Controversial former hedge fund manager and convicted felon Martin Shkreli is shedding his ‘Pharma bro’ moniker and becoming a crypto bro with the launch of a decentralized exchange (DEX) called Albumswap.
According to a press release, Shkreli’s new decentralized finance (DeFi) platform will be serviced by a native utility token called $MS, which can be purchased on his new website for a dollar.
Shkreli became known as ‘Pharma Bro’ after raising the price on Daraprim—a lifesaving medication used by many AIDS and cancer patients—from $13.50 to $750.
He was convicted of securities fraud in 2017 after allegedly running his company “like a ponzi scheme,” according to one U.S. attorney. He was released earlier this Spring on good behavior and now resides in a halfway house in New York, where he will remain until his full release in September.
Shkreli jumped on a Twitter Space immediately after his partial release and said he got into crypto via Uniswap during his stint in prison. He also claimed that he received unspecified perks in prison in exchange for giving prison guards advice on Bitcoin.
Albumswap… Where did it come from?
Shortly after Shkreli’s Twitter Spaces appearance, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams tweeted: “Will Shkreli still like Uniswap when he learns I listened to that [Wu-Tang Clan] album he bought more recently than him?”
Adams was referring to Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, an unreleased one-of-one record that Shkreli purchased in 2015 for $2 million, before squirreling it away from the public. The following year, he offered to release the album if Donald Trump won the election, and destroy it if Hillary Clinton won.
Going back on his word, Shkreli only streamed the intro and first track after Trump’s victory. The album was later seized by the U.S. government as a forfeiture and sold to an unknown buyer for an undisclosed sum.
Last year, Ethereum art collective PleasrDAO bought the album for $4 million. The group hoped to make it more available, but are still bound by the original restrictions that RZA and producer Cilvaringz attached to its sale to Shkreli, including that it cannot be released to the general public until 2103.
Adams’s tweet about the album appeared to hit a nerve because Shkreli responded: “Should I start my own DEX you guys to teach this guy a lesson?”
When asked if he was going to create a Uniswap clone, he replied: “I wasn’t planning on it. But I really didn’t appreciate his tweet. I feel that if I can just take 5% of his market share, I will have done my job. Anything I can do to be a thorn in his side.”
Lo and behold, another shitcoin was born.
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