Martin Shkreli, the former manager of three hedge funds who went to prison for fraud, spoke in enthusiastic terms about DeFi and Uniswap in particular.
Summary
Martin Shkreli’s optimistic view on DeFi
Martin Shkreli, the former founder and CEO of MSMB Management, Retropin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, who became famous for managing to raise the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000%, was released from prison and transferred to community confinement on Wednesday. The manager had been convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2018.
Upon his release from prison, Shkreli spoke about cryptocurrencies and DeFi, saying he was certain that very soon some crypto reality could replace some of the biggest banking giants.
Shkreli said he is absolutely optimistic about where DeFi is headed and its future role in finance, revealing that he has used the technology in the past, speaking in particular of the most prominent exchange in the Ethereum ecosystem:
“Uniswap is really cool. I started using Uniswap in prison”.
The former fund manager also stated that Bitcoin‘s dominance is likely to diminish mainly at the expense of Ethereum and other blockchains such as Solana and Algorand, which have higher use cases than the leading cryptocurrency by capitalization for the time being.
He also discussed how DeFi could partially replace the traditional financial system in the future, commenting:
“I don’t think it’s at the limit of where it can go. I think we’ll see more and more financial products that end up in DeFi… eventually we’ll see some crypto entity be bigger than the banking behemoths”.
The big world of tokenization of real assets
Shkreli also spoke about tokenized shares through the blockchain, stating:
“There are so many ways we can do things with DeFi. There should clearly be an Apple coin and a Tesla coin. The idea that I can’t buy a Tesla share without going through this SEC apparatus and all these other steps is kinda nuts… there are people breaking the silo and trying to destroy it forever, I hope”.
Shkreli, referred to as ‘Pharma Bro’, became famous for buying the licence for a drug called Daraprim from his company Turing. Shkreli’s company increased the price of the drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill in 2015.
The conviction was not only due to this, but to a multi-million dollar stock fraud trial that began in 2017 and ended in September 2018 with a 7-year prison sentence. He was released before the end of the sentence for good behaviour.
This fact was the occasion to create a debate via social media, with rather caustic comments against the decision to release him before his due date, such as that of the famous mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wanted to have his say on the real reason for his release.
Martin Shkreli, has been released EARLY from federal prison. It was not for good behavior; he was so unbearable they wanted to have some mercy on the personnel.
https://t.co/rRMrEEVCtR via @WSJ— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) May 18, 2022
Shkreli commented on this and other comments with a sarcastic:
“Getting out of real prison is easier than getting out of Twitter prison”.
