During a period of hyperinflation in 2013, “my Venezuelan mother asked me to send money to Caracas, the country’s capital,” Hervé Larren
During a period of hyperinflation in 2013, “my Venezuelan mother asked me to send money to Caracas, the country’s capital,” Hervé Larren recalls. However, bank transfers were not possible between the two countries.
Busy with work in New York, he told a friend that he planned to fly to Caracas — carrying cash for his mother — and return the same day. “Why don’t you just send Bitcoin?” his friend asked, which quickly led to a change of plans as Larren made his first Bitcoin transfer.
“My first crypto transaction, in 2013, was to wire Bitcoin from the U.S. to Venezuela. Due to the economic collapse, there was no functioning banking system between these two countries.”
Switching from a career with luxury goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Larren co-founded a large-scale crypto mining operation and worked with Grayscale to bring crypto assets to old-school investors. He later became a key adviser to ApeCoin and the first person to bid a million dollars for a nonfungible token.
From old to new
“We were reporting to Nicolas Sarkozy, and he was coming to our meetings,” Larren recalls of his time as the head of a high school student council in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the wealthiest old-money suburb of Paris, where he grew up.
Sarkozy served as the local mayor for 20 years before becoming the president of France. Larren’s mother — from Venezuela — was a TV host and the first Latina model signed by the L’Oreal cosmetics brand. His French father imported wine to Canada, where a third of the population is French-speaking.
In the late 90s, Larren began undergraduate business studies at Montreal’s Concordia University. In 2019, Concordia labeled him “The Blockchain Maven” as part of a “50 Under 50” alumni distinction. Upon graduation, he got a job at Moët Hennessy’s New York office, where he worked on brand development of the firm’s Hennessy cognac brand in the United States.
Larren worked on his MBA at Columbia University part time while at LVMH, graduating in 2010 and entering the venture capital world with Peak Ventures, which “was involved in tech companies including Twitter.” It was Larren’s first experience in the technology sector, which he describes as very different from the old-world, intergenerational luxury goods industry.
Larren quickly moved to accept Bitcoin at an e-commerce business he was involved with, a company that helped charities raise money by partnering with celebrities. In 2015, he formed crypto mining firm Global Crypto Ventures, which grew into an operation of nearly 3,000 machines composed primarily of Bitmain Antminer S9 miners in Las Vegas and Texas, where “the cost of infrastructure and electricity was cheaper.”
Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund
While speaking at the 2017 World Technology Forum in New York, Larren met Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert, who was talking right after him about the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, through which retail investors could get exposure to Bitcoin through their brokerage. He was also working on a new investment vehicle called Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC), which represented a weighted portfolio of cryptocurrencies, including Ether, MATIC, ADA and SOL, in addition to Bitcoin.
As a publicly traded investment instrument, it would require approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission. One relevant matter would be to ensure that the fund could buy its digital assets from a trusted source, preferably from within the United States. Larren’s mining firm was an ideal source, and having a ready buyer for mining proceeds made business smoother.
This opportunity represented Larren’s first foray into crypto beyond Bitcoin, and it “attracted me to a new space.”
Working with the SEC was no easy task, Larren recalls. “It was a nerve-racking process. Though the company was very confident about getting approval, there was a lot of uncertainty because no such investment trust had been approved previously.”
However, the GDLC was approved, expanding the potential pool of crypto investors. Though many in the industry continue to preach the “not your keys, not your coins” mantra, Larren argues that just as with stocks, owning Bitcoin and other crypto assets through a financial instrument instead of on an exchange or cold-storage device is preferable for most of the public.
There is less risk of being hacked or losing access to keys, and regulated funds must meet stringent security policies and often carry insurance. He also notes that they are easier to manage on a portfolio basis, particularly regarding taxation and being more straightforward for accountants to understand.
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cointelegraph.com