From Markets to Metaverse: My Personal Journey Bridging Traditional Finance and the World of Digital Assets

As someone from traditional markets, my immediate thought was, "Well, I dodged that bullet." Closed the app. Walked away. Bitcoin stayed under $10,000 for nearly three years after that.

The reason I remember this so vividly is because of something that happened at my wedding on July 2018. Bitcoin was at $6,500 that day. Two of my groomsmen—and these are smart guys—made a $10,000 wager on whether it would be above or below $10,000 by my wife and I’s first anniversary. One of them believed in it completely. The other just laughed it off as internet money nonsense.

A few weeks before that anniversary rolled around, Bitcoin cracked $10K. I had the somewhat surreal pleasure of watching one of the most frugal people I know write a $10,000 check to someone who, let's just say, had very different spending habits.

That moment stuck with me. Not just because of the money changing hands, but because it was becoming clear that Bitcoin wasn't just going to disappear like so many people predicted.

Fast-forward a few years, and NFTs were absolutely exploding. One of my gallerists called me up, practically breathless, telling me he was making a fortune launching artists like me into the digital space. And he wasn't exaggerating—artists who had been struggling for years were suddenly selling work for amounts that seemed almost fictional. There were even these wild stories, and I mean real ones, of artists crashing Lamborghinis after big NFT sales. Then there was Beeple, who sold a digital piece for over $69 million

.…This space had serious momentum.

‍But here's where I hit a wall.

My pieces take months to complete. Sometimes longer. The idea of handing my work off to some digital animator I'd never met, paying them a few thousand dollars, and then selling what was essentially a JPEG to strangers who didn't know me or understand my art—it just felt wrong. Yes, I understood the blockchain aspect was revolutionary. Yes, these assets were technically scarce and provably unique. But to me, it felt hollow. I couldn't justify taking serious money for something that felt like I was cutting corners.

Despite a flood of calls from galleries and collectors pushing me to jump on the bandwagon, I held off. Until I came up with what I thought was a reasonable compromise.

If I was going to do an NFT, it had to be connected to something real. Something with actual substance.

That's when I dusted off Peter Panda—one of my favorite creations from years earlier. I had originally launched him as part of a clothing line that, to be completely honest, nearly bankrupted me. So I figured, why not try to reclaim that story? Maybe bring him back in a way that actually made sense in this new digital world. Maybe even recover some of those losses.

We launched Peter Panda as an NFT, but we also built an entire ecosystem around him. Comic books, animations, a vinyl sculpture. Things people could actually hold, read, put on their desk.

It worked. We sold out, even though we were catching the tail end of the NFT wave. I still hold the Ethereum from those sales, actually. But more importantly, that project introduced me to someone who's become one of my closest friends and business partners: Gregory Cowles.

Gregory understood the digital asset world completely. I knew public markets inside and out. Every morning during my 45-minute walk to the office, we'd talk. I'd teach him about stock analysis and corporate governance. He'd educate me on tokenomics, community building, and the psychology of Web3.

I watched celebrity coins launch and die within weeks. Meme coins rocket up and crash just as fast. Then I watched what can only be described as absolute chaos—40,000 new "shitcoins" being launched in a single day.

It wasn't even about the names or concepts anymore. You could see where this was heading.

‍Then one day, late 2024, something shifted.

‍My analyst Ben walked into my office and asked, "Have you looked at HODL?"

I said no.

He said, "They're trading massive volume, and the stock's been soaring. Thought you might want to call your crypto guy and take a look."

So I called Gregory…

Basically, anyone holding SOL could stake it through their infrastructure and receive passive income, minus their small fee.

Ben and I looked at this setup and asked what seemed like an obvious question: "Is this actually hard to build?

"Gregory laughed. "No. This is essentially plug-and-play technology, hardware off-the-shelf. We could probably build something similar for you in a day."

That definitely caught my attention.

I asked, "Are there other crypto assets that pay returns just for staking them?"

Gregory explained that yes, many do—called Proof-of-Stake mechanisms. These payments compensate participants for providing the computing power and validation needed to process blockchain transactions. That payment—called gas—is essentially a yield. Like a dividend, but for participating in network security.

So Gregory and I started having deeper conversations about what else might be possible in this space…

We watched large-cap public companies begin moving treasury funds into crypto. We saw smaller, more agile firms launching their own tokens and staking platforms. The business models varied quite a bit, but the trend was becoming undeniable: crypto was evolving beyond pure speculation.

There was real infrastructure being built. Strategy. Sustainable yield opportunities.

That's when it clicked for me—and Intellistake was born.

We identified what seemed like an obvious gap in the market. Traditional investors were increasingly interested in the returns and growth potential of AI-driven crypto projects, but they had no safe, familiar, or properly regulated way to participate. They weren't celebrities like Ashton Kutcher getting early access to invest in private AI companies like OpenAI. They needed exposure through the markets they already understood and trusted.

Intellistake became our solution: a vehicle for public-market investors to gain exposure to AI crypto, staking yields, and digital infrastructure—all through a company structure they could analyze and understand using traditional methods. Of course as with any investment, there are risks including that digital assets remain an emerging assets class with government regulation still underdevelopment, there has been significant volatility in digital assets and their value can decline rapidly, historical performance of digital assets in not indicative of their future performance and global digital asset demand may not continue to increase due to global financial conditions and other factors.

That's exactly why I'm starting this blog.

‍This isn't going to be another crypto newsletter filled with rocket ship emojis and "diamond hands" rhetoric. It's going to be a real conversation from someone who's lived in both worlds—the kind of honest, practical breakdown I wish I'd had when I first downloaded that Coinbase app back in 2017.

I want to share what we're building at Intellistake, certainly. But more than that, I want to translate what's actually happening in this space for people who think like traditional investors. The legitimate opportunities worth considering. The obvious scams to avoid. The infrastructure that's being built while everyone gets distracted by the latest meme coin.

Because the convergence between traditional and decentralized finance isn't just a trend we're watching from the sidelines—it's already happening. The question isn't whether it's coming. The question is whether traditional investors will understand it well enough to participate intelligently when the right opportunities present themselves.

I hope you'll stick around as we figure this out together. One block at a time.