Mena

This story captured a side of me that I’ve never actually talked about publicly anywhere else. Jeff, who wrote this, is beyond elite at what he does. I can’t even explain how he took what were two very hectic conversations with me and turned them into this article. And I couldn’t be more honored that it was a profile for the inaugural issue. In getting more personal publicly of late, I’ve decided that starting to tell my story in its entirety is really important. Not just telling the PR version that I know will do well, because that bland version just gets mixed in with everyone else who’s trying not to say the wrong thing. There’s a lot about how I got here, what I believe, and why I’ve made some of the decisions I have that I’ve just never really talked about publicly. The life I live now was never supposed to be the life I’m living. Over time, though, I’ve learned to trust my intuition because there have been too many moments where it’s told me to go in a direction that made absolutely no sense on paper, only for it to make sense later. I’ve come to believe that’s God helping direct me toward where I’m supposed to go. And the reality is, when I look around at other founders, I know I’m better than them. Sure, time will tell and all that. But the kid who stood up in sixth grade and said it would one day be “Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Khan” is still very much here. To quote the great Ye, “I’m a star, how could I not shine?”

Illinois just signed what may be the most anti-innovation digital asset bill in the country, creating a new 0.2% tax on certain digital asset activity. Imagine being taxed differently because you chose to send an email instead of a physical letter. That sounds absurd. Yet that’s effectively what’s happening here. The rules change simply because a financial transaction occurred on blockchain rails instead of traditional ones. When lawyers and trade associations talk about this stuff, it can sound abstract. So I wanted to simplify the issue. The real debate isn’t about whether digital assets should be regulated. It’s whether the same financial activity should be treated differently simply because a different technology was used to process it.