Pether (1)
The new year had begun.
Changing the calendar didn’t change anything, of course, but it was still hard to deny that the air felt different somehow.
With that fresh start in mind, I got up earlier than usual and headed to Central Park.
Apparently a lot of people had had the same idea, because even at that hour there were plenty of people out exercising.
I wondered if New Year’s resolutions died just as quickly in every country.
Still, being out here like this made me feel, oddly enough, like I was becoming a real New Yorker.
If you wanted to do a proper lap of Central Park, even running all day wouldn’t be enough, so I settled for a decent jog and then headed back to the hotel for a shower.
When I went to the restaurant for breakfast, a waiter said, “Your companion is here already.”
“Oh?”
Following the waiter, I found Trish elegantly sipping coffee and eating pancakes.
When I sat down across from her and stared at her for a moment, she looked flustered and said, “W-What? You said I could come and eat anytime.”
Her flustered expression was kind of cute.
“Who said otherwise?”
I’d told her she could come whenever she wanted and even given her the room number. Breakfast was free for two people anyway.
The waiter poured coffee into my cup.
As I took a sip, I asked, “When did you get here?”
“I just arrived too, and I was actually about to call you.”
“I see.”
I wasn’t that hungry, but I brought back an omelet and some bacon.
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Oh! I was just about to talk to you about that.”
I told her about Emily Chloe, the woman I’d met at the party.
Trish was stunned. “Even the bankers on Wall Street got fooled by some woman in her early twenties?”
“Well...”
Strictly speaking, they hadn’t been completely fooled. After all, the loan application had still been denied in the end.
“Look into it. If you write it well, it’ll make a great story.”
“Got it.”
Trish immediately typed it into her phone.
“Oh, and Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year to you too, Trish.”
***
Once New Year’s Day passed, stock markets around the world opened for business.
Both the Korean and U.S. markets started the year on a bright note, each rising more than 1 percent.
I went into Continue Capital HQ and got to work.
In the past, I’d had to dig up all the materials myself and write the reports, but now I didn’t need to do that anymore.
I gave Joseph an order. “Put together some materials on cryptocurrency and exchanges.”
“Understood.”
He sat down at his computer at once and started working.
The next day, Joseph handed me a neatly organized report.
Goldman Sachs, indeed.
Flawless, down to the last detail.
“Good work.”
“Not at all. If you need anything else, just let me know.”
I asked him for a few more materials and then read through the report carefully.
The largest cryptocurrency by market cap was Vantcoin, followed by Eldereum. Together, those two accounted for more than 60 percent of the market.
Every other cryptocurrency was lumped together as an altcoin.
After the success of Vantcoin and Eldereum, countless cryptocurrencies flooded the market. On top of that, there were many coins that had split off from existing cryptocurrencies through hard forks.
There were about 9,000 cryptocurrencies currently traded on exchanges. If you included the ones not listed on exchanges, the number would likely be dozens of times higher.
They all shared the same foundation in blockchain technology, but beyond that, their mechanisms, purposes, and uses were wildly different.
For example, Tipple partnered with banks around the world to provide international bank transfer services; Remix specialized in game development and item trading; Teran focused on content production and distribution; AOS was geared toward business use and application building; and Assembers rewarded social network creators.
But most people didn’t care about any of that. There was really only one thing they cared about.
Whether the price went up or down.
After going over the materials thoroughly, I headed into the chairman’s office and sat down.
David looked at me and asked, “Is something wrong?”
“Do you happen to know much about the cryptocurrency market?”
He nodded at my question.
“About as much as anyone else. Why do you ask?”
“I met the CEO of Coinmax.”
I told him about meeting Leonard Chang at the charity party.
David listened with obvious interest.
“I’ve heard he’s the unofficial richest man in the world.”
“There’s a reason he’s unofficial.”
More than 90 percent of wealthy people’s assets were in stocks, and those stocks had market-recognized value.
But Leonard Chang’s fortune was, at best, an estimate. Besides, the value of the cryptocurrencies he held was extremely volatile, which made it hard to pin down exactly how much he was worth.
David asked me, “Have you ever invested in cryptocurrency?”
“Of course. There was a time I was really into it.”
When I was in college, the coin craze swept across South Korea.
While Vantcoin and Eldereum rose tenfold, altcoins that went up dozens or even hundreds of times kept popping up everywhere.
It felt like anything you bought would go up.
It was, quite literally, a time when money seemed to be duplicating itself.
People claiming they’d made tens or even hundreds of billions of won from coins were springing up all over the place.
Hearing that, everyone and their mother jumped in with dreams of getting rich. Even at school, more and more students stopped studying and just stared at exchange screens all day.
Back when not investing in coins made you feel like an idiot, I started investing too, together with Sunwoo.
Unlike stocks, cryptocurrencies traded 24 hours a day and had no upper or lower limits. Sometimes they would double or triple in a single day, then crash just as hard.
Because of that, I’d stare at exchanges until I went to bed and then check them first thing after waking up.
“So what happened?”
“It started well. Within a few days I’d made more than 50 percent.”
With any asset, once it starts going up, you get the illusion that it’ll rise forever. But there’s no such thing as an asset that only goes up forever.
Thinking back on it now, I said, “I was planning to cash out cleanly after doubling my money, but after that it just started crashing.”
Back then, both Sunwoo and I had clearly lost our minds. We barely slept, stared at the exchange all day, and kept shouting for it to “go to the moon.”
“I almost lost my tuition money, but I managed to pull it out at the last second. I still get chills thinking about it.”
“...”
I’d really nearly gone to hell after yelling “go to the moon.”
David looked genuinely surprised.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“It’s fascinating.”
“What is?”
“That the boss has failed at investing before.”
“Well...”
That was before I regressed.
Either way, after that I never looked at the coin market again.
That was why I hadn’t invested in cryptocurrency even after I came back.
After college, I’d lost interest; then in my senior year I’d been busy preparing for employment, and after joining DA Securities I’d been too busy learning the job to pay the coin market any attention.
Still, I had a rough sense of the broad trend. At the point when I regressed, Vantcoin and Eldereum were both in a gentle downtrend.
Some altcoins may have gone up, but since I hadn’t invested, how would I know which ones?
On the other hand, thanks to working hard as an analyst, I knew every major event in the stock market cold. Honestly, it was a relief.
This time, I asked him, “What do you think about investing in cryptocurrency?”
“I’m not particularly fond of it.”
I’d expected that answer.
Because he had never invested in crypto, and probably never would.
“I especially think it’s foolish for individuals to invest in cryptocurrency.”
“Why?”
“Because the playing field is tilted.”
“Isn’t that true of the stock market too?”
“Even so, the stock market has laws and regulations that protect investors. The cryptocurrency market, on the other hand, is controlled by a handful of whales—the big players.”
Financial markets are ruled by the logic of survival of the fittest.
In terms of information and capital, individuals are no match for institutions. If they want to, the rich can strip the poor of their money without breaking a sweat.
Still, there are at least basic rules in this market.
Companies have to disclose their assets, sales, and profits transparently, and they have to submit to regular audits. Price manipulation, false disclosures, trading on undisclosed information—those are all illegal acts, and they’re punished as such.
That was why ordinary investors could feel safe putting their money in.
So what about the cryptocurrency market?
There was no such thing.
And because of that, the whole place was a den of snakes.
A developer might list a coin on an exchange and immediately dump all their holdings before vanishing. They might release false disclosures to pump the price. They might even manipulate prices through wash trading.
Some exchanges even issued their own coins or listed tokens they themselves had invested in just to drive the price up.
If the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission bought a mountain of unlisted shares and then helped those shares get listed, what would happen?
He’d be arrested immediately.
But in the cryptocurrency market, that wasn’t even a crime.
No, it wasn’t even investigated.
David must have noticed my expression, because he continued, “That doesn’t mean I think cryptocurrency has no value. I don’t believe that at all. If enough people think something has value, then value takes shape. In particular, I think Vantcoin has become the gold of the digital world.”
Vantcoin was the first cryptocurrency to implement blockchain technology.
As the first of its kind, its performance was the weakest. Compared with Eldereum, which served as a platform, it had little practical function beyond transfers.
And yet it still accounted for 40 percent of total crypto market cap.
The reason was simple: everyone acknowledged its value, and it was scarce.
Gold was used as currency in the early days too, but nowadays nobody carried gold around to make purchases. It was just something people accumulated as an asset.
“The crypto market may have turned into a pure speculation pit, but the core is blockchain technology. And for that technology to be properly useful, its value needs to be fixed.”
I nodded.
“Which is why Leonard Chang created Pether faster than anyone else.”
The company that issued Pether was Pether Limited.
It was a subsidiary of Newcurrency Enterprise, the company that ran Coinmax.
As soon as Pether launched, it was listed on Coinmax, and soon afterward the larger exchanges began allowing Pether trading as well.
Pether’s success translated directly into Coinmax’s success.
Up until then, Coinmax had ranked sixth. After Pether’s launch, it overtook Vantnex and climbed to number one.
“Pether played the role of supplying liquidity to the cryptocurrency market. Thanks to that, exchange usage surged, crypto prices rose sharply, and ICOs became far more active.”
Pether’s appearance made crypto trading much easier.
Without needing to create accounts or register on each exchange, you could simply buy Pether and move from exchange to exchange as much as you wanted.
Even when using overseas exchanges, there was no need to go through complicated procedures like currency exchange, account opening, or international remittance.
In the past, prices on different exchanges had varied slightly. Pether made arbitrage trading possible, which in turn stabilized the prices of individual coins across exchanges.
Right now, Pether was practically the reserve currency of the cryptocurrency market.
The reason it could be used so universally was because its value was so stable. And the foundation of that stability was dollar convertibility.
Pether was backed by dollar deposits equal to the amount issued. Because it could be exchanged for dollars at any time, no one questioned its value.
The total supply of Pether was currently about 150 billion coins.
At one Pether to one dollar, that meant 150 billion dollars—about 165 trillion won. To put that in perspective, it ranked third in crypto market cap, behind only Vantcoin and Eldereum.
Come to think of it, it was an astonishing thing.
When you looked at companies with market caps over a trillion dollars, 150 billion dollars didn’t seem like much. But this wasn’t a company’s valuation—it was pure cash.
How many companies in the world held 150 billion dollars in cash? Continue Capital certainly didn’t have that much sitting around.
That left one question.
“Did they really have that much dollar reserves?”