In the summer of 2014, I was in Sunnyvale in southern Silicon Valley, a couple of miles from Apple’s then headquarters. More modestly I was in a startup accelerator and I needed a good coffee, where the concept of good coffee can certainly be different in those latitudes than ours.
Anyway, I walk into the cafeteria, order my black coffee and, at the cashier, I see a handwritten sign: “We accept Bitcoin”.
The coffee was not bad and the bartender, a boy in his early twenties, was nice. Do you pay in Bitcoin?, He gives me with a knowing smile. Oh no, I answer, I don’t have any. And he, in return: do you want me to believe that you do not yet own Bitcoin? And why? The conversation went on for several minutes, during which I explained to him that my knowledge of Bitcoin was more than superficial, that I had never really started studying it and that there were only bad stories about that strange digital currency. .
The faith of that young bartender in Bitcoin was unwavering and, in no time at all, he magnified its characteristics to me, making me reflect on the benefits that could be derived from it. The conversation ended with a peremptory “Don’t wait any longer, someone like you can’t go around saying that he doesn’t have Bitcoin, buy now for 10 or 20 thousand dollars, listen to me”.
I didn’t.
Those of my generation grew up with phrases like “when a taxi driver or a bartender tells you that you have to buy certain shares on the stock exchange, I sell everything and run”. I thought it was even more true of a strange thing like Bitcoin and let it go.
At that time, Bitcoin was being bought for around $ 600. You do the math. And, unlike me, don’t underestimate a good bartender. In 2017 I received a book on the blockchain as a gift. I read it and understood little or nothing about it. He was actually very technical, and I’m not a nerd. I decided to reread it because I couldn’t accept that I didn’t understand better something that I was sure would be relevant. I reread it, I understood better but I still felt like a kind of fish out of water. That book was given to me by Federico Nitidi, today one of the leading Italian experts on DeFi and my partner in Anubi Digital.
A couple of years later in the office next to mine, in the incubation of the Polytechnic of Turin, a group of twenty-year-olds arrived with the same “light in the eyes” of the Silicon Valley bartender. They had just founded Young Platform, a crypto exchange designed for their peers to offer a platform to understand the cryptocurrency revolution and to buy them. They had clear ideas and worked day and night: they will go far, I told myself. Three years later they are the leading exchange in Italy and the value of the company has increased tenfold. Finally, in the summer of 2020, I was witnessing a somewhat historical phenomenon: several companies listed in America were buying Bitcoin as a corporate treasury tool, investment banks were releasing positive reports on Bitcoin, affluent customers of private banks. they suddenly wanted Bitcoin and were wondering if it wouldn’t be more expensive for them to stay out of it.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s creature, born to make the revolution, had suddenly gone mainstream. Of course, it was still a drop in the bucket. For that matter, the whole crypto market is still a drop in the ocean even today when compared to the value of global assets, but the signal was clear: cryptocurrencies were cleared and a new, potentially huge market was emerging. I found myself thinking that this new big market would only become such under certain conditions. The first is that it was necessary to find a way to keep cryptocurrencies in a simple and safe way. The second concerned the possibility of generating income even during the ownership phase of the same, otherwise one would end up doing as an old aunt of mine who bought the shares of Generali and Fiat, put them in the drawer to resell them when their value would be higher. Don’t we want to go through all this revolution to find ourselves where my aunt was? I talked about it with Diego D’Aquilio, who returned to Italy after a few years in London in Fintech and, above all, after having participated in the Ethereum ICO. We discovered that we shared the vision and, a few days later, the basic idea that would give birth to Anubi Digital, of which Diego has been CEO from day one, had blossomed.
And so, seven years after that unpaid coffee in Bitcoin, and once again in a space for startups, I found myself finally embarking on this promising market, which still had to be invented. Because most of the people I meet every day, and I refer mainly to operators in the world of classical finance, explicitly admit that they still understand little about digital assets. Where some see this as a problem, I find it a great opportunity, where communication plays a fundamental role. That’s why this blog was born.