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Exclusive Interview: Richard Heart
Richard Heart Crypto’s Most Outrageous Advocate - Exclusive Interview
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By Nicole Grinstead and Seth Estrada
In an exclusive for Crypto Magazine, renowned billionaire Richard Heart discusses the Fed’s abuse of power, the importance of censorship resistance, and the impact of outrage marketing.
Richard Heart, easily the most outrageous figure in crypto today, joined CryptoMag to talk about how cryptocurrency can return power to the people and his evolution within the space - from Bitcoin Maximalist to founding the controversial but highly-performant HEX and now PulseChain.
Disclaimer: The author of this piece holds some HEX and sacrificed for other up-andcoming Richard Heart products. Additionally, this interview was conducted with input from Seth Estrada, who wrote many of these questions, owns HEX, and sacrificed for PulseChain.
I’ve known Richard at a distance for many years through his content. In 2019, I resonated with his no-BS approach to blockchain. While other prominent crypto figures put on a show for the camera and present as someone completely different behind the scenes, that isn’t the case with Richard, at least not that I can tell. He wears flashy clothing, talks about things that others won’t touch with a ten-foot pole (or Red Bull can), and speaks truth to power - even when it’s to his own detriment. Listening to a Richard Heart live stream is like coming up for fresh air after drowning in the voices of charlatans. While his outrageous marketing tactics make Richard the most controversial figure in crypto today, he’s also quite possibly among the most misunderstood.
Years before launching his own token, Richard was already a self-made millionaire and selfhelp author who had garnered a cult-like fanbase. He has staunchly supported Bitcoin for years, called out scammers, and made content warning young crypto investors about the dangers ahead - a mission that he continues to this day. I asked Richard about best opSec (Operational Security) practices and common mistakes people make in crypto.
“I’ve always found it best to not let anyone know how much money you have,” he said, as I imagined him shopping for luxury goods or a new supercar online. “The most common mistake in crypto is trading. If you trade, you’re going to lose all your money. People say, ‘money management will save you from that,’ but it won’t. Money management just changes the rate at which you lose all your money.” Richard continued by listing other common mistakes people make: losing their keys, not writing down their seed words in more than one place, getting hacked, falling for scams, leaving their money on exchanges, and putting their keys in someone else’s hands. In the end, it all boils down to this simple, cliche concept:
“Not your keys, not your coins.”
Crypto’s king of controversy continued, “Cryptocurrency was invented for you to hold your own keys, and if you give your keys or your coins to someone else, you’re in trouble.”
Time to Update your Worldview
Several years into Richard’s involvement with Bitcoin, he started to see that his maximalist viewpoint was faulty. He commonly refers to this change of heart as the ability to “update his worldview.” Now,
instead of focusing all of his time and energy on spreading the good word of Bitcoin, he promotes only his own products to the point of literal absurdity. Richard has been known to flaunt ridiculous-looking monogram designer garb as he twerks in front of well-known landmarks, but that’s not all.
In February, the eccentric billionaire purchased the world’s largest diamond - formerly known as ‘the Enigma’ - for $4.3 million in cryptocurrency.
The hex.com diamond has 555.55 carats and 55 sides, making it the perfect complement to Richard’s high yield Certificate of Deposit on the blockchain.
While this might seem like an outlandish tactic to some, it was brilliant positioning. Because the Enigma is the world’s largest diamond, it holds a place on Wikipedia, which doesn’t typically allow cryptocurrencies to have their own dedicated pages. The Hex.com diamond, however, now does.
HEX’s price performance from launch through August 12th, 2022. Source: Nomics.com
When I asked if outrage marketing was part of his strategy from the outset, he said it wasn’t. “I never set out to be outrageous, but when you speak truth to stupid and truth to power, it just seems outrageous to many.” But, he adds, “now that I’ve seen some profit in it, I’m sticking with it.”
But between the seemingly random outbursts of narcissistic anger - much of it designed to elicit a calculated response - there are kernels of truth delivered as tough love.
“People who don’t understand marketing don’t understand the outrage. They don’t know why or how it works. They’re just a bunch of rekt pleb losers who don’t have any followers who try to give me… their weak pleb, rekt advice on how to become popular. While I’m the popular guy. They need to learn from me instead of trying to give me educational advice.” While his statement may be off-putting, what he’s saying isn’t untrue. Richard has been gaining followers rapidly, possibly even outpacing HEX’s price performance in 2020-2021.
Time for some Cypherpunk Subtext
I’ve always admired Richard’s unwavering adherence to the cypherpunk values of liberty, freedom, and rebellion against a corrupt system. For years, Richard has refused to pay centralized exchanges to list HEX, declined partnership and collaboration offers from respectable crypto leaders, and
maintained that crypto should be a path towards freedom.
I asked Richard what would be helpful for non-crypto holders to know about it. He said, “Cryptocurrency is one of the few things in the world that can truly return power to the people. Right now, a bunch of unelected guys called the Fed that have no relationship to the federal government decide the value of money. They decide what interest rates are. They decide what you have to pay to borrow money. And that’s not okay. They’ve abused that power and created artificially lowinterest rates for so long that we have all-time high 40-year inflation rates. That’s their fault, from them printing the money and setting the interest rates too low, which causes boom and bust cycles… and the hunting of yields to try and cancel out all the inflation they’re creating by printing money from thin air. Real cryptocurrency - like HEX, PulseChain, Ethereum, Bitcoin - solves that.”
Richard then provided a reallife example of why crypto’s censorship-resistant properties matter:
“Recently, Canada seized the funds and froze the bank accounts of people who bought sandwiches for those who were part of a political protest. That’s not okay…. People are fleeing war-torn areas, and the existing
payment reels are broken. The only way they can pay for things is with crypto because the ATM machines don’t work, so even if they have money in the bank, they can’t get their cash out. People in Ukraine who needed to get out were buying cars with bitcoin to escape the country.”
While Richard espouses the values that bitcoin was founded on, his views on decentralization are somewhat at odds with those that many crypto proponents hold. “Decentralization of the infrastructure and nodes that carry transactions is very useful. Decentralization of ownership doesn’t really exist. 42% of bitcoin sits in 2,000 addresses.
“2% of bitcoin addresses hold 90% of the coins.”
“Decentralization works great in node infrastructure, processing, and block making, but it doesn’t really matter much for ownership. Some of the best-performing assets of all time - Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla - have extremely centralized control, decision making, and ownership.”
This jives with the nearly totalitarian control Richard holds over the coins and tokens he creates, but it’s not for nothing. Numerous crypto influencers and thought leaders have criticized HEX because the Origin Address (OA) - which many believe is Richard - holds a majority of the token’s supply. Meanwhile, HEX is among the
only authentic DeFi products to perform exactly as it was designed to.
A Turning Tide
To wrap up, I asked Richard if he thinks people’s opinions of him have changed in the 2.5 years since HEX’s launch - when everyone and their mother were calling it a scam and him a scammer.
“Many people talked trash when I said that HEX was designed to do 10,000x price performance in under 2.5 years, and then it did it in 1.7. I think that has shut their little mouths… HEX has had 100% perfect flawless operation for 1,000 days. Everything else is getting rekt left and right, and going down… and losing billions of dollars, but our stuff works perfectly. I think people figured out that I was right, and they were wrong.”
From my perspective, it also seems that the tide against HEX and Richard Heart is turning. Today when I mention HEX, PulseChain, or Richard in conversation with a client, they rarely grimace and often even smile. That’s a vast difference from the landscape of just two years ago.
Looking into the future…
Although sentiments against Richard and his products have begun to shift, there’s still a long path ahead. For the last 2.5 years, establishment crypto has excluded HEX from its offerings. Data aggregator sites like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko have intentionally obfuscated HEX’s market cap, assigned it an arbitrary ranking, and held the asset on page three of their sites, even though HEX has been as high as number 4 by market cap. Centralized exchanges have refused to list the token even though their customers have asked for it. And big-name crypto media outlets have declined to publish anything against the narrative calling HEX a scam. And yet, the more the popular outlets attempt to push Richard away, the more his unorthodox outrage marketing tactics have worked to draw an audience in.
Could it be that cringe matched with outrage is the new black?
That it’s not only hip to be square- but it might soon be cool to have HEX?
We checked Richard’s claim against Glassnode’s freely available Bitcoin charts & found it to be frighteningly close to the current numbers for Bitcoin distribution.
