Jackson cohosts a popular YouTube show called The Gentlemen of Crypto. Wilson’s business partner Isaiah Jackson, a former public school teacher, stands nearby in a smart green blazer. She’s talking to Lamar Wilson, a software developer and fintech business owner who I’d seen explaining the basics of Bitcoin to Charlamagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club. This is Najah Roberts, a founder of one of the few brick-and-mortar cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. He has become a symbol of how to make it in crypto while maintaining integrity for the cause.Īcross the auditorium, I spot a woman in a sky-blue dress. Also, he didn’t cheat people-he was taken down for skirting rules that, in his view at least, locked everyday people out of finance’s cutting edge. Ask around and people will say that the difference between him and the SBFs of the world is that Hayes is the son of Detroit autoworkers. Last year, he pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and received house arrest, probation, and a $10 million fine. He is the credentialed cofounder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, and at the company’s peak he was the country’s most recognizable Black crypto billionaire. Outside the summit, Hayes is a divisive figure. Even in virtual attendance from Singapore, he looks precisely the part of the renegade crypto bro, his turquoise shirt popping against his skin. These are the folks who’ve been here through every crypto winter and are still working toward spring. It doesn’t take long for me to realize that I’m surrounded by legends of the Black crypto movement. When you have nothing to lose, and no sign that TradFi or Silicon Valley will show up for Black people, gambling on crypto starts to look like a necessity. What about the risks for the average investor? Skinner acknowledges that crypto is a gamble-but the promise of the future it might deliver seems, to him, magnitudes better than sticking to the status quo. The company’s founder may have used the language of altruism, but “it’s still the same white elites moving money around,” he says. When I ask him what he thinks of the FTX crash, he replies that no one should be surprised. Then, as the market inflated, scams proliferated, and Black investors started to get crowded out, Skinner envisioned the summit as a “safety net” by which Black people could learn from and protect one another. This was during crypto’s early wave, when Nipsey Hussle was evangelizing the digital revolution. The next year, in 2018, Skinner created the Black Blockchain Summit to hash out with other Bitcoin disciples, currency creators, artists, and government reps what the future could look like for Black communities globally. “If you can’t top that, I’m not impressed.”) The idealistic ethos of crypto-anarcho-populist protest meets decentralized network, as Skinner saw it-convinced him it could be a way to build a pan-African movement. (“When people tell their startup launch stories, I say mine included a coup,” Skinner tells me later. The tour ended in Zimbabwe, where it was abruptly stopped by the uprising against Robert Mugabe. In 2017, he launched the remittance company BillMari by embarking on a bus tour of historically Black colleges and universities, spreading the gospel of this new tech to young Black minds. He was turned on to crypto when he helped organize a DC Occupy encampment and saw how a Bitcoin wallet was used to distribute resources. It helps that he’s an unusually credible narrator: a Howard alum, with a storied history in organizing protests on that campus and for the 1995 Million Man March, as well as forming the first Black super PAC for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. With Skinner onstage, though, my mood swivels toward optimism. I worry that the Black-utopian narrative of a crypto-fied future leaves out how many of us will survive to the end of the story. Brother Sinclair Skinner, a cofounder of the summit.
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