"We’ll see if there’s something we can do that’s a positive one, and not a fly-by-night coin where people are just trying to make a quick buck overnight…"
While my eyes are yet to be opened to the mysterious world of cryptocurrency, Kelly Slater, the greatest surfer of all time, eleven world titles and counting although no Olympic medals, has devoted himself to the study of digital currency in all its variations.
And, now, just three days before the bunting is loosed and the horns erupt at the opening of the Tokyo Olympics, Slater has threatened to steal the thunder of the Games after revealing his plan to launch a cryptocurrency.
It wouldn’t be any ol cryptocurrency, either.
Like his surfwear brand Outerknown and a wood recycling company he’s bought into, Slater’s digital currency will be a capitalist enterprise with a conscience.
“I’ve started reaching out to people in the crypto world who make these things. We’ll see if there’s something we can do that’s a positive one, and not a fly-by-night coin where people are just trying to make a quick buck overnight,” the almost-fifty-year-old Slater told The Gentleman’s Journal in an interview ostensibly about his eco-watch collaboration with Breitling, the device strapped onto the wearer’s wrist with “a recycled ECONYL nylon strap.”
Slater adds, “I think it’s interesting to have a currency – a storage of value – that isn’t controlled by a CEO or a government… It’s an exciting, rare time for people to do their investing themselves… I do hope that Bitcoin is more widely accepted by different industries and people and money managers, and it seems like it’s going in that direction… At the same time, it seems like there’s people coming in who aren’t in it for its purpose… it seems to me there’s some manipulation going on with it and I’m afraid that’s what happens with stocks and companies in that way.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Slater talks about his blood feud over crypto with Elon Musk (“Does he have an issue with kids mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo to build batteries?”), as well as plastics in the ocean.