April 3, 2024 • 24 mins
Ray is left picking up the pieces of his life and business after his failed Vegas trip. In Episode 3 – Heads or Tails, Ray and a few friends from Miami Exotics set their sights on tackling the unregulated Wild West of the crypto-currency world. Introducing, Centra Tech.
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To get an inside look into Ray Trapani, Centra Tech, and all the characters in the podcast, check out Bitconned, exclusively on Netflix… available to stream now.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I wake up, you know, after my suicide attack didn't work.
I'm in complete despair. I was just trying to figure
out what to do next and where to go from here.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
He called me that morning and he just came out
with it like hysterical crime, you know, just like let
it all out, told me everything.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Right after he lost one hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
I remember he called me and I was like, oh, okay,
like you're very unwell right now.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I was just relieved to be hearing his voice that
he was alive, That it didn't happen like that broke
my heart, just thinking like what was he going through
that he was even contemplating something like that.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
This was my mess. I had to face it. My
mind was racing that next day. All I could think
of was how to clean it up, to get the
fuck out of Vegas. Jump. On the next flight out,
I speak to Sam. We have to do something new,
something big, and we have to figure out how to
get rid of this debt.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
I'm Johnny be good and this is creating a con
The story of bitcom episode three, Heads or Tails. If
there's one thing I know about my best friend Ray
when his back's again, the wall, He's going to come
out swinging. He needed money. He had just blown the
(02:06):
last of Miami Exotics money in Vegas. The debt was
insurmountable and the shame was piling up. He owed his family,
especially his grandfather, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once he
got back to Miami, Ray had to decide his best
path to get that money back. And Ray, he picks
the path of least resistance, and you know it won't
(02:28):
be on the up and up. His first decision was
which partner to trust, who could get him solvent fastest.
Ray went with Sam Sharma.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
I saw them becoming very close.
Speaker 5 (02:42):
That's Bert Feldman, Miami Exotics third co founder.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
I would be by myself and MP. We go on
the balcony and smoke together every night.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
My intentions were always about the debt. I was in
such you know, desperate times that I would have done
anything to get to the point of being able to
pay that debt back.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
I just remember telling myself, like, this is not going
to be good. I knew the way that Ray was,
and I knew the way that Sorby is, and Sorby's
very manipulative, and Ray can be manipulated, especially when it
comes to money.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Remember Sam Sharper goes by Sorby, same guy.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Sorby figures out a way to sell this Bentley and
get us one hundred and twenty thousand dollars liquid.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
As they started getting closer, I remember even telling them like,
you guys are very close. Now. I thought you guys
hated each other. I have no clue, but I think
they were already planning what they wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Once we have this one hundred and twenty. We knew
we needed to get rid of Bird because he's just
not really helping us at always not bringing any money.
He's spending as much money as possible.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
They said, we're kind of splitting from you, and we're
doing our own thing.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
We just told him get out the cutover all his funds.
It was just like a big fight, like everybody's screaming, yelling.
He's like, oh, fuck you guys type of thing, and left.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
I was like, this is so weird. Why is this happening.
I'm the one that brought them together. That's so strange.
I think race or an opportunity for him to make
more money with Sorby, so that's why he chose outside.
Speaker 5 (04:19):
With Bird out of the picture. This new alliance between
Ray and Sorby focused on repaying the debt. But then
a shiny new object called Ray in Sorby's eyes and
it wasn't a lambo.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Shortly after this, we're down in the offices in Miamixotics
and Sorby comes in. He starts talking about Ethereum and like,
I had no idea what ethereum was. Sorbia had been
investing in Ethereum, and he was like, oh, I love it.
You know this is dope, Like.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
You should check it out. Ethereum was a cryptocurrency that
was just gaining steam at the time. Back then, I
had no idea what crypto was, but Sam convinced Ray
that it was the way to solve their debt issue. Seventeen,
cryptocurrency was finally starting to become mainstream. Even the New
York Times is writing about it.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
This was a new way of making money that provided
returns unlike any traditional investment. These are the kind of
returns you can't get in the stock market.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Nathaniel Popper was a reporter for The New York Times
who back in twenty seventeen, wrote about all things crypto.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
On one side of this phrase, you had the entrepreneurial
people who saw an opportunity to make money by launching
initial coin offerings. You also had the investors, all these
ordinary people who saw cryptocurrencies shooting up in value. They
had just seen Bitcoin double triple in value in a
(05:47):
matter of months. They saw Ethereum go up even faster,
and so everybody was trying to figure out, how can
I buy the next coin that's going to go up
one hundred percent in a week.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Cryptocurrency was like a modern day wild wild West, a
gold rush. There were no rules. It was unregulated, highly volatile,
and played with scams, perfect for Ray and Sam. The
thing was they were always small time crooks. This was
bigger than anything they'd gotten into before.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Within a couple of days, Sore becomes me and he
says he basically lost all of his crypto, which was
like fifty thousand dollars worth, and he was coming to
me because he needed more money again.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Ray thought he found his next scheme, and in a
couple of days it all came crashing down. That didn't
stop Sam Sharma. He was convinced he could make that
fifty k back right away. Sam was a believer. And
where did Sam get his masterclass in crypto? On Reddit?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
He kind of was just like on Reddit and found
out about icos public offerings in the crypto space. It
came to me as like, this market's so untapped and unregulated,
and we should try to have an ICO. Like everybody's
killing it. They're raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Like,
we can definitely put some sort of business idea together
and we should definitely jump on this.
Speaker 5 (07:16):
And ICO or an initial coin offering, is just like
an IPO, an initial public offering. The main purpose is
to raise money for a business or fund a new project.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
You create a coin behind your company, which is essentially
shares of your company, but in the crypto space, it's
weird because it's not really even shares. They're not getting
any piece of your company. They're just buying the evaluation
that your company creates.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Did you follow that because I didn't, and by the way,
neither did Ray.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
I have no fucking idea what crypto is or anything
about it or what he's talking about, but I do
trust his business sense.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
It was Sam Sharma who Ray trusted, and Sam was
salivating it the lack of regular in the crypto world,
and honestly, he was right. Just like he did with
Miami Exotics, Sam went to work.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
He's on these ridit channels figuring out what to do.
He's like, Oh, I'm going to create this company. He
starts at first talking about other companies and how much
they raised ten x Monaco. These companies both created debit
cards where you can spend cryptocurrency, and that was the concept.
They hadn't ever got to a final step yet.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
The final step that Ray is referring to is offering
a debit card of sorts for your crypto. In his
subredded Deep Dives, Sam realized the major gap in crypto
was your ability to spend your valuable coins in the
real world. He also learned that this was an idea
that companies were trying to solve, but none of them
had been successful and bringing an actual card to market.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
You know, and Sorby's m was to just steal a
business idea and basically use it as a template to
create his own business idea. He would never come up
with something completely organically. It was always take this and
let's build off of it.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
Sam saw an opportunity to fill that gap, create a
needed solution, and he believes he could do it himself,
but to hit it big, he would need a lot
more than what he was working with. Some Reddit posts,
a stolen business plan, and a partner like Ray wouldn't
cut it. In the summer of twenty seventeen, Sam Serbi
(09:28):
Sharma approached Ray about a new emerging opportunity, initial coin offerings.
Sam convinced Ray that this was the path to solve
their financial issues. Sam had done the research, identified a
gap in the market, and was putting pen to paper.
The next step was to decide what they were going
to call this company.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Come up with the name centri Tech. It just sounded good.
CenTra dot tech or centri tech. It kind of flows.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
In his own words, here's Sam Sharman in twenty seventeen
explaining the origins of center Tech.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
One day, I was just sitting home and I was like,
what if I could spend my bitcoins and the profits
I've made and just go buy stuff with it without
having to worry about withdrawing depositing. And that's where the
idea manifested for centri card.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
This is thought up in a week. Everything all the
ideas are just within seconds of smoking blunts in a
bedroom in Sworby's house.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
But the narrative that they were feeding the public.
Speaker 6 (10:27):
We've been working on this for about a year and
five months now in total, and we've been working diligently
day and night to make sure we were able to
get this product to the hands of people this year.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Within I would say two weeks, we have a fully
functioning website and this whole idea mapped out.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
You can go to our website www dot CenTra dot
tech and you can just get an inside of everything
from a to Z.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
However, it was formed both Ray and Sam agreed to
turn in the keys to Miami Exotics and solely focused
on building out Center Tech, in their words, was the
key to the future of money. Sure, Ray would have
to work, but he was good with the hustle, and
unlike his past and construction, he could use his wits.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
To own a tech company. You don't need to be
a technical guru. You can be a guy that's very
good at marketing, a guy that's very good at finance,
and you're just incorporating yourself into this space because you
see there's value there. So going in none of us
knew anything about cryptocurrency, but we knew we were smart
enough in an untapped market that you know, has all
this new money coming into it.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
That's not exactly the vote of confidence i'd expect to
hear from one of the founders.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
We were trying to just make everything convenient for crypto users.
Back in twenty sixteen, crypto was just so complicated.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
Sounds like the blind leading the blind.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
If you had a process where you can have a
debit card, a wallet, a market space, everything was in
just one central area, and you know it goes back
to our name CenTra.
Speaker 5 (12:01):
They were selling the idea of everything in one place,
your crypto coins, the card to spend those coins. They
even wanted to create a digital marketplace exclusively for centri
card holders. They called it Cebay. To have any legitimacy,
they needed something tangible, a prototype, proof that this debit
(12:22):
card could work. Here's Sam.
Speaker 6 (12:25):
When our lap actually goes out in October November, you
will have the ability to connect your bank account and
be able to withdraw and deposit, just like coinbase or
any of the other exchanges that are available.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
Ray and Sam were a lot of things that they
weren't developers.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
You just hire a bunch of guys from Romania that
work twenty four hours a day, and you know, they
make five dollars an hour, but they create everything else.
Speaker 5 (12:49):
This team of freelancers got started designing the prototype, but
Ray and Sam also needed a white paper.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
A white paper is a business plan. It's just presented
to the public to show everybody what the company's going
to do and their timeline of when they're going to
do those things. We're going to have the card finished
by this time, We're going to have the beta version
of the app released by this time.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
But in Ray and Sam fashion, if they didn't do
their homework. Nope, they had their freelancers steal it from
another company called ten X.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
In the white paper, they copied and pasted ten X
this whole thing, put our names in all the spots,
you know, pretty simple control F and delete ten X
and put CenTra in there, changed the logos up. But
then we, you know, we took that and fluffed everything
and made our own white paper.
Speaker 5 (13:40):
From there, Ray and Sam published their white paper to
the public, and just like that, Centritech started getting traction overnight.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
In twenty seventeen, Crypto was.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Exploding Nathaniel Popper, a journalist, had just completed a book
on bitcoin called Digital Gold, and after that came out,
he became the de facto crypto expert at the New
York Times.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
There was this incredible fear of missing out that drove
people to buy things with very little attention to what
they were buying, what the underlying business was.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
Ray and Sam wanted to tap into that quote unquote
fear of missing out.
Speaker 7 (14:21):
I believe I come across center Tech around twenty seventeen.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
That's Jacob Renzel, an early investor in centri Tech.
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Essentially, they were creating a debit card that you could
load your cryptocurrency on and spend it like a regular
debit card, like how your Visa MasterCard works, and you
want to spend money from your checking account.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
Jacob was on the hunt for an investment that would
change his financial future.
Speaker 7 (14:46):
I was trying to figure out ways of investing and
making money to better enhance by financial security, and so
I was doing stock trading and things like that. And
at that time, my friends were making a ton of
money and other coins, and so I definitely feeling like
I was missing out. Like I had a friend who
invested three hundred dollars and made two hundred K, so
(15:06):
I was definitely feeling the pressure to do as well
and perform in my friend group.
Speaker 5 (15:12):
Here's Alex another investor of centri Tech.
Speaker 8 (15:16):
The thing that got me really invested into center Tech
was the idea of an actual use case for cryptocurrency.
So at the time, you couldn't really use bitcoin. If
you wanted to go and grab a coffee at McDonald's,
you couldn't use any cryptocurrency, So the idea of a
crypto card really popped off in my mind. What drew
me to Centre was the active community on the forum.
(15:36):
They had an army kind of amassing around them.
Speaker 7 (15:39):
I was in the slack just talking to other community members,
just getting hyped up about what was going on and
what the possibilities of this company could be.
Speaker 5 (15:48):
A lot of crypto companies use Slack or other online
forums to speak with their community of investors in future customers.
Speaker 7 (15:54):
It was the best place to get firsthand knowledge directly
from the team. That's where Sam Sharma talked directly to people.
That's where Raymond Trapani would go to and we would
have conversations. They directly talked to the community there.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
And since Rain and Sam we're running center tech Slack channel,
they were the ones controlling the narrative.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
We would create news articles, paid press releases, and we
just pump it out onto the Internet and people would
just take it as fact.
Speaker 8 (16:21):
Center Tech did look the most promising in terms of
their active development and being involved in the community, so
I ended up increasing that a little bit more.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
As time went on, Sam Sharman knew the only way
to grow his company was to be out front and center.
Sam was joining bloggers and YouTube series, touting his company
to anyone who would listen. He needed to tell potential
investors what center Tech had that no one else did,
and what he shared would be a game changer. After
(16:54):
Sam Sharma's discovery of initial coin offerings on Reddit and
successfully publishing a white paper, Sam ascended any pulpit he
could find to tout the emergence and progress of his
newly formed company, center Tech.
Speaker 6 (17:07):
Right now, we're currently in our phase two of testing.
We're just going through daily transactions, testing volume, etc. And
we've gotten really good results so far on it.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
And one topic that kept coming up on the forums,
the aceub Centric sleeve their partnerships. They announced the one
thing that none of their competitors had contracts with Visa, MasterCard,
and Bank or.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
We've said that we had contracts with banks in the
United States already in place, which no one else had
that yet.
Speaker 5 (17:36):
Partnerships with Visa and MasterCard. That's kind of like the
holy Grail, something that signals to the marketplace that Center
Tech was the real deal.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Everybody wants to be a part of this new idea.
Speaker 7 (17:47):
One of the reasons why I invested is because they
had partnerships with Visa, MasterCard, and Bank Corporate.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Obviously we had bank contracts.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
You're pretty legitimate.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
We were just ballsy enough to say we're going to
be able to build all this our out.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
Without capital, it's hard to get anything done. Crypto startups
are too risky for banks, so new projects often turned
to crowdfunding vehicles. In center Tech's case, it was an
initial coin offering and that consumed rain and SAM Because
the better the ICO launch, the more appealing you are
to the big investors, which meant money. Without it, this
(18:25):
business wouldn't go anywhere. They put their entire focus on
the ICO.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
We're just basically going through the things that people check
when they look at an ico. Oh, what's like a
big thing on credibility behind the team. Bet, let's develop
a team. Who the fuck is our team? Me and Sorby?
All right, so we got to have a bigger team.
Speaker 5 (18:46):
Rain and Sam already carved out their positions COO and
CTO respectively. They updated their LinkedIn pages, listing their new
roles just above their education.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
On his LinkedIn, he put everything under the sun and
we all did that.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
Right Harvard University. Of course, not bad for a kid
who was checking for tokens under a slab machine. A
few months prior, we.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Hired a couple guys. That's when Farcas comes into play.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
Robert M. Farcas, Chief marketing officer.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
He was Sorbie's girlfriend's brother, so he was in the house,
in and out him. He had been helping us once
in a blue kind of sitting there with us, but
like he was still working as a waiter or something
like that, some bullshit job, and we're like, yo, just
quit your job. Fuck it, Like we got you, you know,
we gave him some bread. We're like, you know, you
can quit, come work with us.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
But Farcas wasn't the only new hire on Centra's employee page.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Here's Michael Edwards. We make him the CEO.
Speaker 5 (19:41):
Michael Edwards CEO. According to Centra's website, Michael got his
master's degree in business administration from Harvard. He also brought
twenty years of banking experience with role as a Chase,
Wells Fargo and Bank of America. The ideal faced for
the company, bringing experience and credibility, something Ray and same
we're lacking. Along with the CEO title, Michael is listed
(20:05):
as co founder of Centritech.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
And then obviously CFO is a big position and he
couldn't put me or put Farcas at these positions. We
have Jessica Robinson. We needed some females on the team,
and Johnson's Communication was a big company at the time.
She was there for five years, so we were just
impressed with her resume, so we brought her in. Yeah,
(20:27):
we all went to Harvard. That's how we know each other.
Skull and bones. We're all in the same fraternity.
Speaker 5 (20:33):
One incredible guy. While attending Harvard, he was admitted to
his secret society that only exists at Yale. With the
team in place, Ray and Sam had worked through their
punch list of how a lunch in icl just one
small detail left for it all to begin.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
We created one hundred million coins. We assigned a value
to him. He basically, in my mind, printing money. You
just print as much money as you want and you
just go off to the races.
Speaker 5 (21:07):
Speculative, new, unregulated. You couldn't draw it up any better
for a couple of con artists. These two founders catapulted
themselves out from under the hoods of Miami Exotics cars
to launching their own cryptocurrency. Ray and Sam have a team,
they have a coin, and they built the makings of
a company. The world was taking notice when we catch up.
(21:30):
I'd always question myself when getting off the phone with him.
Did Ray make it? Could he run an actual company,
let alone a complex one like CenTra? Was any of
this even real? Or is this just the latest prescription
pad he can get his hands on. From the outside
looking in, it seemed like my friend Ray finally found
his footing onto the biggest opportunity of his life. Next
(21:56):
time on creating a con Who's the fellow that is
going to protect your ass? It is in charge of security?
Speaker 6 (22:03):
Well, we're going to hire action independent company to do
that with the funds that we raised.
Speaker 5 (22:06):
You're fucked.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
People are like, oh shit, this guy doesn't know what
he's doing.
Speaker 5 (22:17):
Creating a Con is a production of Glass Podcasts, a
division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
If you would like to reach out to the Creating
a Con team, email us at Creating a Con at
gmail dot com. That's Creating a CeON at gmail dot com.
We appreciate your support. One way to support our show
(22:39):
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don't forget to rate and review Creating a Con. Five
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to those who are listening. Also be sure to check
us out and follow us on Instagram at Glass Podcasts.
The show is hosted and produced by me Johnny be Good,
(22:59):
with executive ducers Nancy Glass, Ben Fetterman, and Andrea Gunning.
Written and produced by Ben Fetterman and Todd Gans, additional
writing by Matt Delvecchio, Operations and production support by Christin Melchiori.
Additional production support Trey Morgan. Our iHeart team is Ali
(23:19):
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(23:42):
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I wake up, you know, after my suicide attack didn't work.
I'm in complete despair. I was just trying to figure
out what to do next and where to go from here.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
He called me that morning and he just came out
with it like hysterical crime, you know, just like let
it all out, told me everything.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Right after he lost one hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
I remember he called me and I was like, oh, okay,
like you're very unwell right now.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I was just relieved to be hearing his voice that
he was alive, That it didn't happen like that broke
my heart, just thinking like what was he going through
that he was even contemplating something like that.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
This was my mess. I had to face it. My
mind was racing that next day. All I could think
of was how to clean it up, to get the
fuck out of Vegas. Jump. On the next flight out,
I speak to Sam. We have to do something new,
something big, and we have to figure out how to
get rid of this debt.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
I'm Johnny be good and this is creating a con
The story of bitcom episode three, Heads or Tails. If
there's one thing I know about my best friend Ray
when his back's again, the wall, He's going to come
out swinging. He needed money. He had just blown the
(02:06):
last of Miami Exotics money in Vegas. The debt was
insurmountable and the shame was piling up. He owed his family,
especially his grandfather, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once he
got back to Miami, Ray had to decide his best
path to get that money back. And Ray, he picks
the path of least resistance, and you know it won't
(02:28):
be on the up and up. His first decision was
which partner to trust, who could get him solvent fastest.
Ray went with Sam Sharma.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
I saw them becoming very close.
Speaker 5 (02:42):
That's Bert Feldman, Miami Exotics third co founder.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
I would be by myself and MP. We go on
the balcony and smoke together every night.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
My intentions were always about the debt. I was in
such you know, desperate times that I would have done
anything to get to the point of being able to
pay that debt back.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
I just remember telling myself, like, this is not going
to be good. I knew the way that Ray was,
and I knew the way that Sorby is, and Sorby's
very manipulative, and Ray can be manipulated, especially when it
comes to money.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Remember Sam Sharper goes by Sorby, same guy.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Sorby figures out a way to sell this Bentley and
get us one hundred and twenty thousand dollars liquid.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
As they started getting closer, I remember even telling them like,
you guys are very close. Now. I thought you guys
hated each other. I have no clue, but I think
they were already planning what they wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Once we have this one hundred and twenty. We knew
we needed to get rid of Bird because he's just
not really helping us at always not bringing any money.
He's spending as much money as possible.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
They said, we're kind of splitting from you, and we're
doing our own thing.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
We just told him get out the cutover all his funds.
It was just like a big fight, like everybody's screaming, yelling.
He's like, oh, fuck you guys type of thing, and left.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
I was like, this is so weird. Why is this happening.
I'm the one that brought them together. That's so strange.
I think race or an opportunity for him to make
more money with Sorby, so that's why he chose outside.
Speaker 5 (04:19):
With Bird out of the picture. This new alliance between
Ray and Sorby focused on repaying the debt. But then
a shiny new object called Ray in Sorby's eyes and
it wasn't a lambo.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Shortly after this, we're down in the offices in Miamixotics
and Sorby comes in. He starts talking about Ethereum and like,
I had no idea what ethereum was. Sorbia had been
investing in Ethereum, and he was like, oh, I love it.
You know this is dope, Like.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
You should check it out. Ethereum was a cryptocurrency that
was just gaining steam at the time. Back then, I
had no idea what crypto was, but Sam convinced Ray
that it was the way to solve their debt issue. Seventeen,
cryptocurrency was finally starting to become mainstream. Even the New
York Times is writing about it.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
This was a new way of making money that provided
returns unlike any traditional investment. These are the kind of
returns you can't get in the stock market.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Nathaniel Popper was a reporter for The New York Times
who back in twenty seventeen, wrote about all things crypto.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
On one side of this phrase, you had the entrepreneurial
people who saw an opportunity to make money by launching
initial coin offerings. You also had the investors, all these
ordinary people who saw cryptocurrencies shooting up in value. They
had just seen Bitcoin double triple in value in a
(05:47):
matter of months. They saw Ethereum go up even faster,
and so everybody was trying to figure out, how can
I buy the next coin that's going to go up
one hundred percent in a week.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Cryptocurrency was like a modern day wild wild West, a
gold rush. There were no rules. It was unregulated, highly volatile,
and played with scams, perfect for Ray and Sam. The
thing was they were always small time crooks. This was
bigger than anything they'd gotten into before.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Within a couple of days, Sore becomes me and he
says he basically lost all of his crypto, which was
like fifty thousand dollars worth, and he was coming to
me because he needed more money again.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Ray thought he found his next scheme, and in a
couple of days it all came crashing down. That didn't
stop Sam Sharma. He was convinced he could make that
fifty k back right away. Sam was a believer. And
where did Sam get his masterclass in crypto? On Reddit?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
He kind of was just like on Reddit and found
out about icos public offerings in the crypto space. It
came to me as like, this market's so untapped and unregulated,
and we should try to have an ICO. Like everybody's
killing it. They're raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Like,
we can definitely put some sort of business idea together
and we should definitely jump on this.
Speaker 5 (07:16):
And ICO or an initial coin offering, is just like
an IPO, an initial public offering. The main purpose is
to raise money for a business or fund a new project.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
You create a coin behind your company, which is essentially
shares of your company, but in the crypto space, it's
weird because it's not really even shares. They're not getting
any piece of your company. They're just buying the evaluation
that your company creates.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Did you follow that because I didn't, and by the way,
neither did Ray.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
I have no fucking idea what crypto is or anything
about it or what he's talking about, but I do
trust his business sense.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
It was Sam Sharma who Ray trusted, and Sam was
salivating it the lack of regular in the crypto world,
and honestly, he was right. Just like he did with
Miami Exotics, Sam went to work.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
He's on these ridit channels figuring out what to do.
He's like, Oh, I'm going to create this company. He
starts at first talking about other companies and how much
they raised ten x Monaco. These companies both created debit
cards where you can spend cryptocurrency, and that was the concept.
They hadn't ever got to a final step yet.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
The final step that Ray is referring to is offering
a debit card of sorts for your crypto. In his
subredded Deep Dives, Sam realized the major gap in crypto
was your ability to spend your valuable coins in the
real world. He also learned that this was an idea
that companies were trying to solve, but none of them
had been successful and bringing an actual card to market.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
You know, and Sorby's m was to just steal a
business idea and basically use it as a template to
create his own business idea. He would never come up
with something completely organically. It was always take this and
let's build off of it.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
Sam saw an opportunity to fill that gap, create a
needed solution, and he believes he could do it himself,
but to hit it big, he would need a lot
more than what he was working with. Some Reddit posts,
a stolen business plan, and a partner like Ray wouldn't
cut it. In the summer of twenty seventeen, Sam Serbi
(09:28):
Sharma approached Ray about a new emerging opportunity, initial coin offerings.
Sam convinced Ray that this was the path to solve
their financial issues. Sam had done the research, identified a
gap in the market, and was putting pen to paper.
The next step was to decide what they were going
to call this company.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Come up with the name centri Tech. It just sounded good.
CenTra dot tech or centri tech. It kind of flows.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
In his own words, here's Sam Sharman in twenty seventeen
explaining the origins of center Tech.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
One day, I was just sitting home and I was like,
what if I could spend my bitcoins and the profits
I've made and just go buy stuff with it without
having to worry about withdrawing depositing. And that's where the
idea manifested for centri card.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
This is thought up in a week. Everything all the
ideas are just within seconds of smoking blunts in a
bedroom in Sworby's house.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
But the narrative that they were feeding the public.
Speaker 6 (10:27):
We've been working on this for about a year and
five months now in total, and we've been working diligently
day and night to make sure we were able to
get this product to the hands of people this year.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Within I would say two weeks, we have a fully
functioning website and this whole idea mapped out.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
You can go to our website www dot CenTra dot
tech and you can just get an inside of everything
from a to Z.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
However, it was formed both Ray and Sam agreed to
turn in the keys to Miami Exotics and solely focused
on building out Center Tech, in their words, was the
key to the future of money. Sure, Ray would have
to work, but he was good with the hustle, and
unlike his past and construction, he could use his wits.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
To own a tech company. You don't need to be
a technical guru. You can be a guy that's very
good at marketing, a guy that's very good at finance,
and you're just incorporating yourself into this space because you
see there's value there. So going in none of us
knew anything about cryptocurrency, but we knew we were smart
enough in an untapped market that you know, has all
this new money coming into it.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
That's not exactly the vote of confidence i'd expect to
hear from one of the founders.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
We were trying to just make everything convenient for crypto users.
Back in twenty sixteen, crypto was just so complicated.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
Sounds like the blind leading the blind.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
If you had a process where you can have a
debit card, a wallet, a market space, everything was in
just one central area, and you know it goes back
to our name CenTra.
Speaker 5 (12:01):
They were selling the idea of everything in one place,
your crypto coins, the card to spend those coins. They
even wanted to create a digital marketplace exclusively for centri
card holders. They called it Cebay. To have any legitimacy,
they needed something tangible, a prototype, proof that this debit
(12:22):
card could work. Here's Sam.
Speaker 6 (12:25):
When our lap actually goes out in October November, you
will have the ability to connect your bank account and
be able to withdraw and deposit, just like coinbase or
any of the other exchanges that are available.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
Ray and Sam were a lot of things that they
weren't developers.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
You just hire a bunch of guys from Romania that
work twenty four hours a day, and you know, they
make five dollars an hour, but they create everything else.
Speaker 5 (12:49):
This team of freelancers got started designing the prototype, but
Ray and Sam also needed a white paper.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
A white paper is a business plan. It's just presented
to the public to show everybody what the company's going
to do and their timeline of when they're going to
do those things. We're going to have the card finished
by this time, We're going to have the beta version
of the app released by this time.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
But in Ray and Sam fashion, if they didn't do
their homework. Nope, they had their freelancers steal it from
another company called ten X.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
In the white paper, they copied and pasted ten X
this whole thing, put our names in all the spots,
you know, pretty simple control F and delete ten X
and put CenTra in there, changed the logos up. But
then we, you know, we took that and fluffed everything
and made our own white paper.
Speaker 5 (13:40):
From there, Ray and Sam published their white paper to
the public, and just like that, Centritech started getting traction overnight.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
In twenty seventeen, Crypto was.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Exploding Nathaniel Popper, a journalist, had just completed a book
on bitcoin called Digital Gold, and after that came out,
he became the de facto crypto expert at the New
York Times.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
There was this incredible fear of missing out that drove
people to buy things with very little attention to what
they were buying, what the underlying business was.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
Ray and Sam wanted to tap into that quote unquote
fear of missing out.
Speaker 7 (14:21):
I believe I come across center Tech around twenty seventeen.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
That's Jacob Renzel, an early investor in centri Tech.
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Essentially, they were creating a debit card that you could
load your cryptocurrency on and spend it like a regular
debit card, like how your Visa MasterCard works, and you
want to spend money from your checking account.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
Jacob was on the hunt for an investment that would
change his financial future.
Speaker 7 (14:46):
I was trying to figure out ways of investing and
making money to better enhance by financial security, and so
I was doing stock trading and things like that. And
at that time, my friends were making a ton of
money and other coins, and so I definitely feeling like
I was missing out. Like I had a friend who
invested three hundred dollars and made two hundred K, so
(15:06):
I was definitely feeling the pressure to do as well
and perform in my friend group.
Speaker 5 (15:12):
Here's Alex another investor of centri Tech.
Speaker 8 (15:16):
The thing that got me really invested into center Tech
was the idea of an actual use case for cryptocurrency.
So at the time, you couldn't really use bitcoin. If
you wanted to go and grab a coffee at McDonald's,
you couldn't use any cryptocurrency, So the idea of a
crypto card really popped off in my mind. What drew
me to Centre was the active community on the forum.
(15:36):
They had an army kind of amassing around them.
Speaker 7 (15:39):
I was in the slack just talking to other community members,
just getting hyped up about what was going on and
what the possibilities of this company could be.
Speaker 5 (15:48):
A lot of crypto companies use Slack or other online
forums to speak with their community of investors in future customers.
Speaker 7 (15:54):
It was the best place to get firsthand knowledge directly
from the team. That's where Sam Sharma talked directly to people.
That's where Raymond Trapani would go to and we would
have conversations. They directly talked to the community there.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
And since Rain and Sam we're running center tech Slack channel,
they were the ones controlling the narrative.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
We would create news articles, paid press releases, and we
just pump it out onto the Internet and people would
just take it as fact.
Speaker 8 (16:21):
Center Tech did look the most promising in terms of
their active development and being involved in the community, so
I ended up increasing that a little bit more.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
As time went on, Sam Sharman knew the only way
to grow his company was to be out front and center.
Sam was joining bloggers and YouTube series, touting his company
to anyone who would listen. He needed to tell potential
investors what center Tech had that no one else did,
and what he shared would be a game changer. After
(16:54):
Sam Sharma's discovery of initial coin offerings on Reddit and
successfully publishing a white paper, Sam ascended any pulpit he
could find to tout the emergence and progress of his
newly formed company, center Tech.
Speaker 6 (17:07):
Right now, we're currently in our phase two of testing.
We're just going through daily transactions, testing volume, etc. And
we've gotten really good results so far on it.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
And one topic that kept coming up on the forums,
the aceub Centric sleeve their partnerships. They announced the one
thing that none of their competitors had contracts with Visa, MasterCard,
and Bank or.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
We've said that we had contracts with banks in the
United States already in place, which no one else had
that yet.
Speaker 5 (17:36):
Partnerships with Visa and MasterCard. That's kind of like the
holy Grail, something that signals to the marketplace that Center
Tech was the real deal.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Everybody wants to be a part of this new idea.
Speaker 7 (17:47):
One of the reasons why I invested is because they
had partnerships with Visa, MasterCard, and Bank Corporate.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Obviously we had bank contracts.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
You're pretty legitimate.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
We were just ballsy enough to say we're going to
be able to build all this our out.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
Without capital, it's hard to get anything done. Crypto startups
are too risky for banks, so new projects often turned
to crowdfunding vehicles. In center Tech's case, it was an
initial coin offering and that consumed rain and SAM Because
the better the ICO launch, the more appealing you are
to the big investors, which meant money. Without it, this
(18:25):
business wouldn't go anywhere. They put their entire focus on
the ICO.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
We're just basically going through the things that people check
when they look at an ico. Oh, what's like a
big thing on credibility behind the team. Bet, let's develop
a team. Who the fuck is our team? Me and Sorby?
All right, so we got to have a bigger team.
Speaker 5 (18:46):
Rain and Sam already carved out their positions COO and
CTO respectively. They updated their LinkedIn pages, listing their new
roles just above their education.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
On his LinkedIn, he put everything under the sun and
we all did that.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
Right Harvard University. Of course, not bad for a kid
who was checking for tokens under a slab machine. A
few months prior, we.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Hired a couple guys. That's when Farcas comes into play.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
Robert M. Farcas, Chief marketing officer.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
He was Sorbie's girlfriend's brother, so he was in the house,
in and out him. He had been helping us once
in a blue kind of sitting there with us, but
like he was still working as a waiter or something
like that, some bullshit job, and we're like, yo, just
quit your job. Fuck it, Like we got you, you know,
we gave him some bread. We're like, you know, you
can quit, come work with us.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
But Farcas wasn't the only new hire on Centra's employee page.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Here's Michael Edwards. We make him the CEO.
Speaker 5 (19:41):
Michael Edwards CEO. According to Centra's website, Michael got his
master's degree in business administration from Harvard. He also brought
twenty years of banking experience with role as a Chase,
Wells Fargo and Bank of America. The ideal faced for
the company, bringing experience and credibility, something Ray and same
we're lacking. Along with the CEO title, Michael is listed
(20:05):
as co founder of Centritech.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
And then obviously CFO is a big position and he
couldn't put me or put Farcas at these positions. We
have Jessica Robinson. We needed some females on the team,
and Johnson's Communication was a big company at the time.
She was there for five years, so we were just
impressed with her resume, so we brought her in. Yeah,
(20:27):
we all went to Harvard. That's how we know each other.
Skull and bones. We're all in the same fraternity.
Speaker 5 (20:33):
One incredible guy. While attending Harvard, he was admitted to
his secret society that only exists at Yale. With the
team in place, Ray and Sam had worked through their
punch list of how a lunch in icl just one
small detail left for it all to begin.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
We created one hundred million coins. We assigned a value
to him. He basically, in my mind, printing money. You
just print as much money as you want and you
just go off to the races.
Speaker 5 (21:07):
Speculative, new, unregulated. You couldn't draw it up any better
for a couple of con artists. These two founders catapulted
themselves out from under the hoods of Miami Exotics cars
to launching their own cryptocurrency. Ray and Sam have a team,
they have a coin, and they built the makings of
a company. The world was taking notice when we catch up.
(21:30):
I'd always question myself when getting off the phone with him.
Did Ray make it? Could he run an actual company,
let alone a complex one like CenTra? Was any of
this even real? Or is this just the latest prescription
pad he can get his hands on. From the outside
looking in, it seemed like my friend Ray finally found
his footing onto the biggest opportunity of his life. Next
(21:56):
time on creating a con Who's the fellow that is
going to protect your ass? It is in charge of security?
Speaker 6 (22:03):
Well, we're going to hire action independent company to do
that with the funds that we raised.
Speaker 5 (22:06):
You're fucked.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
People are like, oh shit, this guy doesn't know what
he's doing.
Speaker 5 (22:17):
Creating a Con is a production of Glass Podcasts, a
division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
If you would like to reach out to the Creating
a Con team, email us at Creating a Con at
gmail dot com. That's Creating a CeON at gmail dot com.
We appreciate your support. One way to support our show
(22:39):
is by subscribing to our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and
don't forget to rate and review Creating a Con. Five
star reviews go a long way. A big thank you
to those who are listening. Also be sure to check
us out and follow us on Instagram at Glass Podcasts.
The show is hosted and produced by me Johnny be Good,
(22:59):
with executive ducers Nancy Glass, Ben Fetterman, and Andrea Gunning.
Written and produced by Ben Fetterman and Todd Gans, additional
writing by Matt Delvecchio, Operations and production support by Christin Melchiori.
Additional production support Trey Morgan. Our iHeart team is Ali
(23:19):
Perry and Jessica Crincheck, Sound editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio,
consulting producer Nathaniel Popper. Creating a CON's Theme composed by
Oliver Bains. Music library provided by MiB Music. Thank you
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(23:42):
a Con the story of bitcom. Continue binging the rest
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Host
Jonny B. Good
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