Original article from DL News Ben Weiss
Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily Golem (@web3_golem)
Ryan Selkis seems to enjoy picking fights. The CEO of crypto analytics firm Messari has publicly called Silicon Valley bigwigs Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Ron Conway "old rascals"; commented on his country's leaders as cowards; challenged Mark Cuban, a Democrat and billionaire who supports cryptocurrencies, to a duel; and launched the most vicious verbal attack on U.S. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, calling him a liar, a toady, a loser, and a sociopath. At the same time, Selkis wrote in late April: "This government and its agents should be severely condemned."
Some practitioners in the crypto industry may be disgusted or even resistant to his behavior. For example, the founder of Mask said in a statement that he would stop all potential transactions with Messari and stop participating in all their activities. He also advised partners and portfolio companies to think twice before cooperating with Messari.
So why does Ryan Selkis repeatedly make these radical remarks on public social media and support Trump so firmly? This article comes from an interview with Ryan Selkis by a DL News reporter at the end of June. Odaily Planet Daily compiled it to decode this "active CEO" for readers.
Summarize:
Ryan Selkis is relentless on social media;
He once supported Biden, but now he’s all in on Trump;
His shift reflects a broader trend in the crypto industry toward Trump.
Extensive network and influence
Ryan Selkis has nearly 360,000 followers on the X platform.
He has drafted a plan to get cryptocurrency noticed in the 2024 election and helped strengthen FairShake, a super PAC that has raised nearly $180 million to support crypto industry candidates.
He has a wide network of contacts and has deep connections with many celebrities in the crypto industry. He claims to be personal friends with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and venture capitalist Fred Ehrsam. Messari is backed by Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital and angel investor Balaji Srinivasan, among others. At the same time, Selkis' business has also attracted the attention of Wall Street. Point 72 Ventures, led by hedge fund billionaire and New York Mets baseball team owner Steve Cohen, is also an investor in Messari.
Unlike Armstrong, who positioned himself as a calm, nonpartisan cryptocurrency advocate, Selkis openly supported Trump during the presidential campaign and became aggressive in his rhetoric in the process.
"My level of verbal abuse has been a gradual escalation over the last six months," Selkis said in the interview, insisting that his insults were counterattacks and never preemptive.
The main target of Selkis' remarks is still the SEC. Since the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX in November 2022, the SEC has stepped up its litigation against crypto companies.
Selkis said that although he voted for Biden in 2020, he always considered the SEC to be his mortal enemy, while Trump seemed to have become an ally - this political shift also reflects the general tilt of the crypto industry toward Trump.
However, many people were puzzled by Selkis' sometimes aggressive, hostile language and name-calling.
Billionaire Mark Cuban complained that he "didn't know what was wrong with Selkis." Selkis retorted in several interviews: "He knows exactly what I'm doing."
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman also expressed confusion. “Reid has absolutely no idea what Selkis is talking about,” a spokesperson for Reid said in response to Selkis’s claim that Hoffman was conducting a “secret boycott campaign” against the Messari team.
Continued aggressive behavior leads to dissatisfaction
Selkis’s aggressive public comments left some employees confused.
One former employee said he tried to push the industry by hard-selling his rhetoric, but his delivery was disruptive, while another employee interviewed said he had been a troll for the past seven years or so, though his online rhetoric had become more aggressive recently.
Selkis himself said some clients were concerned about his behavior, but he assured them he was fine and said his public comments had not affected Messari's business.
Bald, bearded and stocky, Selkis lives with his wife and four children in a five-bedroom house in suburban Baltimore. He has a bachelor’s degree from Boston College and his crypto company was valued at $300 million in its latest funding round.
By worldly standards, Selkis led a happy life. So why did he seem so over the top?
Do whatever it takes, until death
On the wall behind Selkis during an interview in late June was a signed photo of Australian golfer Greg Norman, in which the golfer had signed, “PLAY HARD, ATTACK LIFE.”
The 6-foot-5 CEO looks like a typical cryptocurrency enthusiast. His username on the X platform is "twobitidiot," and he often posts about drinking IPA beer. In conversation, Selkis is cautious but still a little crazy.
“I think I do pretty well online,” Selkis quipped.
Selkis began his career in investment banking and venture capital. He eventually landed executive positions at Digital Currency Group and CoinDesk. He later raised about $61 million in funding for Messari, the crypto analytics company he co-founded in 2018.
Selkis said in an interview that his public persona is "dumb as a fox." "I can be whatever character or wear whatever mask I need to in public, but I won't change in private."
Reasons to bring down the SEC
Selkis said his purpose for donning the public mask was simple: to overhaul the SEC. “The SEC is a corrupt institution that must be taken down and rebuilt from the ground up,” he posted on X in June.
His objection to the regulator stems from what he sees as its behavior in bad faith. Rather than viewing cryptocurrencies as a new asset class worthy of its own laws, the agency is committed to regulating them in the same way it regulates stock markets.
The SEC has been filing lawsuits against crypto companies regularly since 2018 (in fact, this happened during Trump's term). In 2023, the agency stepped up its crackdown, targeting some of the industry's leading companies, including Coinbase and Binance. If the SEC wins the lawsuit, token issuers will have to register like companies issuing stocks and bear the burden of regular financial disclosures.
This is not good for Messari.
Selkis likened Messari’s importance to EDGAR, the online database that the SEC publishes financial documents that public companies file with the agency. Clients rely on Messari for in-depth reports on blockchain ecosystems like Solana, as well as data on cryptocurrency prices or the amount of money raised by crypto startups. He said Messari’s fortunes are directly tied to the rise and fall of the crypto industry; if crypto goes to zero, the need for analytics will also disappear.
Selkis 2024: The Crypto Political Machine Launched
So Selkis has been seeking help from politicians. According to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, he has personally donated more than $115,000 to political candidates since 2018, many of whom explicitly support cryptocurrency. With the recent donation to Trump, that number is now closer to $200,000. He's even considered entering politics himself.
In September 2021, he announced plans to run for the U.S. Senate, writing in a since-deleted post on X: “Selkis 2024, it’s time to start the crypto political machine,” but ultimately backed off because he didn’t think he could win in his blue states (New York, Massachusetts, or Maryland, the Democratic camp).
However, he has not left the political arena. In 2022, he defended cryptocurrency in an interview with Fox News and said he had founded the Digital Freedom Alliance to be a voice for the industry on Capitol Hill.
Turn to Trump
In February 2023, after meeting with Brian Armstrong, Fred Ehrsam, and other prominent figures in the crypto space, Selkis drafted a Leonidas plan—a plan that involved a massive fundraiser from industry executives to support cryptocurrency activities. But he ultimately channeled his connections into the already existing FairShake and merged the Digital Freedom Alliance's operations under the banner of this super PAC. By December of that year, Armstrong and other wealthy members of the crypto elite had contributed $80 million to the cause.
At that point, Selkis said he turned over the day-to-day operations of FairShake to political consultants, while he told his wife and team he would be leaving politics next year, but he didn’t stay away for long.
In January, pharmaceutical executive and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy ended his long run to become the Republican presidential candidate and endorsed Trump. Ramaswamy was Selkis’s choice for presidential candidate, but Selkis was quick to endorse Trump as well. Selkis is a “right-leaning libertarian” who was initially put off by the drama of Trump’s first four years in the White House.
But when Selkis moved to Washington from New Jersey in 2020, he observed the complexities of the capital’s political scene up close and began to sympathize with Trump.
He did some basic math. The total value of cryptocurrencies increased fivefold to $1 trillion from 2017 to early 2021 during the Trump administration, according to CoinGecko. The market has been relatively flat for much of Biden's term, he said. While the cryptocurrency market cap hit an all-time high of $3 trillion in November 2021, it has stabilized at $2.5 trillion after a severe contraction in 2022.
"The data doesn't lie," Selkis said firmly.
Decided to stand up
Initially, Selkis planned to support Trump privately rather than publicly. The crypto industry has long been accommodating to Trump-style politics, and business leaders have generally leaned to the right. Selkis acknowledged this, but he was worried that becoming an explicit Trump supporter would spark a backlash.
“Speak up about the risks,” Selkis said in an interview.
Selkis likes Trump’s long-standing promise to reduce the size of the federal government and cut back on the “deep state” of Washington’s bureaucracy. (Note: In the Trump era, right-wing populist forces called for draining the swamp in Washington, and their criticism of the so-called “deep state” was impressive.)
Selkis wants less government intervention and more freedom for “builders and creators.”
Although Trump was convicted in June of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, Selkis dismissed it as "political farce."
“We don’t elect angels, we elect leaders,” he said in the interview. For Selkis, the debate over Trump’s character or policies is secondary. He is largely a single-issue voter and believes that Trump completely outshines Biden on cryptocurrency.
Trump craze
Selkis deleted his X-platform history before the end of April, but by then his rhetoric had become more explicit. He posted that we only have one chance: make sure President Trump stays in office to confront the deep state and appoint libertarian-leaning cabinet members.
As Selkis posted more and more frequently in support of Trump, he found that no one cared about him on tweets about crypto-related topics. In addition, since he had a large number of followers on the X platform, he hoped that his increasingly obvious support would attract the attention of the Trump campaign team.
He said that it had indeed attracted attention, but he declined to say who in the Trump camp he had been connected to. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
In May, Selkis believed crypto people openly supporting Trump had reached a tipping point when he flew to Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, for a gala for Trump NFT holders.
Selkis heard his name called while eating a salad as Trump answered questions from the audience. He walked on stage, said a few words, and then shook Trump's hand. After that, Selkis decided to "double, triple, or even 100x" his support for the former president. Since then, other crypto CEOs have also come out in support of Trump.
They include Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange and custodian Gemini, and Jesse Powell, former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.
Selkis said it was "hard to deny the influence I had in changing things," but neither the Winklevoss brothers nor Powell responded to questions about whether Selkis's comments encouraged them to publicly support Trump.
"A genius unifier"
Selkis’ online comments have become more outrageous since May, when he once posted that he was the Thanos of the crypto industry and a genius unifier.
Analyzing his X account, he posted an average of 117 times a day from mid-June to July, typically tweeting between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. New York time.
Selkis said in an interview that he gets up early every day to get ahead of his competitors. He cares a lot about how others interpret his remarks and says he is waging an organized and planned "information war."
Selkis said in early July that he was cutting back on posting, but that changed again after the July 13 assassination of Trump.
“A lot of people are pretending to be angry,” he posted. “It’s hard for me to function right now because I’m consumed by anger.”
Apparently he could never leave social media.
