Happy Nice Mall

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Jordan Belfort was lounging by the pool on a sunny April morning, sipping Red Bull and sharing a cautionary tale. It’s not usual about him imprisonment 10 in securities fraud and money laundering: This time he was the victim. Last fall, he revealed to a group of businessmen gathered at his palace home that a hacker had stolen $300,000 in digital tokens from his cryptocurrency wallet.

He said he got the bad news at dinner one Friday, while telling a friend of his venture capitalist about the time he sank his yacht during a drug-filled turmoil in the mid-’90s. After hacking into Mr. Belfort’s account, a large amount of ohms, a popular cryptocurrency token, to a separate wallet – a transaction that everyone can see, Mr. Belfort could do nothing to reverse. “You can see where the money is,” he said. “That’s the most annoying thing.”

Mr. Belfort, 59, is best known for “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a memoir that tells all about his career in high finances in the 1990s, which director Martin Scorsese adapted into a 2013 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the hardcore party. Main hero. These days, the real-life Mr. Belfort is a consultant and sales coach who receives tens of thousands of dollars for private sessions.

This month, he hosted nine blockchain enthusiasts and entrepreneurs at his Miami Beach home for a weekend crypto workshop – a chance to hang out with Wolf and have some fun. “sincere financial experience” with crypto industry friends.

A long string of celebrities tried to profit from the emerging cryptocurrency boom. widely teased crypto ads or whipping immutable tokensThe unique digital collection known as NFTs. Mr Belfort said he refused to participate in his worst shilling. He said he turned down offers to launch a series of Wolf-themed NFTs, despite “I could easily make $10 million.”

He is also a freshman from crypto skepticism. He fired a shot a short time ago. youtube video about the dangers of Bitcoin, which he calls “madness” and “mass illusion”. He said that over the years, he gradually changed his mind as he learned more about cryptocurrencies and prices skyrocketed.

Now, Mr. Belfort is an investor in a handful of startups. new NFT platform and one animal themed The crypto project he says is “to take the dog and pet ecosystem and try to put it on the blockchain.”

Whatever the cryptocurrency, Mr. Belfort is unquestionably qualified to discuss financial fraud, which is a huge issue in the digital asset industry. In the 1990s, he founded the firm Stratton Oakmont, sophisticated stock manipulation scheme. At the height of their wealth, he and his business partners consumed enormous quantities of cocaine and quaaludes and regularly employed prostitutes. Mr. Belfort eventually spent 22 months in prison.

Given that history, it might sound a bit surreal to hear an older, grayer-haired Mr. “I’m not interested in separating people from their money,” he said. “It’s the opposite of how I’m behaving right now.”

Still, his home crypto workshop wasn’t free: guests paid one Bitcoin for a seat, or the cash equivalent of around $40,000.

The workshop started at 09:00 on Saturday. Selected from a pool of more than 600 submissions, guests wander around Mr. Belfort’s backyard, eating made-to-order omelettes, mining Bitcoin and tokenomics. A Kazakhstani crypto miner eagerly relaxes in the sun blockchain influencer Running a roofing company in Idaho. A Florida businessman has unveiled his plan to use NFTs in a start-up he promotes as Tinder for music. Some of the guests said they paid for the workshop because they were staunch fans of Wolf; others just wanted to network with other entrepreneurs.

At 9:15 in the morning the mimosas were flowing, but Mr. Belfort was nowhere to be seen. “The US dollar is going to shit,” said roof manager Doug Bartlett. A few minutes passed. Still no Wolf. “Is the wolf still sleeping?” one guest wondered aloud.

Finally, Mr. Belfort left the house in faded jeans and dark sunglasses. Mr. Belfort has short black hair; He’s more wrinkled than he was in the ’90s, but he still has a perpetual boyish grin on his face. He paused on the staircase leading down from the porch to study the scene: nine men dressed in various business-casual hues—polo shirts, flip-flops, button-down shirts. “I think we still need to work on the feminine adoption of cryptocurrency,” she said. “We should get some girls here next year.” She stopped. “Woman.”

Someone gave Mr. Belfort a box of Red Bull. (It was around 9:30 am) “I’m going to need sugar,” he said. After a few minutes of conversation, he led the group to the dining room, where the entire table was set with a notebook and a copy of Mr. Belfort’s “Way of the Wolf,” a sales guide published in 2017.

Mr. Belfort has spent the last twenty years trying to regain his reputation, but traces of the old Wolf were everywhere. Behind his seat at the head of the table, a full liquor rack took up most of the wall. (He hasn’t been crazy for 25 years, she said, but he drinks occasionally.) A poster hung next to the shelf designed to resemble an entry in the periodic table—quaalude for Qu—listing various “drug facts,” “the best sex ever.”

After a series of introductions, Mr. Belfort started a conference on the little details of cryptocurrencies, from the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum to the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations. He shared his wisdom based on crypto “smart contract” systems (“some are really smart; some are stupid”) and told old stories about his collaboration with Leo and Marty.

“There was Leo I’ve never used drugs“said. “I had to train him on this.”

For a community of crypto evangelists, it was remarkable how much time everyone spent reliving their biggest loss. Almost half of the group said they had been attacked. A guest hosted the cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox said he lost money when it crashed in 2014. The other two said they burned large amounts of tokens in risky transactions.

The energy in the room was heightened by the arrival of Chase Hero, one of a series of guest speakers Mr. Belfort recruited for the weekend. Mr. Hero, a crypto investor and gaming enthusiast, explained that stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar, are “the biggest innovation since sliced ​​bread.”

“It looks lively and crazy and is almost on the edge of a Ponzi scheme,” Mr. Hero said of his favorite stablecoin project. “And that makes it an excellent asset for cryptocurrency because that’s what these kids love.”

One of Mr. Belfort’s guests, Svein-Erik Nilsen, a Norwegian entrepreneur, began to define his own business goals. Did Mr. Hero have any clues? “The key to launching a new venture,” he replied, is aggressive marketing. “Imagine you went to the Brazilian beach and you were trying to find one hot chick. Eight million,” said Mr. Hero. “The idea is the same thing here. You have to do some stupid, stupid marketing to bring it out.”

A few hours later, the group took a break from dinner at Carbone, an upscale Italian restaurant in Miami Beach, where Mr. While they ate with caviar and rigatoni, some guests shared their own stories of debauchery; It turned out that Mr. Belfort wasn’t the only wolf in the room. The two guests discussed the mechanics of tracking young women without risking getting entangled in a “sugar baby” situation. Someone speculated on how an enterprising strip club owner might get NFTs involved.

Soon the conversation turned to a club in Japan where women are said to play with octopuses. Mr. Belfort wanted to know more: Were the women in Japan beautiful? He then showed the group an iPhone video he had taken at an S-and-M-themed bar where waiters whipped customers.

Artem Bespaloff, CEO of the crypto mining company love forestHe bent over the table to describe his personal transformation to the wolf path. He said he planned to go to medical school when he found a copy of “The Wolf of Wall Street” in the library.

“I said, ‘This is what I want to do,'” said Mr. Bespaloff. “I’ve decided to steal the book from the library.”

“So I had a good influence,” said Mr Belfort, laughing. Still, he said he regretted his behavior in those days – it was wrong and he could have gotten even 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’re in crypto now.”

“You live and you learn,” said Mr Belfort.