Self-proclaimed “crypto moderate” Nic Carter says that he got reamed by some members of the Bitcoin community after they discovered he wasn’t the hardcore Bitcoin maximalist they’d assumed.
“A lot of the self-appointed High Priests of Bitcoin thought of it as an opportunity to try and grow their stature in the Bitcoin community by trying to diminish me,” he says.
Carter is a venture capitalist at Castle Island Ventures and a prominent crypto commentator with his own army of 376,300 followers on X. He believes he came out on top, claiming the whole Bitcoin Maxi scene is kind of fading away anyway.
“I think the crowd of hardcore Bitcoiners is basically shrinking, and it looks to me like the moderates are winning. So I’ve got no regrets,” he laughs.
Su and Kyle rebranded as bitcoin maxis because they knew that the maxi community would be sufficiently dumb, cynical, and self serving to embrace them… perfect marks
— nic "bankful" carter (@nic__carter) January 12, 2023
The issue arose after some “hardcore Bitcoiners” believed Carter had moved from being exclusively into Bitcoin to exploring a polyamorous relationship with other crypto tokens. However, the truth is that he was never solely devoted to Bitcoin in the first place.
“I think that people just misunderstood my views. I have always been a moderate, but I previously was very Bitcoin-focused,” he explains.
“The reality is I’m a venture capitalist and I invest in all kinds of stuff. But I’ve always been open to other things like I was tracking the Ethereum launch very closely back in 2016.”
Carter was never keen on treating Bitcoin like a religion. As a religious person himself, he prefers to keep faith and assets separate.
“I didn’t like the religious aspects of it. I felt offended by that. I’m a Christian, I think religion is religion, and money is money. I think they’re different, and I don’t think we should commingle them,” he explains.
Bitcoin has some of the trappings of religion, but it isn’t a religion in of itself. Don’t confound the two. It’s a monetary system based on some embedded principles. It does not offer salvation or enlightenment.
— nic "bankful" carter (@nic__carter) December 29, 2020
However, Bitcoin wasn’t the first crypto that Carter dabbled in — that was actually Elon Musk’s preferred shitcoin, Dogecoin (DOGE).
The 31-year-old started mining DOGE on his gaming rig back in 2013 during his college days.
It’s pretty mind-blowing to consider that by 2021, when DOGE reached its peak at $0.74, the amount he mined was valued at “probably eight figures,” aka at least $10 million.
The only issue is that he sort of “lost the hard drive” that was holding all his DOGE.
Told a friend today that dogecoin is much more creditable as a project now that its creator has denounced it – and it still exists. That’s kind of the point!
— nic "bankful" carter (@nic__carter) April 26, 2018
However, he doesn’t seem too bothered about missing out on a potential small fortune.
“That specific trade was a zero, as it turns out,” he laughs.
He believes he took some valuable lessons from it, which has helped get him carve out a pretty sweet career in the industry including founding blockchain data aggregator Coin Metrics and being Fidelity’s first crypto asset analyst.
“No regrets man, because it led me down this path and it’s been really rewarding.”
What led to the big following on X?
Carter has been tinkering with mining rigs and trading since the early days of crypto, but it wasn’t until around 2017 that he really started getting vocal on social media.
His well-received articles, mostly focused on Bitcoin, helped him slowly build up a decent-sized following. That’s where the mistaken assumption that he was a Bitcoin Maxi came from.
He recalls that the first article he ever wrote on Medium was titled “What’s it going to take for Bitcoin to become an institutional asset?”
remember when the most exciting thing about 2021 was the prospect of a bitcoin etf
— nic "bankful" carter (@nic__carter) May 24, 2021
But in June 2022, Carter posted about investing in Dynamic.xyz, a company tackling the complexities of wallet interactions across blockchain networks, including Solana, Algorand, and Cosmos.
Samson Mow, the CEO of the Bitcoin advisory Jan3, responded to the announcement post with a snarky remark, “not something to be proud of.”
The post led to a backlash from Bitcoin true believers, causing Carter to restrict who can reply and saw him lose some followers.
“I had to fire my fans and that is quite painful. People that loved you, would go on to hate you, now that’s pretty jarring.”
What type of content can people expect from you?
Carter is a straightforward guy, and it’s fortunate he knows how to amass millions in crypto because selling himself on X might not be his strongest suit anymore.
“My Twitter is basically just garbage these days,” he laughs.
He further explains his content is dependent “on what season” it is and what is hot at the time. Lately, he has been advocating for stablecoins.
“I decided to create a whole suite of original content on stablecoins, which I’m really proud of, and make the case for stablecoins and why they matter from the U.S. perspective. Specifically why the U.S. should embrace them and not destroy them.”
His claim that stablecoins are the “killer app of crypto” has spread like wildfire.
“I did that and now I see my work all over the place, which is not bad, it’s good. I’m glad that’s happening,” he says.
Fortunately for Carter, respected players in the industry believe that his content is far from garbage.
Stablecoin growth on Ethereum is a rocket
— RYAN SΞAN ADAMS – rsa.eth 🦄 (@RyanSAdams) May 7, 2020
The big question: are stablecoins Mutualistic or Parasitic for ETH?@nic__carter just wrote the most thoughtful piece I've yet read on the subject
Read:https://t.co/iXJc1OTXfk
What type of content do you like?
Carter’s got a shortlist of people he follows, trusting their opinions when it comes to the crypto industry.
The first two he mentions are software engineer, crypto trader and recovering Bitcoin maxi Eric Wall, along with Bitcoin developer Udi Wertheimer.
“I think Udi and Eric Wall have done a great job from a Bitcoin perspective, opening it up sometimes in an abrasive way.”
However, his ultimate hero is the co-founder of crypto exchange BitMEX, Arthur Hayes.
Carter says Hayes is “an exceptional writer and thinker.”
He was lucky enough to meet Hayes, and miraculously he managed to hold back any tears.
“I was just telling him thanks for being an early advocate of Bitcoin, which he was one of the ground zero patients for Bitcoin in Silicon Valley,” he explains.
Carter reiterates that he’s not usually such a starstruck fan when he meets someone he has looked up to for years, but that particular moment has definitely stuck with him.
“I don’t fangirl a lot around people, but that was the moment that was special for me,” he says.
If you’re not reading Arthur Hayes’ commentary I cannot help you https://t.co/VpFEJWgPfz
— nic "bankful" carter (@nic__carter) May 27, 2021
Predictions
Wearing his venture capitalist hat, Carter is pretty bullish on layer-2 solutions, which refers to scaling solutions for Layer-1 blockchains — think Polygon or Arbitrum scaling Ethereum, for example.
Specifically, he’s predicting a ton of money to flow into layer 2s, particularly on Bitcoin.
“I think we’ll see a huge amount of funding of new L2’s on Bitcoin,” he says.
He also throws in zero-knowledge rollups as a potential hot commodity in the near future.
These could quash people’s worries about Bitcoin’s slow transaction speed by making transactions faster through off-chain processing while still recording the necessary data on the blockchain.
“People will try and build ZK-rollups on Bitcoin. I think that will be the next thing that we talk about in the Bitcoin space,” he explains.
On top of that, Carter is pretty optimistic about stablecoin adoption growing throughout 2024.
“I think it will be a positive year from a stablecoin perspective,” he states.
I do expect that stablecoin supply will likely surpass BTC market cap eventually, just as there's more dollars in the world than gold. both are useful, just different assurances and tradeoffs
— nic "bankful" carter (@nic__carter) May 27, 2021
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