Week in the Life of a 7-Figure Crypto CEO

So we're about to go wake Ben up. It is.

A little bit early. Not too early. Let's see if he's ready for the day.

Welcome, South Korea.

My name is Ben. I'm the founder of Collective Shift. We're Australia's largest crypto research company and they've flown me over to South Korea to speak at Metal Week. So we're here in South Korea. We've got a big day today. We've got a bunch of meetings, we've got a podcast. We're going to head to the event. We're going to show you all behind the scenes. The VIP networking dinner tonight, then tomorrow we're going to speak at the event. We've got a keynote and then a panel session and yeah, we're just going to take you behind the scenes, see what it looks like. I've never been to South Korea, so maybe get some Korean barbecue food and have a good time. So come along with us, we'll have a good ride.

Right? I always run late. We've got about 30 minutes to gym breakfast and then we've got meetings this morning.

It's been good while I've been away because the market's just been doing just crabbing sideways post bitcoin halving for about three to four months afterwards. We sort of just go in this sort of choppy period. The reality is the market will go down 30 +6 or more times in a bull market. I guess just normal for crypto. So I think I've been doing this for eight years now. It's super season, but like to see some of the people online, like they get super panicked. Bitcoin's down 5% in a day and it's throw the kitchen sink out. It's like. It's not like that. This is pretty normal for crypto, I must say. I miss Melbourne coffee so much. When I went all through Europe, all the coffee was bang aver.

We just finished that call with potentially a new analyst. Went really well. I think he's a really great guy. Now I've got another call with Platinum Member, so we're going to onboard him, give him a call and then get some food because I am hungry.

You know what's fascinating is as soon as the market dips, everyone panics. I'm gonna get some food now with a hot, hot latte with soy milk. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We missed breakfast, so we're having a club sandwich and some latte. So that topic is about the new era of asset management, Crypto talking about like the bitcoin halving cycles. I don't really know like.

What the knowledge of the audience will be. That's the hardest thing when doing a talk is like trying to figure out like are they deep into crypto? They got no idea. I did a talk once at the Oz Crypto Con, my first one up in the Gold coast. Have this whole presentation mapped out of a super basic one. And I asked the question like who here in the room owns crypto or is like not a novice? And everyone put their hand up. So my presentation was completely like an hour of content for an audience that was just not going to be valuable. So I had to wing the whole thing. I always ask now I'm like, what is the audience knowledge? Because then I could. Because you're kind of going to read the room. There's no point talking about what is bitcoin to people that already know bitcoin, you know what I mean? So I'm doing about half and half tomorrow, so doing some stuff on like US election, some ETF stuff, some bitcoin corrections, like where we are, my strategy, some big dogs at the venue, at the event tomorrow. Google Cloud, Netflix, Spotify, AI Intel, Microsoft, Hyundai. There he is, the big fell.

That's what the people come to see. They're all here to see me. We got a podcast to do. But in the meantime, people ask me how I get out. So much content. You just gotta tweet and write when you can.

Whenever you travel, you need these. This is life or death when traveling internationally. So we've got three podcasts today. We're doing one on the market, we're doing one on my trip. And then we're also gonna do how our lives are changed by having a personal trainer. So three episodes as long as my voice holds up and then we'll pack up, head for some lunch.

Always required on the pod. Little caffeinated beverage.

Literally, mate. I would, I would, yeah.

Every single day, sending me updates, photos.

What's the menu today, boys? Korean barbecue. Korean barbecue or Korean barbecue?

More steak.

That's good, it's good.

So these guys, another crypto exchange. Who I've heard of before, but I didn't realize they're in Australia. They're really big in like Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. So it's just chatting. They've got a Melbourne office now and you know, seeing if they need help with some of their research and stuff. Just picked up your speaker package. Got my little pack, mate. A little goodie bag, what I got in here.

Bit of merch.

Oh, that's kind of cool. Or coffee. Coffee mug. Yes, I am. I'm Inji. Oh, nice to meet you. How are you? Good. This is Daniel. Hi. You're a photographer, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We. We didn't realize we're staying next door. Oh, yeah. So close. So close. We're getting into a taxi. We're like, no, wait, it's next door. You guys actually got him? No, no, we walked. We walked. We nearly got him One. You guys are coming to the networking? Yes, we're tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ultimate Web 3 Roadshow. Some sort of VIP pass or somewhere. Bit of merch. I have so much crypto merch.

Initial first reaction after that. Well, the fact that he was talking in Korean makes me a little bit concerned because I only speak English, but it looks like the crowd wears, like, translators or receivers. So when I speak English, it'll get translated into Korean. And then for these guys, if you're listening to Korean, you can translate into English.

So this is probably the first or second in this cycle, and we're probably gonna have more. So this bull market could probably last a year, two years, who knows? So it's just important to sit back, not get too sort of caught up in the short term.

Just wrapped up all that calls. Had our monthly platinum session today, which you probably just saw, going to the networking event. Hopefully we can catch up with someone like heads of a. Google, Spotify, Netflix, Nvidia.

I think we're here.

My first meal of the day. First watch. Oh, thank you. I enjoy you. What is it? Is it ap? Oh, yes. Ap. God, the role.

I never buy this myself. Yeah, really, Tom? Buy for you. Putting an AP as a gift. I'll come back. Yeah, right. What do you eat? That looks good, man. Is it pasta? Well, I think we're actually in the actual Korea now. Feel as though we were kind of like a bit secluded in our little hotel there. But Jay's taking us to the. We're in the. We're in the meat of it here.

What was it? Eat pork. Go party. Yes. And then how do you do a party when you smell. Oh, man, we need some mints. This is very authentic, mate. The menu consists of pork. Pork or pork.

I met Jay, who's an absolute legend. He's a CEO of an esports company and now does, like, Web3 Gaming, one of the biggest market makers in the world. So we went after him. We just met him, had some Korean barbecue. I'm going to head back, sleep, get up gym and we got the talk tomorrow, so thanks for tuning in today. We'll see you tomorrow. Breakfast done, quick rinse and then straight to the. The conference. Go time. Keynote time. See in 10.

Yeah. Expectations for speaking of it. I don't know, mate. Hopefully there's a few people that show up. Might just be an empty crowd. People like crypto here, but this event space is pretty sick. It's like a massive auditorium and. Yeah, about an hour out. A little bit nervous now. It's pretty. It's pretty good yesterday, but it's game time now. I've spoken to a few different countries now, but never have I spoken to a place where they have a like a transmitter. So a lot of the people here don't speak English. So when I talk, the transmitter is going to like convert it to English. So that'd be pretty cool. But the market's been crabbing, so I don't know, I'm trying to come up with some Kudalpha. We'll see.

Yep, yep. We're just going to talk about like the four year cycles, how the US are going pro crypto.

So you're gonna speak a little bit about. I'm gonna try. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna do a bit more about the market, though. I don't like talking about me too much.

10 minutes. Go time. Okay. There's a bit of a kefuffle about how we're gonna introduce the speakers. The moderator wants to do one thing and the event wants to do another thing. And then there's a language barrier, so no one knows what the.

I don't know what the plan is, but we're going to go at it, see what happens. Okay.

One of the biggest problems when buying a lot of bitcoin or crypto is the custody I'm not entirely sure about. The knowledge level in the coin is up about 100% in the last 12 months and it's up about 40% year to date now turned pro crypto. This is a chart that basically is a devaluation. Why Very good at your job and why should they listen to you? Thank you. So my name is Ben Simpson. I'm from Australia and I run a crypto research company out of Melbourne. So we are the largest crypto.

Oh, yes. Which company? Sorry, Coindou. I thought it was 2008 the other day. I've lost like 20 years.

My website, Collective Shift.

Thank you. I'll send you an email. Yeah, thank you so much. Nice to meet you. Oh, there we go, the next speaking geek. I think people understood Me, I wonder how the Korean translation went with my Aussie accent. Rodeo all done. Just got back, had a bit of a sleep given. I was pretty cooked after that. But it was super fun. We just getting changed, we're gonna go have dinner.

Right? We're finished up at the conference, having a bit of dinner, looking over the city of Seoul. And there's two things that I really want to share with you out of today that I thought was really, you know, credible. Insight was sitting down over lunch with a vc, a crypto VC out of Hong Kong and he was sharing with us some of the insights that they have about some of the tokens that they invest into and specifically the relationship they have with finance. What they were basically saying was for some of these projects or most of the projects that are wanting to get list onto Binance at the moment, they are actually asking or requesting for them if you want to be listed on Binance, that they need to pay 15% of the total supply of a token to be listed on the Binance, which is massive. 5% goes to market makers, 10% goes to Binance, which is crazy. And if they have high like FTV in terms of a market cap, they're wanting to bring that down because they basically want the market cap of the project to pump when it gets listed on Binance. So if you have something like a $500 million FDV market cap project, they won't take you on board because they don't think it's going to pump. They need it down near 100 million. So once the project goes live, it will pump. And they need in the documents in the contract that they have really great lockup terms or favorable lockup terms for the VCs and the exchanges. So that basically they're going to make a shitload of money and potentially dump on the, on the retail. What he was saying, I haven't confirmed that, but if it is true that he's super, super crazy, the guys that are making all the Money are the VCs and the exchanges. So for me, looking at projects, it's super, super important. Again, back to fundamentals that you're focusing on projects that can win regardless of being needed to be promoted on a major exchange. If you have a project that is growing in revenue, has good fundamentals and is growing in market cap without the need of going on a major exchange to get the awareness, that's a huge positive. A lot of these projects will go on these major exchanges, get pumped just to get that exposure and the initial hype and then die off. That's why a lot of these meme coins, the celebrity coins, get so much hype and FOMO and excitement early on, but they don't last. It's because they don't get that consistent narrative or consistent fundamental value that drives the price up. They'll be here for a period of time and they'll die off. Now you can get on those projects if you want, but you need to be in and out very, very quickly because a lot of them don't last. So if you want to build a long term portfolio, you need to focus on projects that aren't just being driven by exchange listings or community or sentiment. They are all positive things, but for the longevity you need to focus on fundamentals. Now the second thing was we were listening to a Web3 gaming panel. Actually we went out for dinner with one of the guys last night who recently sold a massive esports company and now works in crypto in the web3 gaming space. And he is super bearish on anything web3 gaming. From an investment perspective, he's a huge believer. He used to make games, he's a huge believer in that we should just scrap the idea of Web3 gaming altogether and just call it gaming and focus on building games that gamers actually want to play, which I fundamentally believe. But he's saying that we really need to continue from an investment perspective, which I agree with, to focus on the infrastructure layout. That's why I'm focusing on platforms like Ronin or Solana or Ethereum to get the value of those future games being built. But to back the individual games is super, super difficult because the tokenomics probably aren't great, the games probably aren't great. And games have a life cycle, they don't last forever. Some games do. But the best games in the world are primarily web 2 focused and these gamers don't care about the web 3 economics. So focusing on the infrastructure layer, where those games will be built on top of and over time, if there is a game that hits the billion users and really goes to the mainstream, well then the infrastructure layer, blockchain is going to be the right play. Trying to back the individual horse in a race of gaming can be super difficult to pick and ultimately just play in the casino. So two key takeaways. One, again focus on fundamental value, not hype driven FOMO and sentiment about where these projects being listed because they're going to have a short lifespan. And number two, focus on the infrastructure, infrastructure level of blockchain games rather than the games themselves. I'M massively bullish on Web3 gaming but getting the infrastructure level focus on those blockchains for me. Ronin, Solana and Ethereum. They're great plays. There's a few others Avalanche etc but those are the big three I'll be focused on and it was good to see that data backed up today guys. We're wrapping up here in Seoul, South Korea. As you can hear my voice is still pretty cooked after jet lag coming from London. I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes vlog style video. It's the first time I've done this so I'd love for you to share with me some feedback in the comments if you liked it, if you didn't, what you want more of, what you want less of. And I'm flying out to Bali tonight to do another vlog with some meetings. That's cool stuff happening in Bali so I'll be sharing you behind the scenes there as well. But make sure you leave a subscribe if you like the content and I'll see you on the next video. Thanks guys.