratives can drive money's value and how crypto is all about community.
"Dogecoin is a really interesting psychological experiment to see how people believe in a new money," he said. "Sometimes it's as easy as believing in the same jokes together."
Held has seen a huge surge in interest in Dogecoin at Kraken, which is one of the few exchanges that allows clients to purchase Dogecoin directly with local currencies, such as the US dollar.
He believes that the shiba inu-themed token has taken off based on a set of beliefs shared by Gen Z and millennial investors who don't take themselves too seriously but are actively engaging in a community.
"These are all belief systems, communities, and stories that we use to bind everyone together," he said of fiat money and cryptos. "Dogecoin is just their own unique flavor of that narrative."
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