“We Are Ready for a New System“ - Ethereum Co-Founder / Our Mate Greg
TL;DR
Our mate Greg lost out on ~$17k worth of crypto gains cause he had to argue with his bank for 7 days before they’d let him move his funds to a crypto exchange.
Full Story
You know the four stages of the crypto bull run that we covered last week?
Yeah, well — this is peak stage two commentary. Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin gave his two cents on the industry at ETH Denver this past weekend, saying:
“I think the momentum is picking up, and it's unstoppable…
We are ready for a new system of the world.”
Which — ok, of course he’s going to say that — he’s a crypto founder, at a crypto conference, in the middle of a bull run.
But this past weekend, we had a conversation with our buddy Greg about the most mundane subject, and (if we weren’t already) this conversation well and truly sold us on crypto creating ‘a new system’ for the world.
The subject of the conversation was money transfers…
And it went something like this:
[For context, Greg’s Australian]
“Yeah, so I’ve decided I’m going all in on crypto (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana). I have $60k in stocks, and $12k in Dogecoin (of all things).
So I grab my Ledger, open the app on my phone and convert my Doge evenly in BTC/ETH/SOL (it takes all of two minutes).
Next, I open my brokerage app and liquidate my shares. The money shows in my brokerage account, but I can’t withdraw it (it takes two days to ‘clear’).
So I wait two days, withdraw my funds, and send them to the exchange.
Immediately after I hit ‘confirm’ on the transaction — I’m locked out of my account and get a message from my bank telling me to call their fraud hotline.
Long story short mate, it’s taken me 7 straight days, 16 phone calls, four separate liability wavers signed, and I reckon 6+ hours on the phone yarning with the customer service departments of two different banks.
(I had to start a new account with a ‘crypto friendly’ bank to move the funds cause friggin’ Commbank doesn’t let its customers move more than $10k to crypto exchanges per month — the dogs).
In the time it’s taken me to move that cash, Bitcoin has moved 21%, ETH is up 13% and Solana’s up a solid 25%.
I did the maths and it’s a good $17k of price appreciation that these bastards have ‘protected’ me from.”
Money transfers aren’t the sexiest ‘killer use case’ — but our chat with Greg made it clear:
We’re ready for a “new system” of banking.