Robin Ebers provides a unique insight into the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, drawing on his own experiences in the industry since 2013. With gripping stories and eye-opening advice, Ebers talks about the highs and lows of investing in crypto, the best projects to invest in, the importance of taking profits off the table, and how to navigate the bear markets. He also speaks about the latest trends in crypto, such as land sales and games, and his opinion on NFTs in the industry. Don’t miss out on this riveting podcast for essential cryptocurrency insights!
This following post was generated using AI via dubb.media 🤖
Transcript
[0:00:00] Rudy Dogum: Welcome, Robin. How's it going? Thank you for coming on the Wholesome Crypto podcast. It's been a long time since we've chatted. I know we've been friends for quite a while, but I'm glad to have you on the show and get to learn a little bit more about you.
[0:00:16] Robin Ebers: Pleasure to be here, man. Happy to talk to you. I always happy to talk to you.
[0:00:20] Rudy Dogum: I know, man.
[0:00:20] Robin Ebers: So yeah, man, I'm happy to be thanks.
[0:00:22] Rudy Dogum: It's always great to talk to you, too. Know you're in Dubai now, but just to get into how you got there and your whole history, I know you've been in a part of a lot of different projects and you've come a long way in the crypto industry. We've been talking to each other since 1716, even earlier.
[0:00:43] Robin Ebers: Yeah, something like that. Something like that. I think we yes, I think so.
[0:00:47] Rudy Dogum: For those of you that don't know, me and Robin have been we first met on the Reddit Telegram crypto channel for Ethereum. Was that that's true?
[0:01:03] Robin Ebers: Eth Trader.
[0:01:03] Rudy Dogum: Eth Trader. And there's like, only a couple hundred people, maybe even a thousand people talking on this channel. And Telegram was just starting out, too, and it was us just being the most active users on there, just chatting away and just shilling Ethereum as much as we can. It was a great time. And then yeah, even though I barely knew you at that point, where were you in life and what were you doing? I mean, I was just new into crypto, too, and so were you. So I would love to learn how it's going for you.
[0:01:42] Robin Ebers: Sure. I love to talk about this because as almost everybody that enters crypto, everybody has, like, super high expectations and it's like, super excited, and everybody does a lot of mistakes, right. Makes a lot of mistakes. So in my case, I actually got into crypto, so I'm from Europe, right. I'm originally German, and originally I'm still German, but I flew to Germany a long time ago. I don't feel like I belong to any country these days, right. But so I at some point, I moved to Malta in Europe, like small islands just underneath Italy. And I had, like, two friends, pete and Martin. There's like, two crazy guys that I work with. And together between the three of us, we discovered Bitcoin in 2013 and late 2013. The price then was about $200 per bitcoin and about like $1.50 or $2 per litecoin. I mentioned those too, because it's like, it's like I love talking about this because to me, like, it was yesterday, but so much has happened in that time. Right, but at that time, when you went to Coin Market Cap I don't even know if Coin Gecko was a thing back then, but I don't think so. When you went to Coin Market Cap, it had like ten or twelve coins or something like that, like some crazy small amount. And yeah, we decided we can gamble a little bit.
[0:03:10] Robin Ebers: So we each took about €500 back then, which is, I don't know, like about $600 or so, approximately. And yeah, we decided that we're going to buy some bitcoin. But then the issue was that at the time, you just couldn't buy it. There was just no way to buy it. Right. So we were researching this for, like, a week or two, and while we were researching this so, mind you, if you look if you look at the bitcoin chart for late 2013, you see that there was one of the first major bull runs, right? So bitcoin went from about $200 upwards, and we literally got to see bitcoin be it, like $200 and think, wow, that sounds like an interest.
[0:03:59] Rudy Dogum: It's kind of expensive.
[0:04:02] Robin Ebers: At this time. I really thought so. I was like, wow, man, this stuff was a couple of dollars not that long ago. Right? Now, it's like $200, but $500, like $600, it's not the world, right? Like, if you have a full time job, it's not that big. So at that time, I was a web developer. I was working. So that was, like, rather dispensable income. And then after two weeks of, like a week and a half or so of really looking, where can we buy it, we just equally saw bitcoin just go up all the time. So it went like, to 253. It's not like today. So all the options there then were bad. Right. At that time, there was one big exchange, which is in famously known Mount Goggles, which at that point was still very much operating.
[0:05:02] Robin Ebers: Right. And we didn't want to go there. I don't remember why. It's not like they had a bad reputation. They had a very good reputation at the time. Right. So I think it was fee related, something like that. And then there was an alternative, which was super shady. So that was like, BTC.
[0:05:22] Rudy Dogum: I remember that.
[0:05:24] Robin Ebers: Yeah, of course, man. They now got busted, in retrospect for actually laundering much of the money that was stolen from Mount Gox, right? So they face trial if they haven't gotten to jail yet. At some point, the guy behind it was captured, and it was a whole story. But these back then allowed to fund a Ukrainian bank account via Swift transfer, which was annoyed me because they're super expensive. So we did that. We went to the bank, and you can imagine if you, like, go to the bank and say you want to make a transfer, they ask you, why would you make a transfer? And it was just $1,500. Like, less than $2,000, less than $2,000. Together, it was like $1,500.
[0:06:15] Rudy Dogum: Let me just put my money.
[0:06:18] Robin Ebers: Yeah, exactly. And they're, like, asking all those questions, and if I'm sure if I want to send money to the Ukraine, dangerous, blah, blah, blah. Right? So we paid all those fees. They gave us like a quote for the fees that they will take. But because of the swift transfer, there will also be a fee on the receiver's end which will also be deducted from the money that we're sending. So that took another week or like ten days easily. Right. So in total we're now talking about like three to four weeks from bitcoin, like $200 on us making the decision of actually buying some to then the money actually arriving, which was at about $650, if I remember correctly. So tripled in price. And then our money arrived, but only about 80% because the rest was just deducted in fees. Thanks. But then we finally managed to buy it, right? So we each bought like, I don't know, like $400 or so worth of bitcoin then. And that wasn't even a full bitcoin at that time anymore.
[0:07:17] Robin Ebers: Right. So we were really frustrated at this point. And then, yeah, we saw bitcoin go up to about $1,100 or so and we thought we were freaking geniuses, right? And then naturally the cycle was over and it dumped really hard. It was one of these days where it doesn't happen today anymore, where bitcoin goes down like 30% or so in a day. It just doesn't happen anymore. Right, but back then that wasn't ongoing, right. There wasn't a lot of value, a lot of volume. And then actually what happened is that one of those friends told me that he wants to get out and if I want to buy it, and so I did. So I bought his share of bitcoin for about the same that we paid for it.
[0:08:07] Rudy Dogum: Now I suspect that was good.
[0:08:11] Robin Ebers: So that was my first interaction with crypto. And then the market was over and I was trying to get into trading, but the fees were like crazy high and much higher than they are today and there were not that many assets to trade back then. There was like feather coin, name coincoin. Yeah, exactly like these type of coins. Right. And I was trying to be smart and this is something that I see with everybody in crypto now. They are trying to trade and be like the master trader of the century, like trying to outsmart everybody. That kind of works when you're in a bull market because anything you buy will eventually pump, but it doesn't work when the cycle just ended. Right. So I lost some money. There probably about like 50% or so what I held at the time and that was it for my crypto at the time. Right. So in the end I got stuck in at least litecoin and not like namecoin or feather coin or something like that and yeah, that was it for a couple of years and then that was roughly at the time when I met you as well. A friend of mine, a very good friend of mine asked me if I've ever heard about ethereum. Ethereum?
[0:09:22] Robin Ebers: Never. Right. Because it didn't exist then. And he told me, yeah, it's this, like, coin similar to Bitcoin, but more complicated. At that time, the concept of smart contract was super arbitrary, right. People didn't really understand. Everybody was just thinking, that not much, really. They just thought it would be like.
[0:09:48] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, no one thought much of it to it.
[0:09:50] Robin Ebers: Yeah, there was no DFI. There was barely any tokens on it yet it was super cheap to interact with the theorem at the time. It literally cost cents back then. Like, it's like BSE today. It's crazy. It was so cheap. And so I bought some for two or $3.
[0:10:08] Rudy Dogum: Wow, nice.
[0:10:09] Robin Ebers: And then not a lot though. Like $200 worth or so, but yeah, that was a lot, right? Yeah. So then with my, like, I don't know, 50 or 100 ethereums or so, I was barely monitoring it. So it's not like today where you, like, refresh your portfolio every day. We're like, yeah, locked down. The market wasn't moving that fast then, right? So at some point, like two weeks later or so, I realized that I don't actually remember the time frame, but I realized that the theorem was like $12. So I was like, whoa, I quadrupled my money. So I sold it naturally, as people do, and that was it, right? And then a couple of months later, or maybe a month or two later, so the same friend asked me, so, man, do you still have your ethereum? No, but I saw that it made four X super nice. And then he told me it was $50. And I was like, classic. Right?
[0:11:05] Robin Ebers: So, yeah, long story short, right? That's when I rebought ethereum. And then I started really getting into it, right? And I really started to try to understand what we can do, start hanging out with like, like minded people. And that's exactly when we met. And I think at that point we started talking a lot, right? I don't even know what we were.
[0:11:32] Rudy Dogum: Just chatting and speculating. It was a whole market and just us, just what's going to be the next one to pump. And I feel like me and you have been through a lot of burns over the years. You've lost some cash. And it's just like, that's when I really learned, like, I'm just going to huddle. I don't care anymore. I don't want to make any more money. I don't care. I just want to huddle with what I have. Because at this point, personally, I just truly believe in the cryptocurrency industry, in the cryptocurrency space, that it's going to change how the world works completely. And it's like, I don't even care about dollar value anymore. I just want to have some crypto just to be part of the industry, part of the space, and learn from other people. Because now it's all about, you know, where the tech has taken us. And I think there's less trade talk and more tech talk, from my opinion, though.
[0:12:24] Robin Ebers: Yeah, I think it depends who you speak to, right? I think there's still a lot of people that trade on a daily basis. Of course I see them, right? And the thing with just buying and holding is that it's an incredibly boring strategy, right? And people don't like that, even though I keep telling them. So whenever somebody talks to me and asks me, hey, can I buy some bitcoin? Or whatever, right? Then the story is always the same. They're always like, okay, how do I buy? Tell me when I can buy. And it's always like, the same story. It's like I have like 5000, 10,000, $20,000 or whatever, can I buy now? And I'm like, don't just like DCA, just buy regularly, set up coinbase, set up binary, it doesn't matter. There are so many tools now, there's even some defy tools. But of course, the people that ask me how to buy bitcoin, they don't know what defy is.
[0:13:25] Robin Ebers: But it's a very boring strategy, right? So it's really, really hard to convince people and though I do my best to convince people to just buy regularly, don't trade hold. But greed is like, if it's not the most powerful, then it certainly is among the most powerful emotions, right, or desires.
[0:13:51] Rudy Dogum: More like one of the seven devices.
[0:13:53] Robin Ebers: Yeah. I have a friend also in Germany now who's asking me for very small amounts, right? So he doesn't want to be bothered with coinbase or whatever, so he's just, like, sending me some money. And he's a good friend, right? So I don't mind doing that, but he's just sending me, like, some PayPal and I sent him like, some ethereum, right? And we're talking about like 50 or $100 minor amounts, and even this guy, right? So, like, one day he's buying ethereum, two weeks later he's buying some bitcoin, and then after three or four weeks, he's starting showing me some screenshots of some shit coins. It's like, man, see if I would.
[0:14:36] Rudy Dogum: Have bought, if I would have, if I should have, could have, would have. Of course you could have. Of course you would have. It's. Everything is clear in hindsight.
[0:14:43] Robin Ebers: Yeah, exactly. In all 2020 and yeah, but that's that's just such, like I it's I would I would blame them for that if we wouldn't have made the same mistakes, right? We were in so many altcoins in 2016, and now 17 and 18 as well. I lost so many paper games just by not selling into ethereum, bitcoin or even like, dollar that I've just learned that I'm an extremely conservative investor now. But the narrative is always the same. Every time I speak to somebody and I tell them, listen, just by the year and just by bitcoin, they always tell me the same thing, right? They always tell me, yeah, you can do that because you've already made money. But for somebody that hasn't made money yet, they cannot make money with your theorem in bitcoin. That's the narrative, right? Even now you see this, right? There is a reason that they are all in NFTs and altcoins, right? And that bitcoin is not rallying, even though a lot of people come in. So the narrative around bitcoin is even worse because they are like, always talking about how bitcoin is so slow and this is like the boomer crypto. Why are you talking about boomer crypto? And crypto is ten years old.
[0:16:00] Robin Ebers: What are you talking about, man?
[0:16:01] Rudy Dogum: You know, it's like dog years. Every year in crypto is like seven years.
[0:16:07] Robin Ebers: Yeah, it's really nuts, right? But luckily I do, you know, I hope anyway that I go that I get through to these people that want to get into crypto and I hopefully give them some insights and some I always remind them of the simple fact that ethereum was $80 last year. Wow. Last year was it last year during the COVID dip, right, you had like one or two days to buy a theorem at that price, between like 80 and $100. And now it is like, what, three and a half? But you cannot make money with those mainstream coins anymore. Right. It just isn't true. But people want to get rich quick, but get rich quick schemes poorly for.
[0:16:52] Rudy Dogum: Most people don't fall into it.
[0:16:55] Robin Ebers: Yeah.
[0:16:58] Rudy Dogum: After all that, we started looking for positions in the crypto industry. I remember me talking, I think you were developing some crypto portfolio manager and that was pretty awesome. And then I think you led into the next thing, which was you Trust, right?
[0:17:19] Robin Ebers: Yes.
[0:17:19] Rudy Dogum: So what were you doing there?
[0:17:24] Robin Ebers: Let's back up there, because that might be something that your audience is actually interested in. Right? So the reason I got into working with you, trust, was that I didn't actually try, I didn't try to find a job in crypto like a lot of people do now. A lot of people right now, they are constantly asking me, how can I find a job in crypto? I want to start in crypto, right? Like, how can I find a job here? And I didn't try at the time at all. So what happened there was very simple. The company UTRUST, which is like the PayPal of crypto, highly recommended. Check it out. They had a presale for their initial coin offering back in 2017. I want to say I want to say it was sometime like in August, august 17, something like that. And I was part of their presale, so I participated. I bought $1,000 worth of preset or something like that, and then naturally, to protect my investment right. I was very active in their community.
[0:18:28] Robin Ebers: So back then it was very common for projects to have slack channels. Today it's more like discord and telegram. But back then it was mainly slack and I was just very active there. So what happened then is that a lot of people were asking questions. And because I was so active, I answered those questions before the actual team could. Right? And eventually they picked up on that after like a week or two, literally, the CEO of this company DM me and said, hey, man, I wanted to say thank you. I see how much you help out our moderators here. I really appreciate it, and I wanted to ask you if you're available to work for us. And that came completely out of the blue. Right. But the moral of the story is that if you really want to get involved with any crypto projects, then provide value to them, right. It is very hard to find people that you can rely on. Right. This is not only true for crypto, but everywhere.
[0:19:32] Robin Ebers: So if somebody sees that you are in fact valuable, right? That you're trying to help them, that you're trying to answer questions, that you maybe do something for them, maybe you create some graphics for them for fun, maybe, I don't know. There are so many ways to contribute meaningfully to a project, and if they are in fact looking for people that do what you offer, they'll hire you, no doubt, because it's very hard to find them. Right. So that is exactly what happened with Utrecht. So then they made me an offer that they would hire me and pay me for doing what I was doing already for free. Right. So I was very happy about that, and that continued. And I think at some point, they started like a telegram channel as well, and like a reddit. And I think that's when you got involved.
[0:20:23] Rudy Dogum: Yes, and that's when I got involved in trying to work with you on community management and some reddit moderation, which I minorly do today. But it was a really enjoyable experience because both of us were just into the crypto project. And I think that's a message for everyone. If you love a project, just be part of the community. Be contributing member to the community. You will be recognized, you will be seen, and someone will try to pick you up, especially when there is a need.
[0:20:57] Robin Ebers: Yeah, that's it exactly. Yeah. I think then what happened is just very natural progression. We were just working for them. And at some point, it was a bit more complicated for you because you're not in Europe and UTRUST has an office in Portugal. So at some point, the same person that you have to me from Utrecht asked me if I wanted to come to the office, which was like, again, totally out of the blue. Right. It just goes to show that when you are valuable and you work, that's important. Right. So, on the one hand, you have to provide value, but on the other hand, you also need to work with a team that appreciates value, which is not always the case. Right. So it is very easy to get exploited, right?
[0:21:44] Rudy Dogum: Yes.
[0:21:45] Robin Ebers: So you need to be a bit self aware about that.
[0:21:47] Rudy Dogum: Work for a legitimate company, legitimate team.
[0:21:50] Robin Ebers: Yeah. Know your value. Right. Which is, again, this happens so often. Like literally a couple of days ago, somebody from Telegram Group that we're both in, by the way, did YM me and said, listen, I would like to work in crypto but I don't know what I would charge or what I should charge, et cetera. Right. So, yeah, I just gave them some tips because again, I think people naturally tend to more often than not undervalue themselves, but occasionally also overestimate how much they are doing. Right. It is very hard when you're younger and you don't have that much experience as a contractor or in any way of measuring your time or your efforts or your contribution or value, then it's very hard to really measure what you can do. So it will take some practice, maybe you get lucky, maybe a bit unlucky, but over time just always keep grinding. Right. Like always try to see what others are doing, try to educate yourself and if you think that somebody isn't appreciating your value as much as it should, then move on. Right. But generally that's a good way to get into crypto.
[0:23:06] Rudy Dogum: That's the thing everyone talks about proof of work in the crypto industry and that's exactly what you have to do as a person is show proof of work that you can actually do something. In the crypto industry, there's tons of job boards now that have crypto jobs and a lot of them are asking when you apply, they ask, okay, do you have any material that you can show us that you've done? And in the beginning it's really hard because I didn't have anything either. But my only proof of work was here's my proof of messages and interaction with the community and that I'm knowledgeable. So the first one is the hardest and keep growing from there.
[0:23:47] Robin Ebers: Yeah, that's a good point because that's exactly what happened. Right. So after going to the office and getting a bit more involved with Utah, I really just started working a lot closer with them. I got really close to the CEO who now is one of my best friends, literally like my absolute inner circle. So this was just a very good experience where you provided a lot of value, you learned a lot. I still learned from that guy. Right. It's always good to learn from people, but even over the years I'm still learning that's good from the same person. Yeah, for sure. Exactly. Very awesome. And at some point I left UTRUST and started working on some other things. And then a couple of years later, two years later or so, we had, like, a talk and he wanted to do something but that he couldn't because he was involved in UTRUST and he didn't want to sacrifice any of the time that he's putting into UTRUST. But he had this idea together with me where you would have a crypto card, Visa card, and you could just it's similar to Coinbase, right? In a way that you had an app where you could exchange crypto and whatnot and you could borrow against it, which is something that Coinbase of course doesn't do.
[0:25:25] Robin Ebers: Then again, just long story short is a crypto Visa with some app, right? So I did this with a bit of support from him and some other people. So that's again, like where the connection from UTRUST? Or like the person that I threw you trust came into play and just developed more. And then I learned a lot in this position, founding this company, which then funnily enough, was later actually acquired by Full Circle and then once again after this was done and I learned a lot. Again, that was in 2018, right? And then it was acquired in 2019, 2020, I don't remember exactly now. And then in the year of COVID 2020, we slowly saw crypto come back to work and very quickly with the power of what's now known as defy, of course, and automated market makers. That was just an incredible revolution. So nobody was talking about NFTs or something at that point, even though they fully existed, this technology. Everybody thinks NFTs were just like but.
[0:26:42] Rudy Dogum: They'Re still NFCs.
[0:26:48] Robin Ebers: They use the same standard, man, it's crazy. So it's like really they have been around forever, but because we are still in such quickly maturing yet still so like an industry that it's complete infancy, even though it's been around like twelve years now, 1011 years or something like that and it's a complete infancy, right? But yeah, it's developing so fast that people tend to forget what was crypto like a year or two ago, which is every time you do this, at every point in time, if you compare crypto today to like two or three years ago, your head explodes because so much has happened.
[0:27:34] Rudy Dogum: No, I was like I said, it's definitely a huge change between every year. It seems like there's a new thing to rave about and try to get your money into.
[0:27:44] Robin Ebers: Very much like, for example right. So then after I took a break again so usually I disappear in the bear markets, which is something that a lot of people don't do. Right. They really do work. They build a huge network of partners or just general connections and whatnot during the bear market. Because that's really when the people are around that really care about the space, right? I really care about the space. I still don't want to be around the bear market for one single reason that people tend to ignore when the bear market is there, right? Which is when the bear market is there, then you have a lot of time, right? It's literally just you build, right? You focus on building what you are out to build or I don't know generally speaking, if you compare the bear market to the bull market, when there's bull market, essentially you can work like 20 hours a day and you still think you're behind, right? So there's just so much happening in such a short time frame that most people, not me, I make a point not to be like that, but most people just they sacrifice their sleep, they sacrifice their health, right? They sacrifice everything. Because the fear of missing out during the bear market is just so intense that people are just going crazy, right? Every business going crazy, every individual goes crazy, and it's getting worse and worse and worse until it pops.
[0:29:19] Robin Ebers: But then during the bear market, you finally have time to breathe, right? And people tend to forget how the bull market was during the bear market and then they just don't do it, right? I don't know. They cry over their pain per game they lost or they do so much, but they don't travel, they don't spend some of the money they make, they don't have fun in life, right. Instead, they are just looking forward to the next bull market, right, and I'm not like that at all. But yeah, that's why I'm like usually taking a break during the bear market because that's the time to do it, right?
[0:29:55] Rudy Dogum: Yeah. Taking like that too ball so the bear market is a great time to get yourself into the latest projects and projects probably reinvest classic Warren Buffett, right? You just buy when it's down and low and calm and then wait for the bull to sell. Of course, bear market is so underrated and how much value you can create for yourself.
[0:30:20] Robin Ebers: Yeah, of course, because nobody likes to buy it when something just depreciates by.
[0:30:27] Rudy Dogum: 50 or 60% to buy it.
[0:30:29] Robin Ebers: But at the same time but at the same time, right. Even though I tell everybody to DCA, like dollar cost average all the time on a weekly basis without checking the price, etc. Personally, if I would use DCA, which I don't against my own advice, but if I would DCA all the time during the bull market, I wouldn't touch it during the bull market. But if we're like in a confirmed bull market and things would genuinely be corrected by like 40 or 50 or 60% yeah, I would increase those weekly prices. I would increase the big time. I would funnel a lot more money into the space than right now. Right now. It's such a risky time to get involved, not get involved in crypto, but to make big investments, right. Like to get involved in crypto is never a bad time. It was never a better time than like today, right. But yeah, I would take it easy with taking like big chunks of money and throwing them at crypto at this.
[0:31:29] Rudy Dogum: Point in the cycle, for sure. It's all also a learning experience. It gets so easy for us to say it to. You, because we also live through it. And I have many friends who are looking at me like, oh, what about if I just buy it on the low and sell on the high? I'm like, you can't just do that. It's not that easy. It's really hard. And I mean, I encourage them to like, all right, if you really think you can do it, take $100 or whatever you're willing to lose and test it out. Test your theory never works because it's too hard to time. That's why I'm a hoddler.
[0:32:08] Robin Ebers: Even if it would work the first time, they would lose all their money on the second time. It just doesn't work.
[0:32:15] Rudy Dogum: There's only a handful of people that just rave on Twitter saying how much they've made so quickly on some coin. I'm like, don't listen to those people.
[0:32:22] Robin Ebers: They know those are usually the same people that make calls every day, five times, and then delete the ones that didn't work. So it looks like they're always right. But yeah, there's so much that we could talk about when it comes to crypto, particularly for newbies, right? There's so much. But really the best thing is just to get involved with, as you say, as much as you're willing to lose. With that said, I just recently got a friend of mine here in Dubai involved in crypto, and he was always telling me, yes, he had a few thousand euros, whatever, how many dollars? And he was like, can I get in now? Can I get in now? I don't care about the money. And I was like, listen, you're investing so much money, what you're experiencing is formal. If you really, truly do lose 50% of this money, you would kick yourself. So now it starts buying on a weekly basis and it's like, yeah, so.
[0:33:22] Rudy Dogum: That'S better now, I guess, for you. Are you at a time where it's trading? I mean, obviously trading is still important for you and everybody is just something you want to do to make money. But right now, what are you really focusing on in the crypto industry? How are you spending your day to day?
[0:33:41] Robin Ebers: Sure. So moving on from that story earlier, from the visa and crypto, when the market picked up again last year, I started trading, got involved into D five, really educating myself on what has changed. What was the delta between me leaving and me entering again? Right. And that was a lot as expected, and it took me maybe like a week or two to really get familiar with what is uniswap, what are liquidity tokens? Yeah, I was crazy at the time, but I was so profitable, too. But then after like two months or so, I once again talked to a friend of mine who it's good to have friends in crypto, right? Let me just get this out. So particularly people that have companies in crypto and whatnot, right? Because they know a lot of people. So I then talked to one of my buddies and he was like, he is in touch with the people at I don't know if you heard about it, there's a company in Crypto that is very similar to Kickstarter in the traditional world. They're called polka starter. So they're taking these ideas from tomorrow and they help them raise money, like Kickstarter essentially, but for crypto. And I really like this project. I was actually following this project for a while and then this body was like, oh yeah, I know the CEO.
[0:35:17] Robin Ebers: Do you want me to arrange a call? And I was like, are you kidding me? And of course I want you to arrange a call, right? And so I just jumped on a call with the company at some point and they interviewed me, they liked me and a week later so I started working for them. And that is what I do now, right? So they are, as I said, they are crypto fundraising companies, essentially, where people conduct things that are called IDOs initial decentralized offerings. So while I say they are like Kickstarters, just the concept is the same, but they are firmly decentralized. So you don't need to sign up or anything. You can literally just go on the website with any web, three wallet like MetaMask and participate in these initially centralized offerings, right? And get access to these ideas of tomorrow today. And I started there as a market analyst. So this company pride itself so Poker Starter pride itself with essentially vetting companies. So not everybody can raise funds on pokerstarters or similar, very similar to Kickstarter. So there are very few very highly vetted projects that get to raise funds on Pork Starter. And I was one of the people that actually vetted those companies, right?
[0:36:45] Robin Ebers: So it involved a lot of calls and just due diligence on projects, like really going deep into economics and understanding what their marketing plan is, what their team is like, getting a really good there are so many data points that we try to collect it. And I did that for a few months, like three months, I think. And then the company essentially decided that we would like to have a product guy that really focuses on, tries to understand what the market wants and then coordinates with Tech and the leadership team to combine essentially what we're technically feasible for and what, you know, like our executives and leadership wants to do, right? And so I became their Chief Product Officer, CPO, and that has been three months now. So on a daily basis, really what's happening is focusing the market, focusing on the market, trying to understand not on project like prices or market movements or something like that, more like identifying trends, understanding what works in the market, right? Maybe analyzing some new ideas that are out there. Like for example, right now, of course there are NFTs extremely hot. So we are now actually just planning a big launch, like a V Two porkista launch, which is going to introduce so many features. But yeah, basically that's what I do, right? Like really focus on the product, listening to users, coordinating with our tech, our leadership team, and making sure that Poker Starter is the best it can be.
[0:38:29] Rudy Dogum: Yeah, I mean, there's no one better than you for that position. So I'm glad to you all right. It's pretty amazing. Like, all these new companies are coming up, especially Pocostarter is a pretty big one and how they're all contributing differently to the DFI and crypto space. And I think as more and more is happening, it's starting to really click for some people. Like, oh wow, this is world's changing. Before it was just, oh, we're changing money and then we're changing like legal contracts and now we're changing how people experience almost any interaction through the blockchain, through crypto. Right now it's really a race between who's going to do it first mover, doing it properly and having a strong uptime. Recently there was the outage with Solana and arbitrary. Some people take that as like a bad hit where you can't recover from but I think you can recover from those things. It's a learning experience. Cryptocurrency is all programmed by human beings and human beings can make mistake. It's not some it is a shadowy supercoder, but it's a human being who's doing the coding. And it just goes to show that we need more people in the space contributing, trying and helping out rather than just discussing trade tactics.
[0:40:02] Robin Ebers: Definitely, man, I think to quickly go into these down times, right? I think there's a lot of things that can be said about this, right? Whenever something like this happens, I mean, I have a strong opinion on this, right? But it's not the place. But whenever something like this happens, people try to defend their positions, right? When this happened went short, for example, they will just try to destroy Solana, right? They are the failures and they'll never recover from this. Right. They are like, this is the scarbage, decentralized, you know, this is over. And then on the other hand, you have people that hold Solana and they just say the opposite. They say, wow, Solana so strong it's collapsed under like 400,000 transactions per second. Both of these statements are wrong, right. I think in the end it's a bit of a timing thing. So in their cases, I absolutely think they will recover because we're still in a bull market, right. And I think if this would have happened three years ago during like a firm bear market, I think they could be dead now's.
[0:41:15] Robin Ebers: Right. But they're not. Right? And also what people forget is that both of these have so much backing, right. So it really depends on who does it happen to, right? Solana is enormous backing from FDX and whatnot and are we trim? They have so much picking from the entire world of the year. So, yeah, both of them was the wife, of course. Right. Still, it's not ideal, but yeah, of course humans make mistakes and we will learn. And again, if you look at all this in this like two or three year time span that we were talking about earlier, nobody's even going to remember.
[0:41:55] Rudy Dogum: That moves too quick. People are going to forget and how this industry is. Would you say cryptocurrency has changed your life, the whole industry? Did you ever even expect to even go this, like when you first heard about Bitcoin, did you even think, this is going to be my world?
[0:42:20] Robin Ebers: I think that would be the understatement of the century, man. I think I I have absolutely no idea what I will be doing in life with Paul. I was a web developer at the time. I haven't developed anything for the last five years. I got pretty much burned out, I think, and I was burned out for a long time when I stopped too, crypto came just back into my life at the very right moment, right? So when this conversation from earlier, like when my buddy was like when I was buying ethereum at like two or three or $4, I don't remember exactly. And then later when my body was talking about it again and asked that told me it's like $50, I was already done with developing at that time, but at the same time, I was one of the lead developers in a company in London. So at that time it's just this like bull market of like 20, 16, 17 man, it was, it was, it was my exit ticket, you know, it was just so perfectly timed that exactly, man, here was my golden ticket. I honestly don't know where I would be today because I was already unhappy with what I was doing, right. And I'm sure I would have figured it out, but I sure wouldn't have the gains that crypto had provided me.
[0:43:48] Rudy Dogum: So now that you've been in the crypto industry for so long, I have to know, what is your crypto pet peeve.
[0:43:56] Robin Ebers: Right now in general?
[0:43:57] Rudy Dogum: Now? Whenever? NFTs.
[0:44:00] Robin Ebers: No, right now. Okay, so I say NFTs, but NFT is just the current one and it's always the same reason. It's the lack of innovation. And that is always a very short term annoyance to me because there is absolutely no shortage of innovation in crypto on a macro level. So if you look at crypto on a year, as we just said, again and again, right, if you look at it in like a year, two year, three year time span, it just keeps reinventing itself, which is insane. But on a day to day, week to week, or month to month level, it is sometimes so difficult to see the good. NFT is just the latest grace, right? I just wrote about it, like this morning. They start it with something decent, like crypto punks, for example, right? I don't agree with crypto punks. I don't know why people buy them, but fine, at least they were original, right? But then what happened now is that people literally on TikTok, I watch way too much.
[0:45:17] Rudy Dogum: I don't have that download.
[0:45:19] Robin Ebers: Yeah, don't, don't, don't. It's a huge time period of your life. Don't do it, man. It's fun though. But my TikTok algorithm knows me very well. So I see a lot of crypto content and literally on a daily basis, I see people explain how to do NFTs, how to make a lot of money with NFTs. Creating NFTs. Not only buying and selling, but creating NFTs. Right now, you have this craze of just like, painting or drawing a few sprites and then using a software to generate like you paint. If you look at these, their current they call them like profile picture NFDS like PFP, where you just have a head and, like, different accessories, whatever, different dress. And sometimes there's a cigarette in the mouth, stuff like that. Exactly. So they just paint all of these or draw all of these individual sprites, which might be a couple of hundred. You can literally go to fiverr and do this for a couple of then you use a software to generate 10,000 unique NFTs based on those sprites. It's like just random combinations of them, right?
[0:46:31] Robin Ebers: And then you sell them. And that is what's happening right now, right? There's. Like complete garbage, in my opinion.
[0:46:40] Rudy Dogum: The ones that have some type of enhancement where you can have different utility of like maybe joining group chats or having access to something. The ones I like a lot are trading card games. That makes sense.
[0:46:56] Robin Ebers: Actual games.
[0:46:57] Rudy Dogum: That makes sense.
[0:46:57] Robin Ebers: Exactly.
[0:46:58] Rudy Dogum: But just having profile pics is kind.
[0:47:01] Robin Ebers: Of like okay, but even because the general in the space, they always talk about JPEGs, right? JPEGs. Even though I disagree with the valuation of current cordless or JPEGs, I understand that they are collective items. So if I have a real artist that painted something like this guy in the UK recently who said he designed or he just painted a lot of, like, paintings. And now you can make a decision. If you buy one, you can either get the original or the NFT. If you take the NFT, he will destroy the original or vice versa. I kind of get this. I'm not like an art guy. I don't have paintings. Maybe one day I'm not in that space. But I understand the space exists, right? And it has existed for a very long time. So this I understand, but I'll try to understand. But what I don't understand is these like auto generated composite NFTs, right?
[0:48:07] Robin Ebers: They just make no sense. And the thing is that they are just clones and clones of clones, right? And that is why I say that my pet peeve was always right. Now it's NFTs, but before it was NFTs. It was just projects cloning other projects, doing minor iterations, like changing the name, changing the fee on transfer, stuff like that. Right. So it's always copies of copies of copies of copies for a while, and then there's a new trend and the thing resets and it happens again. Right. So this is my pet peeve. But this is how innovation works, I suppose, right? You just have people experimenting fast, but yeah, it always ends up in while there's a new trend. This is amazing. Let's make a lot of money while there's a lot of clones and while there's a lot of clones of clothes while this trend is dead next, we're.
[0:48:59] Rudy Dogum: Going to see a lot more of that, for sure.
[0:49:02] Robin Ebers: I wonder what the games games is the next thing, right? Like now, games, it's extremely hard, right?
[0:49:08] Rudy Dogum: That like play games and renting out digital space in a virtual world.
[0:49:14] Robin Ebers: Oh, yeah. Land sales and games, both of which are happening on pokerstarter right now. But yeah, we are always on top of those trends. And as you say, land sales and games are super huge right now. So what you can expect is that a lot of land sales will be copied cloned, cloned, cloned, cloned. Right. A lot of will happen with the games. People will clone games, clones of clones, and then the trend dies next. But it is really like that. It's just people somebody plants a lemon tree. The lemon tree has extremely juicy lemons, so everybody starts planting lemon trees. Right. And that's exactly crypto, man. Until there's an X trend. It's a never ending story, I suppose.
[0:50:02] Rudy Dogum: So to end it off, what made you smile the most recently? Ear to ear smile? It could be anything not crypto related. Just like maybe you just saw a puppy and you got super excited.
[0:50:18] Robin Ebers: No, I bought an apartment in Dubai with crypto, I might add. Right. So I was very happy about this because it took me hard work, a very long time to get not only to the crypto gains that I've made today, but also, and that is very important, taking profit, right? It is like greed is again, I say that again and again, but greed is such a strong desire that people just never cash out. For me, it's easy to say because previously I lived in Portugal where there are no crypto taxes. Now I live in Dubai where there's no taxes at all. It's easier for me than for others, naturally. But taking profits off the table, particularly when your entire profile I literally know people that from last year or like from two years ago that turned a couple thousand dollars, like $5,000 or so into a million in the cycle. Right. And they still don't take major profits. And that is just such a dangerous game, because when the cycle is over, these paper games are going to disappear. I had to learn that. I think you learned that, Too. Rudy. And so when I did take this money out and I bought an actual apartment with it, I was very happy about this.
[0:51:47] Rudy Dogum: Your hard work.
[0:51:47] Robin Ebers: That means that this apartment nobody can take from me. Bear Market. I don't care. I don't pay rent. Yes. This was a big deal for me.
[0:51:57] Rudy Dogum: Congratulations, man. And thank you so much for spending time with me here today. And it's always great talking to you. I'll speak to you soon. Thank you. Everybody else.
[0:52:06] Robin Ebers: Thanks, man.
[0:52:07] Rudy Dogum: See you.
[0:52:08] Robin Ebers: Thank you very much. Bye.
Robin Ebers - CPO of Polkastarter