​Wolf of Wall Street loses $300 000 in cryptocurrency in a hack

What’s new? Former stockbroker Jordan Belfort, known as the “Wolf of Wall Street,” admitted in an interview for Yahoo Finance Live that he lost more than $300 000 last year as a result of hacking the decentralized crypto wallet MetaMask. In addition, he said that he moved all of his assets from exchanges to a cold wallet.

The full version of the interview

What other statements have been made? Belfort said that he does not trust crypto exchanges because he himself was a victim of hacking. However, he did not specify when and how the hack occurred, which cryptocurrencies were stolen, and whether there was an investigation into the matter. At the moment, Belfort has no funds on any exchanges and has transferred all assets to Ledger’s cold wallet. The “Wolf of Wall Street” added that he owns only bitcoin and Ethereum.

Belfort compared the cryptocurrency industry itself to the Wild West, noting that it is “in desperate need of regulation.” And about 99,99% of cryptocurrencies should be regulated as securities, unlike bitcoin and Ethereum, which are more like commodities. He also noted that even after the regulation is implemented, fraud will not completely disappear from the industry, just like in any other market.

Belfort also commented on the collapse of FTX. In his opinion, FTX was not an exchange, but a brokerage company that was engaged in fraud. FTX also lost a lot of money on bad trades. Belfort called Coinbase, an exchange that reports to US regulators, as opposed to various offshore and unregulated companies, the only exception in the market. He called the activities of individual companies “insane,” noting that they borrow from each other, issue their own tokens, artificially inflate value, and trade with a lot of leverage.

In August, Jordan Belfort warned the community against investing in cryptocurrencies with low capitalization, comparing them with the penny stocks, which he himself had previously traded. In his opinion, one can only make money on this type of asset if one enters the project early.

After the collapse of FTX, Binance exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, as well as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called on users to self-custody of digital assets.