REKT - Chapter 23
Bull God sits next to me on my Ikea couch in the condo. Niko is on Facetime with us. It turns out that she is behind the Bull God. She found him in a Telegram channel, moved with his trades, and made some good money. He’s abrasive but has a soft spot for her. The whole female thing. He’s useful to us because he has a pair of gifts. He’s a quant and can make numbers say anything with a high degree of confidence. He’s also a storyteller so he can connect those numbers to the larger world and find an angle why a coin might make it past this crazy bubble.
“RedAnt is the Ethereum of China.” Bull God says.
“What is the play here?” Nikola asks.
“China has one of everything. It has its own Facebook, PayPal, Twitter. It will have its own blockchain. Everything Ethereum does, but for the Chinese market. That’s the simple story. What we need to say is why RedAnt and not Quanti or BB79? For that I need to connect RedAnt back to the party. I need to trace its founders and investors and find a connection. If I show that the Chinese government has a stake in RedAnt and not the others, then Chinese people will understand this is the one to back.”
“Then?” I ask.
“Then Andy reads what I write, Deacon Joe tweets about it, we push it in our channels for people to flood on their platforms. I’ll subtitle all of it and push it in the east. Chinese people move first on the trade, everyone else piles in afterwards. Same thing as MEGA this morning.”
We made four hundred grand pumping MEGA. Niko took half our stack and bought the coin over the last week. Bull God was with her on the trade. We used them to launch Andy’s career as an analyst and crypto authority. The project itself is boring. It tracks objects through supply chains. Think of it as a barcode on a bolt that you can follow from a factory in China to a tanker off Africa to an assembly plant in Tennessee. It’s that simple. What Bull God did to make the magic was size up the supply chain software market (billions), hype up VW’s small involvement in the project (a pilot program), and dig up some academic papers the CTO did (inscrutable but important sounding) to spin all that into a surefire solution that the market is begging for (bullshit).
While he was doing that, Niko was buying up coins on the quiet so that we had a decent sized stake in the MEGA market before Andy’s video dropped. Once it got out there, Deacon Joe hyped Andy’s acumen on his channels, and a trade in MEGA started popping. Nikola sold all the way up, exited out just before it peaked, and the bubble did its job keeping the coin with a respectable appreciation.
This is our new racket. Fuck the hedge fund. We’ve been reduced to touts. We are pumpers, we are dumpers. We create markets for alt coins by leveraging Andy’s credibility. It’s a virtuous cycle. As each coin we profile gets lifted up through our manipulation and stays up thanks to the bubble, the smarter Andy looks. The smarter Andy looks, the more people pay attention to his videos and the bigger the next move is. The bigger that move, the better the media bookings Andy gets, and on and on. He’s on Bloomberg’s radar now. Our goal is to have him booked as a recurring guest on their CryptoCorner segment. These first few videos are simply a test, a proof of concept. As we get better at the process, we’ll pick bigger coins to move and put more money into each. We are going to compound risk. That’s what we are pushing through the tunnel of the bubble, a bet where we double down over and over again. I’ve figured out what Andy is all about. He’s about rigging our bets and doubling down until the bubble bursts.
A part of me is troubled by this, but that part of me has a hard time being heard in all the noise. We aren’t the only ones doing it. Hundreds of so-called analysts have popped up in the last few months. The thing is there’s nothing to analyze. These blockchain projects are all so new, so young. They’ve got years of development already priced into them. We have all hopped so hard onto the next big thing that we’ve saddled them with enormous expectations before they’ve grown bigger than a couple dozen volunteers working nights and weekends. This whole thing is under the spotlight. It’s all an enormous shitshow. Besides, this isn’t my side of the house. I’m still in charge of winding down Icarus. Tonight is just a matter of making peace with the Bull God. Andy wants us all on the same page, pulling in the same direction. Not that he can be bothered to come by and broker the truce. He has three podcasts to guest on.
Bull God here grew up in Queens, the son of Chinese immigrants in Flushing. His real name is Jonathan Tsang. He was pushed hard by his parents. Went to a gifted and talented school, spent nights and weekends at Kumon doing homework on top of his homework. After eight years of that, he tested into several of the elite high schools in New York. He wanted to go to Performing Arts. His parents made him go to Styuvesant. Bull God developed some bad habits there. Adderall, cramming, tying his self-worth to his standing in his class, but he held it together long enough to make it into college. He lasted a year and a half at Cornell. A few of those nights were spent staring into the gorge, wondering what it would be like to jump.
After Cornell came online poker. He wrote bots and played eight hands at the same time. A decent player makes $15-20 an hour playing poker. With the bots he was able to multiply that by eight. He lived a good life on that income, met a girl in Chicago online, and followed her out here. She dumped him after he threw his PowerBook through her glass coffee table. Someone cracked his program, suckered his bots for twenty-grand before he figured out he was getting outsmarted.
If you haven’t figured it out, Bull God is extremely good at some things and horrible at others. People are a real weakness for him. Bull God has a scarcity mindset. The pie is only so big, so anyone else’s gain is his loss. He doesn’t believe in a rising tide which is weird because it’s obvious how large the inflows are into crypto. Andy thinks he can control the Bull God. I think Andy can as well. I want nothing to do with him, but I’m territorial. This is a new man on the scene, and he is connected to my woman. A woman who is fading from my life.
I’ve got to audit the batch file for tonight. The Serbs need an approved list of redemptions for their morning which starts in a few hours. Speaking of events coming up, the Frankfurt account is running low. We need to move the two-hundred million out of the mutual fund money market and into Frankfurt. I’d like that done before Thanksgiving just in case one of the exchanges needs to pull money we don’t have on the schedule.
“So, are we good now?” I hold out my hand to the Bull God wanting to wrap this up.
“We’re good.” We grip hands, he pulls me into his shoulder, and we slap each other’s backs and pretend to be bros.
“Niko, do you need anything else from me tonight?” Bull God asks.
“Nope. I’m going to start buying RNT. When you wake up, I’ll be holding eight hundred thousand worth of RedAnt.”
“I don’t sleep.”
Bull God gives her the peace sign and heads towards the door. I show him out and come back to talk to Niko. She’s gone from Facetime. There’s a message waiting for me.
“Sorry, I have to run. XOXO”
Something is off with us. This is how the fade happens. She doesn’t love me anymore.