Consensus Toronto 2025 Coverage, CT2025, Feature The founding father of Barstool Sports will converse at Consensus 2025 on May 15.
They name him “El Presidente.” But not like the opposite President, Dave Portnoy attracts a line at launching a memecoin. He worries his followers will lose their shirts.
“I got involved in memecoins because I wanted to launch a Barstool memecoin, but I didn’t want my fans and followers to lose money,” he mentioned in an interview with CoinDesk. Memecoins are “legalized Ponzi schemes,” he mentioned, “there’s no value to it, so you gotta get in and get out before it crashes.” [Note: memecoins aren’t legalized in the U.S. but they are popular.]
While Portnoy hasn’t launched a Barstool branded memecoin, he has launched different memecoins. In February he launched GREED, a token that reached a market cap of $41.5 million. According to Lookonchain, Portnoy purchased 357.92M $GREED, totalling 35.79% of the entire provide, then offered all in a single transaction inflicting the value to crash. He made round $258,000.
The Barstool Sports founder took to X within the aftermath to say, “I warned people I could sell. I could have cashed out +1 million. I let it drop 75% before cashing out. Lots of people made money. I took profits + poured it into #jailstool which I can’t touch. I didn’t make a dime on it. Some people won. Some lost. Only the losers keep bitching.”
Portnoy began buying and selling shares through the COVID-19 pandemic, and even launched the YouTube channel Davey Day Trader, the place followers may comply with his trades. His trades weren’t all the time profitable, and there wasn’t all the time a transparent technique, however they have been entertaining. At one level, he pulled letters out of a Scrabble bag, put RTX (Raytheon Technologies Corporation) collectively, and put $200,000 into the inventory.
It was round this time that Portnoy was launched to bitcoin. “I don’t think you can be involved in anything, stock market [or] finance without crypto being a major part of it,” he says now. He has a love/hate relationship with bitcoin as a result of he says he’s “been on the wrong side of it every time it rips.” Over the years he’s additionally experimented with investing in cryptocurrencies like XRP.
Although Portnoy received into memecoins as a result of he needed to launch one for the Barstool neighborhood, he admits that he nonetheless doesn’t perceive find out how to implement blockchain know-how or cryptocurrencies into his enterprise mannequin. Barstool as soon as accepted bitcoin as a part of its Barstool Fund to assist small companies, however out of $50 million raised, he mentioned solely $30,000 got here from bitcoin.
“They talked big, big talk, but it didn’t work out,” he mentioned, reflecting on the bitcoin neighborhood who persuaded him to just accept the cryptocurrency. “Crypto is the league leader in people telling you what [you] should be doing, and it’s also the league leader in people I don’t trust.”
Portnoy has experimented with memecoins, bitcoin, and even launched an NFT connected to his well-liked One Bite Pizza Reviews YouTube channel that offered for $138,000. And, though he doesn’t all the time perceive them, he says “as much as I have back and forth with the crypto community, I actually love them. I think they’re hilarious […] an interesting group, which I guess I’m a part of.”
Dave Portnoy can be sharing extra about his crypto journey at Consensus 2025 in Toronto on May 15. Get your tickets here.
CoinDesk: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Crypto News and Price Data Read More