Miami Beach, Fla. – Jordan Belfort was walking by the pool on a sunny April morning, sipping Red Bull and sharing a cautionary tale. Not the usual about his imprisonment on 10 counts of securities fraud and money laundering: this time, he was the victim. Last fall, he explained to a group of merchants gathered in his palatial home that a hacker had stolen $300,000 of digital tokens from his cryptocurrency wallet.
He said he had received bad news at dinner Friday, he said, when he was telling a venture-capitalist friend about a time he scuttled his yacht during drug fueling in the mid-90s. was drowned. After breaking into Mr. Belfort’s account, hackers transferred large amounts of OM, a popular cryptocurrency token, to a different wallet – a publicly visible transaction Mr. Belfort could do nothing to reverse. “You can see where the money is,” he said. “It’s the most frustrating thing.”
Mr. Belfort, 59, is best known for “The Wolf of Wall Street”, an exhaustive memoir about his 1990s career in high finance, which director Martin Scorsese made in a 2013 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Was adapted into a hard-partying form. hero. These days, the real-life Mr. Belfort is a consultant and sales coach who charges tens of thousands of dollars for private sessions.
This month, at his home in Miami Beach, he hosted nine blockchain enthusiasts and entrepreneurs for a weekend-long crypto workshop – a chance to hang out with Wolf and enjoy an “intimate financial experience” with his crypto-industry friends. .
A long line of celebrities have tried to profit from the cryptocurrency boom, widely appearing in fake crypto ads or the unique digital collectible known as the non-fungible token, NFT. Mr Belfort said he refused to participate in the worst shilling. He has declined offers to launch a line of Wolf-themed NFTs, he said, even though “I could have easily made $10 million.”
He has recently converted away from crypto skepticism. Not long ago, he shot a YouTube video about the dangers of bitcoin, which he called “frickin’ madness” and “collective delusion.” Over the years, he said, he gradually changed his mind as he learned more about cryptocurrencies and the price skyrocketed.
Now, Mr. Belfort is an investor in a handful of start-ups, including a new NFT platform and an animal-themed crypto project, which he said is “trying to take the dog and pet ecosystem and put it on the blockchain.” “
Whatever his cryptocurrency, Mr. Belfort is undeniably qualified to discuss the topic of financial fraud, a major problem in the digital-asset industry. In the 1990s, the firm he founded, Stratton Oakmont, operated a sophisticated stock-manipulation scheme. At the height of his wealth, he and his business partners consumed massive amounts of cocaine and Qualudes and regularly employed prostitutes. Mr Belfort eventually served 22 months in prison.
Given that history, it might seem a bit real to hear an older, more troubled Mr. Belfort say that he is “widely looking forward to regulation” in the crypto industry. “I’m not interested in separating people from their money,” he said. “It’s the opposite of the way I act now.”
Still, the crypto workshop at his home was not free: guests paid one bitcoin, or the cash equivalent, for a seat, which is roughly $40,000.
The workshop started at 9 am on Saturday. The guests – selected from a pool of more than 600 applicants – mingled around Mr. Belfort’s backyard, eating made-to-order omelets and trading tips about bitcoin mining and tokenonomics. A Kazakhstani crypto miner relaxing in the sun with an aspiring blockchain influencer running a roofing company in Idaho. A Florida businessman explains his plan to use NFTs at a start-up he’s working on as Tinder for Music. Some guests said they paid for the workshop because they are staunch fans of Wolf; Others simply wanted to network with fellow entrepreneurs.
By 9:15 a.m. the mimosa was flowing, but Mr. Belfort was nowhere to be seen. “The US dollar is going to fuck off,” said the roofing executive, Doug Bartlett. Few minutes passed. Still no wolf. “Is the wolf still sleeping?” One guest thought aloud.
At last, Mr. Belfort left the house, wearing faded jeans and dark sunglasses. Mr. Belfort has short dark hair; He’s more wrinkled than he was in the ’90s, but his face is still set in a forever childish smile. He stopped at the staircase down from the porch to survey the scene: nine men dressed in a variety of business colors — polo shirts, flip-flops, shirts with no buttons. “I think we still need to work on the adoption of cryptocurrencies by women,” she said. “We have to get some girls here next year.” He stayed. “women.”
Someone handed Mr. Belfort a can of Red Bull. (It was about 9:30 in the morning) “I’ll need sugar,” he said. After a few minutes of chitchat, he escorted the group to the dining room, where each spot on the table was set with a notebook and a copy of “Way of the Wolf”, a sales manual Mr Belfort published in 2017 .
Mr Belfort has tried to rebuild his reputation over the past two decades, but signs of old Wolf were everywhere. Behind their spot on the table top, a fully stocked wine shelf occupied most of the wall. (He hasn’t grown high in 25 years, he said, but he drinks occasionally.) Next to the shelf hangs a poster designed to resemble an entry on the periodic table — for Qualude — of various “drug facts.” Listing “, including “Best sex ever.”
After a round of introductions, Mr. Belfort began a lecture on the nuances of cryptocurrencies, from the differences between bitcoin and ethereum to the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations. They shared their knowledge on crypto-based “smart contract” systems (“some of them are really smart, some of them are stupid”) and told old stories about their collaborations with Leo and Marty.
“Leo had never done drugs,” he said. “I had to educate him on that.”
For a gathering of crypto propagandists, it was striking how much time everyone spent working off their biggest losses. About half the group said they had been hacked. One guest said that he lost money when cryptocurrency exchange Mount Gox collapsed in 2014. Two others said they burned large amounts of tokens in risky trades.
A Guide to Cryptocurrency
The energy in the room rose with the arrival of Chase Hero, one of a series of guest speakers Mr. Belfort had recruited for the weekend. A crypto investor and gaming enthusiast, Mr. Hero declared that the stablecoin – a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar – is “the biggest innovation since sliced bread.”
“It sounds lively and crazy and almost borderline a Ponzi scheme,” Mr. Hero said of his favorite stablecoin project. “Which makes it the perfect asset for cryptocurrency because that’s what these kids love.”
One of Mr. Belfort’s guests, Sven-Erik Nilsson, a Norwegian entrepreneur, began to describe his business ambitions. Did Mr. Hero have any tips? The key to starting a new venture, he replied, is aggressive marketing. “Imagine a Brazilian going to the beach and trying to find a single hot girl. There are eight million,” said Mr. Hero. “The idea is the same thing here. You have to do stupid, dumb marketing to get it out there.”
A few hours later, the group stops for dinner at Carbone, a high-end Italian restaurant in Miami Beach where Mr. Belfort eats twice a week. Some guests shared stories of their own corruption when they dine on caviar and rigatoni; Mr. Belfort, it turned out, was not the lone wolf in the room. The two guests discussed the mechanics of chasing down young women without the risk of engaging in a “sugar baby” situation. Someone guessed how an enterprising strip club owner could incorporate NFTs into the business.
Soon the conversation turned to a club in Japan where women are asked to live with octopuses. Mr. Belfort wanted to know more: Were women beautiful in Japan? Later, she showed the group an iPhone video she had taken at an S-and-M-themed bar where waitresses would whip customers.
Artem Bespaloff, chief executive of crypto mining company Asik Jungle, leaned over the table to describe his personal conversion to Wolf’s Way. He was planning to go to medical school, he said, when he found a copy of “The Wolf of Wall Street” in the library.
“I said, ‘That’s what I want to do,'” Mr. Bespaloff recalled. “I stole the book from the library.”
“So I was a good influence,” said Mr. Belfort, laughing. Still, he said, he regrets his behavior in those days—it was wrong, and he could have been richer if he hadn’t broken the law. “I missed the internet boom,” he said. “I would have made 100 times more money.”
“Well,” replied Mr. Bespaloff, “you are in crypto now.”
“You live and learn,” said Mr. Belfort.
