According to The New York Times, Jordan Belfort hosted the first Cryptocurrency Seminar last week at his Miami estate. Nine participants paid one bitcoin - or about $40,000 - to attend a two-day workshop on cryptocurrency.
In a video promoting the event, the former stockbroker and convicted criminal said he was investing in cryptocurrency and NFT, which he called the future of finance.
In 1999, Belfort pleaded guilty to embezzling $200 million from more than 1,500 individual investors. After that, after serving 22 months in prison, Belfort published his now famous memoirs and became a motivational speaker. His TikTok @wolfofwallstreet has 3.7 million subscribers.
However, the recent focus on bitcoin is in stark contrast to Belfort's previous views on cryptocurrency, which he expressed in a YouTube video in 2018.
During the video, Belfort says that the rising value of bitcoin is related to the greater fool theory, which states that overvalued assets can still be sold for profit. That is, until the market runs out of people to cheat. Then he goes on to call cryptography a massive misconception.
Belfort's cryptography workshop was positioned as an intimate financial experience where participants would learn about the metaverse, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance.
According to the The New York Times report, nine guests were selected from 600 applications, including a crypto miner from Kazakhstan and a blockchain podcaster from a roofing company in Idaho.
Despite Belfort's historical aversion to financial regulation, he previously called for massive regulation of the digital currency in a 2021 interview with CoinDesk.
The sooner mass regulation appears on the market, the better it will be for bitcoin, stablecoins and everything else.
