Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Are we Getting Catfished by Crypto? With TikTokker Gavin Mayo

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Bitcoin, dogecoin, doggie coin… Money Rehab coin? Nicole calls up financial TikTokker Gavin Mayo to help suss out which cryptos are legit… and whether she should start her own coin.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn't. Charge for wasting our time. I will take a check. Like an old school check. You recognize her from anchoring on CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. Nicole Lappin.

If you've been keeping up with your money rehab, you've definitely heard of some of the popular players in crypto right now. Bitcoin, of course. Ethereum. Dogecoin. Or Doggycoin. But there are a ton of others that you probably have never heard of before with names straight out of a teenage boy's fever dream, like 24 Genesis Mooncats or Wrapped Virgin Gen Zero Crypto Kitties. I am not making those up. Those are real coins. In fact, there are more than 10,000 different types of crypto out there,

which definitely supports the idea that we are living in a crypto bubble. But if this bubble is going to burst soon, how do we know which crypto options to trust? And should we even make our own coin? To answer these questions, I called up crypto buff and financial TikToker Gavin Mayo. Gavin, welcome to Money Rehab. So when people ask you what you do, what do you tell them? I've basically just been saying I teach people how to invest and I also make my own cryptocurrency. So that's kind of the main thing I've been telling people. But it's kind of I've just been doing a lot of stuff in the past like four months.

It's just so many to count. But that's like my main thing is I just TikTok. Sometimes I say I'm a TikToker and they're like, oh, you dance. And I'm like, no, I just teach people how to invest on TikTok. So you got interested in stocks when you were 13. Is that right? Yeah. How did that happen? So I was on vacation and I walked past a Rolex store. I was obsessed with watches. So I saw the Rolex and that's all I was thinking about the whole day. I'm like, oh, I want a Rolex someday.

And I went back and that was when Instagram was pretty new. But I went back to my hotel and I was just sitting on Instagram. I was scrolling through. I saw Rolex watches. So I clicked on this one guy's page and he was a day trader. So I was like, oh, what does this guy do? How does he afford a Rolex? And that was pretty much how I got introduced. I never knew what day trading was, didn't know what the stock market was. So after that, the next day, I basically just went on YouTube, watched a bunch of videos about what stocks are. Teachers would ask me in school what I want to do when I grow up. I'll just say I want to trade stocks. It's kind of like a broad thing. And then yeah, throughout high school,

stocks you know it's kind of like a broad thing and then yeah throughout high school I was just sitting in class uh I would kind of go out in the hallways when I was in the middle of a stock and like try to trade it come back in make like a few hundred dollars sitting in class in high school and uh yeah I kind of did that throughout high school made really nice money some months I lost a lot because I was learning um and then once I got to college, I pretty much just took it more seriously. I got injured. So I wasn't able... I was an athlete at UNC. And I wasn't really able to compete anymore.

So I had nothing really else to do other than school. So I got really serious about trading. And that's when last summer, I basically just went crazy with it. Studied every day for like 6-7 hours. And then I just decided to do TikTok back in the fall. So how often are you buying and selling? So actually, last month was the first month that I really did not trade every day. For the past 6 years, I pretty much would wake up, market open, trade, or I'd be trading throughout the day. I'd be looking for stocks on my watch list throughout the week. But last month, I pretty much just did crypto. And yeah, that's when we were creating our own

cryptocurrency. So that took a lot of my time. And I mean, I made my mom a lot of money through crypto in the past 4 months. So she loves it now. She's addicted to crypto. She loves it. Every time I send her a new crypto, I'm like, check this out. Check this project out. And she's been making a lot of money from it. she loves it my dad now is like more understanding like yeah I guess you can you know make a lot of money from it he thinks like you know I should try to take that money and put it other places which I agree but right now a lot of my money is in crypto when you say you made your mom a lot of money in the last few months, what is a lot of money? She made like 30,000. Yeah. April was a really good month. I got like a few coins that I found out about. And it's like one of them went up like 100x and she only put a little bit in. She could

have made like a lot more. But I think she made something around there. And like I get my sister in too. So but then she's like lost on a few like cryptos so right but she got to buy like a hot tub and she got to like fix a porch so she's been pretty happy about i think she took some of the crypto out and got it in the fiat hold on to your wallets boys and girls money rehab will be right back now for some more money rehab you casually said when you started your own cryptocurrency um can we rewind uh tell me everything how did you decide to start your own coin yeah it's actually surprising it's really easy to start your own cryptocurrency but like a lot of them like no one's gonna buy it and or it has no like use like anybody like you know anybody can make like you know something like dogecoin and it could technically go to a

billion market cap of people buy it which i mean that's kind of like dogecoin started as like a meme uh there are a lot of other memes i don't know i've heard of like safe moon um like those type of cryptos that don't necessarily have a use. There are a lot of good projects coming out now that do actually have uses. Thousands of coins are created each week. Some of them are complete scams where the owners will just try to rug pull, which means they basically just take everybody's money that invested in it. But some of them are really great projects. And I've been on a few other projects with people I've met through the crypto space

where I was on this one coin called HappyCoin, where it's basically they were just donating to people with mental illness. So there are some like really cool projects, just kind of a fun way to do crypto and also make some money with it. But yeah, so anybody can create their own cryptocurrency. I found out about these, I guess they're very like very small cap altcoins where you can buy them through like TrustWallet or Metamask. Like anybody can just make a contract and list their coin. So I found out about it after like SafeMoon, you know, I was talking to some people and that's when I started getting into these coins because I would like find out about random coins and I would try to get in and make like, you know, people are making like 100x, 200x. It's just insane. If you invest early enough, people like

would hit us up on TikTok and say, why don't you guys make your own coins? You guys have so much influence. And that'd be cool. So yeah, me, my business partner, and another Discord owner, actually, and our developer made a coin. I think it was about a month ago. And we were basically trying to be the next Robin Hood of crypto.

So we were going to try to make our own app and platform. And yeah, the launch... I mean, a few things went wrong because it was our first actual point we did. It was a pretty crazy launch. We had like, your crypto can get bought, which happened to us, which a bunch of bots will buy and dump. So that didn't help. We hit, I think it was like 30 or 40 mil market cap in the first night, which is like really good. From there, you know, we, we allocated influencers tokens and stuff like that, like to kind of talk about our project and get the word out.

So we had a few of them sell. And then like, after that happened, we just decided we're going to relaunch it. But now it's just going to be called portal. We like had a new logo and we're still going to try to make the app. So yeah, we're just,

we you can't buy it right now. Like the coin is no longer active, but when we relaunch it, we're going to try to make it like nice and stable, see what happens. And no matter what, we just want to have an app and have something like backing it. So it was a lot of work, but yeah, I mean,

it's definitely interesting that anybody can create their own cryptos. Do you think I should make a coin? Yeah, honestly, like I've had, since I've been in LA, I've had like celebrities say like, wait, you're saying like anybody can create their own cryptos. Do you think I should make a coin? Yeah. Honestly, since I've been in LA, I've had celebrities say like, wait, you're saying anybody can create a coin? Can you create a coin for me? I've talked to a few famous people and I'm like, yeah, some people have created... There's literally a coin called GabeCoin right now. It's literally just the name GabeCoin and it's gone up thousands of percent.

And I don't know who created it it but i'm guessing the guy's name was gabe so i think that's a good guess is there a downside risk uh i guess like you if you wanted to just do it for fun then yeah but like i mean with portal we put a lot of our own money into the project like just to build like liquidity um to make sure like it also like who knows like a lot of these coins like especially with portal like they usually pump and they dump and then they either keep going or they kind of die down and it's kind of inevitable it's just because people just want a quick buck so it's really hard to stabilize the price and like that's one thing we wanted to make sure like

we're not a pump and dump we're trying to like keep people like you may make sure we're not like because there's a lot of scams that goes on in the crypto space right now a lot of people that will just like rug pull the project at the top and take people's money so it's that's the only like downside i'd say in the space is very just like it's a bit risky too but yeah anybody can create a coin and uh yeah there's no investment cost uh if you want to like it depends how much you'd want to put in liquidity. And that basically means that's how much you'd put in to build up the price when it first comes out. But we pay a guy for a website. We do a few marketing things through other telegrams and Twitters. It's pretty much as much as you want to put in. The more money you put in, the more successful the project is going to be like we dropped well over six figures just for portal so it was very expensive to like

if you want to have a successful project it can be expensive but technically anybody can create a coin um right now it's a lot harder for coins to be successful though just because there's so many coins being created every day. And to anyone listening who's hearing the scam stuff you were talking about, just to be clear, none of this is regulated. Yeah, that's the thing. You're buying these coins through a decentralized platform like TrustWallet or MetaMask. So technically, there are no governing bodies. That's why you see these pompadoms happening, which if it was the stock market, there'd be a complete different story. But now it's with crypto through decentralized exchange. There's not really much the SEC or anybody can do to stop these people from these scams.

I mean, I see scams happen every day. Sometimes I've actually invested in projects. And the next day, I realized scams happen every day. Sometimes I've actually invested in projects. And the next day, I realized I just got scammed. But I would say if you do decide to invest in any of these coins, be very, very careful and only do it with money that you do not care about losing. Because this isn't like the stock market or this isn't like investing in Bitcoin. These can go to zero. They can go to zero overnight. That's why I recommend not really investing in meme coins and actual good projects.

Because then your money probably won't disappear. But it's with high risk comes high reward. So a lot of these meme coins like SafeMoon, of course, it's high risk, high reward. I mean, that went up thousands of percent. So you can make a lot of money with them. But that's why when I was trading stocks and stuff, sometimes I'd trade like OTCs, which are like a lot riskier than penny stocks. And I would just do a very small amounts of money, like very small percentages of my portfolio. So if I make a 10x, then great. It's like,

it's not with even though I didn't put a lot of money in, like, it's still turning a profit that I would if I put like money into a stock, you know, like a lot of money into the stock. So you also talked about the idea that there's so many of these coins and that the space is so, so crowded. Do you think that crypto is a bubble? I don't know. Who knows what's going to happen with crypto? I mean, it's the best performing asset of the last decade. So it usually we usually have 80 percent drops and then it always goes about all time highs. So I think we're going to hit% drops and then it always goes to the all-time highs. So I think we're going to hit all-time highs again. I don't know if this bull market is over, but I do hear a lot of people, like random people saying what to invest in, which usually

is a good sign that we're in a bubble. I know, especially in April and even beginning of May, it was just absolute bananas. My crypto portfolio has been hurting a bit. There's a lot of crashes. There has been a lot of crazy stuff. I think this morning, Bitcoin hit like 28,000 or something. So that was really bad for a lot of people too. But yeah, I mean, I think the US dollar is going to be worth less in the future, but it's not going to drop like 80% like crypto does. So that's the only thing like a lot of people, there's usually two sides. There's people that think Bitcoin is going to go to a million. There's people that think Bitcoin is going to go to zero and it's worthless. So I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin is like a digital gold someday,

but it just needs to be a bit more stable, I would say. And who knows the government come in and make their own digital currency. But in 20 years, I think we will have a track digital currency, whether it's Bitcoin or one of these other currencies. So I think right now, if you invest in crypto now, I think it's going to break all-time highs at least in the future. And you'll probably make some nice money. But it's probably going to keep crashing, going up, keep crashing, going up just because it's, yeah, it's very, very volatile. Did you end up buying your Rolex? I did. I actually got my first Rolex a month and a half ago. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. I'd recommend money rehabbers play the crypto game a little more cautiously. My rule that you should know by now is not to invest more than 1%

of your net worth in crypto. That way, if something like wrapped virgin Gen Zero crypto kitties makes it big, so do you. But if it goes belly up, because we know how much cats like to be belly up, you won't be reeling from the losses either. Money Rehab is a production of iHeartMedia. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Our producers are Morgan Lavoie and Catherine Law. Money Rehab is edited and engineered by Brandon Dickert with help from Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Mangesh Hatikader and Will Pearson. Huge thanks to the OG Money Rehab supervising producer, Michelle Lanz, for her pre-production and development work. And as always, thanks to you for finally investing in yourself so that you can get it together and get it all. money, money, money. You spend the money, money. You spend the money,

money, money. You spend the money, money, money.