Leave Banking, Hawk Cryptocurrencies for a Living

There's plenty of these already--with boatloads more to come.

Manias in the business world are nothing new. In the technology realm, we've had any number of these already like the dot-com boom followed by the dot-com bust earlier in this century. In the realm of finance, the latest and greatest gold rush concerns the issuance of cryptocurrencies. Instead of initial public offerings of shares of stock, the marquee events here are initial coin offerings (ICOs). As no shortage of issuers and investors buy the gospel (or Kool-Aid for skeptics) that cryptocurrencies represent the future widely-used form of money, there is a lot to be made (or lost).

A surefire sign of optimism about opportunities is when folks leave otherwise well-paying if predictable jobs for the Wild West of trading these largely unregulated instruments. Bloomberg says that's already happening with many ex-bankers setting their sights on the larger promised returns of virtual monies:

From Hong Kong and Beijing to London, accomplished financiers are abandoning lucrative careers to plunge into the murky world of ICOs, a way to amass quick money by selling digital tokens to investors sans banks or regulators. Cut out of the action, a growing cohort of banking professionals are instead applying their talents toward buying or hawking cryptocurrency.

They’re going in with eyes wide open. For [ex-banker Richard] Liu, who put together some of China’s biggest tech deals in his old job, the chance to shape the nascent arena outweighs the dangers of a market crash or crackdown. Loosely akin to IPOs, ICOs have raised millions from investors hoping to get in early on the next bitcoin or ether, and their unchecked growth over the past year is such that they’ve drawn comparisons to the first ill-fated dot-com boom. Yet with stratospheric bonuses largely a thing of the past, the allure of an incandescent new arena far from financial red-tape has proven irresistible to some.

“Traditional investment banks and VCs need to monitor this space closely, it could become very big,” said the 30-year-old partner at $50 million hedge fund FBG Capital, which has backed about 20 ICOs. He’s off to a quick start, getting in on this year’s largest sale: Tezos, a smart contracts platform that raised $200 million to outstrip the average Hong Kong IPO size this year of around $31 million.

That said, the potential for huge gains trading these monies comes with correspondingly huge risks as their critics point out:

Critics say many ICOs are built on little more than hyperactive imaginations. A cross between crowdfunding and an initial public offering, they involve the sale of virtual coins mostly based on the ethereum blockchain, similar to the technology that underpins bitcoin. But unlike a traditional IPO in which buyers get shares, getting behind a startup’s ICO nets you virtual tokens -- like mini-cryptocurrencies -- unique to the issuing company or its network. That means they grow in value only if the startup’s business or network proves viable, attracting more people and boosting liquidity.

That’s a big if, and the sheer profusion of untested concepts has spurred talk of a bubble. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission signaled greater scrutiny of the red-hot sector when it warned on Tuesday that ICOs may be considered securities, though it stopped short of suggesting a broader clampdown. The regulator however did reaffirm its focus on protecting investors: part of the appeal of ICOs lies in the fact that -- for now -- anyone with a bold idea can raise money from anybody.

Actually, the dot-com boom may illustrate the future of these virtual monies. Most startups of course went bust. However, those that survived for the longer run eventually did well enough and have introduced widely-adopted consumer standards. The survivors are exceedingly well-known including the likes of Amazon, EBay, Google, and so on. Like before, these newfangled entities cannot survive on novelty alone but must offer some sort of unique selling proposition to customers.

It will take some time to sort the Amazons from the Pets.coms of the cryptocurrency world. Meanwhile, there apparently be many gamblers drawn to this realm--even from the relatively stolid world of banking.