A series of articles in Tampa Bay Business Journal from last year was titled 25 People to Watch in 2022, and Nuke Goldstein was one of them. He’s the CTO and one of the cofounders of Celsius Network, the exchange that mishandled its customers’ cryptocurrency and went bankrupt. (You can find more details in my infamous post titled If you’re going to Florida Bitcoin and Blockchain Summit 2022, YOU’RE AN IDIOT.)
To add extra failure to their mix, what happened with Celsius has since been relegated to footnote status thanks to FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried’s colossal crash and burn.
A year ago, we had three splashy players announce moves to Tampa Bay:
- Nuke Goldstein (again, see my post, If you’re going to Florida Bitcoin and Blockchain Summit 2022, YOU’RE AN IDIOT.)
- Dom Heller, whose company, Fast, imploded in a year
- And admittedly, we have yet to see whether Cathie Wood’s bold bets pay off. Her investment firm, ARK, relocated to St. Pete to much fanfare amidst announcements about Nuke’s and Dom’s arrivals. The financial services company Morningstar recently published a report saying that ARK has destroyed $1.3 billion in shareholder value over the past decade, and that’s before this year’s stock market slump. They are currently buying a lot of Bitcoin, along with stock in Coinbase and Tesla, whose prices are currently crashing with the great cryptocurrency crunch and Elon Musk’s Twitter clown show.
As bad as this news may seem, I’m compelled to remind you of a line that John Perry Barlow was fond of trotting out: “Bullshit is the grease on the skids of innovation.” Attention is a key element of building a tech hub, and the hype from our new Tampa Bay residents has helped shine a light on our local scene.