Hamiz focuses on operations risk management, and overall strategy, the growth of his firm called Plutus21, and he’s focused on all things investing in, especially alternative strategies across multiple, multiple asset types, he has been involved as a principal investor in deals totalling over $50 million on behalf of us as partners and family capital.
Growing up in Pakistan, he saw the effects of economic and political instability firsthand, and given this experience, he has motivated him to understand the many problems faced by the developing world and is confident that blockchain technology will be an important part of the solutions.
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Strategic Investing in Blockchain Technology with Hamiz Awan
Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. He focuses on operations, risk management, and overall strategy, the growth of his firm, by the way, it’s called Plutus21, and he’s focused on all things, investing in, especially alternative strategies across multiple, multiple asset types, and in fact, he has been involved as a principal investor in deals totaling over $50 million on behalf of us as partners and family capital. Growing up in Pakistan, he saw the effects of economic and political instability firsthand, and given this experience, he has motivated him to understand the many problems faced by the developing world and is confident that blockchain technology will be an important part of the solutions. Please welcome to share with me, Hamiz Awan. Hamiz, how are you doing, sir?
Hamiz:
I’m great. I’m great. Thank you for having me.
Brett:
For our listeners getting to know for the first time, would you give us a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Hamiz:
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. Now living in Dallas, Texas, we’re trying our best to make sense of the alternative asset landscape and invest on behalf of our partners in alternative strategies such as blockchain assets and other venture capital strategies.
Brett:
Excellent, by the way, you can learn more about him, Hamiz Awan, at Plutus21Capital.com, that’s P L U T U S 21.com, and before we dive into our topic today, which is strategic investing in blockchain, blockchain technology, I want to take one other step back and help our listeners to get to know a little bit better. When you’re growing up back in your, grade school days, or high school days, I want you to go back to those days. I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts, be given to us to be a blessing help to others. Some people call these strengths and superpowers. I believe in their gifts, and they’re here to be helpless to help poor people. I’m curious, what are those one or two gifts that you believe you were given? And how does that help, how do you help and bless people today?
Hamiz:
I think I got entrepreneurship back early on. I started my first small business and my brother, we were 1012 years old, and we never looked back since then, and we really think that a lot of the problems in the world can really be solved by putting people behind, really tough problems and getting them to think about that every day and work towards those solutions, and most of the times these solutions are coming from startups. I’m a big believer in the social change that startups can bring to entire countries, entire societies, and I’ve been a big, startup founder, myself a big supporter of startups, and now an investor in startups.
Brett:
Being an entrepreneur in belief in the spirit of someone starting something from scratch and solving the world’s problems. Is that a fair summary? Absolutely, absolutely. Now let’s dive right into the kind of the secret behind Plutus21 Capital and strategic investing in blockchain technology. Here’s what’s the biggest secret or the first step to understanding how to strategically invest in blockchain technology.
Hamiz:
Nothing we talk about is investment advice. But we see the blockchain space from a very different lens than most people do. I believe, and I think a lot of the conversation that happens around dinner tables or even around Investment Committee, workrooms, is all focused on the price of different budget assets, and I think that’s the wrong approach. The conversations you’ll have are whether bitcoins $40,000, today are $20,000 today, and that really doesn’t make a difference. Because if you’re in a secular trend, if you’re in a long-term adoption trend, then short-term price movements are quite irrelevant to the long-term story. I believe that either you understand the long-term adoption trend of blockchain technology or you don’t, and if you don’t understand it, and don’t appreciate it, then you should not be participating in the market. It’s highly volatile, very dangerous if you don’t understand what you’re doing, and so you should only do it because you understand the long-term disruption that the technology can have.
Brett:
Let me see if I encapsulate that. The first thing is shifting the conversation in the mindset from a price versus trends and versus understanding the business are the value behind the blockchain technology. Is that a fair summary?
Hamiz:
Yes.
Brett:
Let me ask you the second question. We’ll let’s just go to the second secret. What’s the next step? Once you shift from focusing on price to understand the value in business and what it’s going to do now with the second part to investing and blockchain technology.
Hamiz:
We believe that the number one, thing that we’ve learned over the last few years of doing this is that adoption is everything. It that’s true, even from, traditional technology companies. The reason Uber has value is that because they have the best application or the best technology, it’s because they have the most users and the most drivers using their platform. That kind of competitive advantage is even more pronounced on a blockchain network. Because the technology is open source. Anybody can copy-paste the technology and use it as their own. But what is your main durable competitive advantage? Is not how great your technology is, but how many users you have and how many sticky users keep coming back.
Brett:
It’s the adoption, and what is Uber been able to do to attract more users and more people use their platform?
Hamiz:
Uber has done a great job at sort of going across the world going against regulation in many spaces and showing users the value of their platform. They’ve created jobs and times when countries needed jobs, like the COVID. The pandemic, they have given users access to services that they never thought was possible, and one of the important things to understand about companies like Uber is, people usually underestimate them throughout their lives. When people started thinking about Uber as an investment, they probably thought, the total addressable market here is the size of the taxi market. But what ended up happening was because Uber made that transportation easier, cheaper, and more accessible, they actually expanded the market for taxis, people that never took taxis before takeovers now, and so a lot of times, it’s very easy to sort of forgetting that these markets are not just the traditional markets. But a lot of times, when you add technologies to it, you actually expand the market far beyond the traditional competition.
Brett:
That makes sense. I think of something even like a blockbuster versus Netflix. I imagine there are more people watching consuming content today, because of the ease of access and how friendly it is. That’s growing the pie versus just taking from the first summary so far?
Hamiz:
Yes.
Brett:
Now let’s apply it to blockchain technology. We have understood that the actual business and the technology behind it, and this is the value it brings to the everyday person or business or whatever. Secondly, is adoption. Helping the users and the people understand and actually use it. What would be the third step to this?
Hamiz:
It would be to understand that when you like a company like Netflix or a company like Tesla, there are very obvious assets that you can buy to sort of back that company and bet on their success. But that’s not so simple in the blockchain space. blockchain assets are unique, and all of them are different from each other. There’s no set standard. It’s not necessarily the case. If, for example, you believe in the theorem network, you believe that that’s going to get adopted further, it’s not necessarily the case that you go by the Ethereum token, and that gives you exposure to the growth of the theorem network. Some of those digital assets are really strongly connected with the underlying growth of the business. But many of them are actually very loosely connected to the underlying growth of the business, and so you could be absolutely right about the growth of the business, but see no value being passed through to the actual digital assets involved. You cannot take the structure and the relationship between the company and the digital asset for granted. You have to really dig deep to understand whether there’s any real economic relationship at all
Brett:
Interesting. A lot there. It’s not you can’t just put blockchain in a box, I think is what you’re saying, and you’ve got to really underwrite and look at it on an individual basis. Just because you’re buying the coin doesn’t necessarily you’re supporting the blockchain technologies that are very summery?
Hamiz:
Absolutely.
Brett:
Now let’s dive into Plutus21, by the way, plutus21.com and says responsible strategic investing in blockchain technology Plutus 21 Capital is a multi-strategy investment firm focused on blockchain infrastructure investments, so how do your customers or clients work with you? Kind of give us a play-by-play there?
Hamiz:
From us as a company we look like any other end aspirin firm, it’s the investments that we make that are, non-traditional, and on the front hereof tech. We have a very typical investment firm business model, we pull capital together from investors that want exposure to these trends and adoption cycles, and then we invest that capital on their behalf. From that perspective, we’re very traditional, what we want to really focus on is infrastructure investments. Because we feel that the underlying marketplaces, the protocols, the platforms that make this entire ecosystem run are the best way to get exposure, and the reason we feel that way is instead of investing in individual applications, if you were to invest in the App Store, instead, you would get exposure to the 1000’s and 1000’s of applications that are on the App Store. We like to take a really broad and diversified exposure to the ecosystem instead of betting on individual applications of the technology.
Brett:
Give us an example of a recent or past investment that, that he saw what he liked about it, and maybe what the general outcome if you could share some of those things.
Hamiz:
Like not investment advice at all. But one of the infrastructure, very important pieces of infrastructure in this space is the Ethereum network. The Ethereum network is essentially a blockchain that innovators and entrepreneurs from around the world and come and build on top of. Instead of them having to create their own blockchain, they have a plug-and-play solution called Ethereum. Network, it already has users already have validators, and you just come and build your application on top of it, and so the reason that we really liked Ethereum was that it was the king in terms of adoption. But it was getting beat down unnecessarily because of a general bear market and in the ecosystem. We continue to see rising adoption, more users, users kept coming back opening more accounts, more developers building on top of it, but at the same time, we saw the value of Ethereum depleting over time. It really, we get very excited when adoption is rising, and prices are falling, that’s to us the best place to, start to start to express our opinions, and that’s one of the investments that we made, and that’s really going through a big transition tomorrow, and that should decide big parts of the future with them.
Brett:
That’s really fascinating. The fundamentals, obviously said, adoption is everything, and so when you’re seeing, the general market fall, let’s say crypto world at times, but you’re seeing the adoption in the users go up, you’re saying hey, the value is there, otherwise, the adoption, the users probably wouldn’t be going up. There’s something there, and eventually, the market should catch up. Is that what you’re saying there?
Hamiz:
Basically, at the end of the day, fundamentals always win. There’s short periods of time, or even long periods of time where fundamentals lose, but over the long run, fundamentals always win, and so we want to find these fundamental reasons why people keep coming back, and as long as technology is valuable to people, and it improves their lives, it’s valuable over on. That’s the only reason that any of this stuff is worth anything is if it’s actually helping people and changing their lives, and we saw reason we got so good reason to believe that users kept coming back, and it was giving them a product or a service that they enjoyed, and they found value.
Brett:
Let’s talk about that adoption piece. Even for something like Plutus21 Capital as it applies to your business, and helping people to become more users and more investors, and with you, what’s the biggest thing that you’re focused on, and to increase the adoption?
Hamiz:
We would love to do is make our investments more accessible. Today, the way that we’re structured in our investments are not very accessible to regular investors, and so we would like to, we’re working through those things, trying to figure out how can we not just invest in these, really alternative exciting asset classes, but also give more people access to what we do?
Brett:
A very fascinating world and I like the way you said fundamentals always win, I think is when we have certainty of conviction of the investments that we’re putting in. It’s not the emotional highs and lows. It’s no, I’m certain This is gonna, this is going to win, and this is going to do well because the fundamentals are there. I understand it. I see the vision. I see the users, I see the fundamentals, and therefore I’m more likely to not be swayed by highs and lows of just the market moving. Any thoughts on that, Hamiz?
Hamiz:
Like the perfect example is, the only people that how to Amazon stock all the way from the IPO to today are, Jeff Bezos and his mother, and that’s because there were many believers that came along the way. But they all got shaken out by the volatility, and that’s what made Jeff Bezos the richest person on earth is because he had a level of conviction that nobody else had, and he understood that the short-term price movements didn’t matter, he had a much bigger vision, much bigger, a bigger target for the company, and so that tends to happen with all companies. You think about Elon Musk, you think about Bill Gates, you think about any of these people, they had big believers, but even their own employees and family members don’t stay with them through the entire, and so volatility is what you have to accept for exceptional returns, volatility doesn’t equal risk, necessarily. volatility is the cost of exceptional returns.
Strategic Investing in Blockchain Technology: “Ninety percent of all millionaires become so through owning real estate. More money has been made in real estate than in all industrial investments combined. The wise young man or wage earner of today invests his money in real estate.” – Andrew Carnegie
Brett:
Even the basis, and even the Steve Jobs, they had a lot of people who doubt it, and it, it’s a part of, of any entrepreneurs, dream that did that certainty of conviction to stay in long enough and to keep building and keep, keep building and succeeding. Let’s shift a little bit to Capital Gains Tax, which I’m curious on your take on some of the proposed changes and or just the world of crypto, because one of the biggest things we found is people hate to feel trapped by capital gains tax when they want to sell high, and they wanna, they want to be able to capture some value. We’re doing an Etherium case for actually a couple who, out of the Bay Area, California, and they bought it for around 100,000, and in 2017, they saw it shoot up to about 6 million, and then they saw kind of crash down, and then in 2000, about a year ago, eight months ago or so five months ago, it shot up to like 9 million, and then it shot up to like 13 million right now. It’s from the 4000 highs, let’s say to about 2500 or so, and they’re looking like we wish we would have sold if we would have had a good, long-term Capital Gains Tax Deferral option. I’m curious for you and your, friends, family, clients, investors, what’s the biggest frustration when it comes to Capital Gains Tax Deferral options when it comes to crypto?
Hamiz:
I think that people are still unsure what crypto-asset even is. Is it property? Is it treated like security? I think most people are just treating us like a capital asset, and that’s what the lawyers in the accountants are suggesting, as well. There’s obviously a lot of confusion about what type of asset it is, What strategies would apply to it? What is it like-kind exchange in a cryptocurrency? I don’t know. Are there securities? Are they not? There’s a lot of confusion, and I think the accountants and the lawyers are trying their best to give very conservative advice on it. But I think the biggest problem with this entire thing, and I think just generally in capital gains taxes, there’s a lot of confusion, and most people don’t know. Don’t know very clearly what our options are.
Brett:
And that’s by the way here, Capital Gains Tax Solutions, we’re trying to declutter the confusion and give you clear options for cryptocurrency for primary homes, using the deferred sales trust for businesses, you can go to capitalgainstaxsolutions.com, that’s capitalgainstaxsolutions.com. You can also search for that on YouTube as well to see some videos on all this. All that being said, homies, are you ready for the lightning round?
Hamiz:
Absolutely, let’s do it.
Brett:
Here we go. Knowing what you know. Now, if you could go back to your 25-year-old self, what’s the one Golden Nugget and make sure to tell yourself to do?
Hamiz:
The funny thing is I’m 25. I’ll go back to my 15-year-old self and say, take it easy and just believe in yourself.
Brett:
Second question, what’s the number one book you’ve recommended or gifted the most in the past year?
Hamiz:
I’m not gifted. There’s this book about Jim Simons about how he built Renaissance technology, one of the most successful hedge funds in history. I really liked that book. I think it’s called The Man That Solved The Market.
Brett:
Question three. What are you most curious about right now?
Hamiz:
I’m most curious about understanding how I can have a bigger impact.
Brett:
The biggest obstacle facing cryptocurrency investors.
Hamiz:
Regulation.
Brett:
The one regulation that if it were changed, what changed the most for the crypto world?
Hamiz:
I think if there was heavy-handed regulation on whether crypto is a security that will probably be the biggest thing.
Brett:
Got it. If they put that as security is what you’re saying. We’ll be the biggest setback?
Hamiz:
Yes. Because right now it’s the argument is a sign of security.
Brett:
Property. Got a second the last question is the number one leadership quote or theme that you strive to live by when it comes to building a business or being an entrepreneur?
Hamiz:
A smooth scene ever made a skilled sailor. The ups and downs are necessary to make you good at what you do.
Brett:
Last question, How do you stay centered in all your values, and stay encouraged to reach for new heights? After all your success. What are the like maybe the daily habits are the things that you do to make sure to keep yourself centered in your values?
Hamiz:
I make sure I spend time with my family, and that they’re my source of motivation.I make sure I spend time with them, and then I make sure that I spend time with people that are not like me, are maybe younger than me or older than me, or have a different background than me and that really helps me see things from a better perspective.
Brett:
Hamiz Awan, I want to thank you for being on the show. For listeners who want to get in touch with you Would you mind them one last time where they can find you,
Hamiz:
P, L, U, T, U, S, 21.com
Brett:
That’s Hamiz Awan and that’s yet plutus21.com Hamiz. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for sharing a bit about your story. I want to thank you for being an entrepreneur and starting big things with blockchain technology, helping others invest, create and preserve more wealth. I want to encourage you to keep doing more of that, and I want to also thank our listeners for listening to another episode of the Capital Gains Tax Solutions Podcast. As always, we believe most high net worth individuals and those who help them they struggle with clarifying their capital gains tax deferral options, not having a clear plan is the enemy, and using a proven tax deferral strategy, such as the Deferred Sales Trust to defer taxes, capital gains taxes on the sale of cryptocurrency primary homes, businesses are the best ways to grow your wealth and defer tax so we want you to encourage you to go to capitalgainstaxsolutions.com to learn more about all of that and share this with somebody we’re also streaming on expertcresecrets.com, so you can learn if you’re in the commercial real estate brokerage world. You can learn more about how to use the Deferred Sales Trust to grow your business as well. Thanks so much, everyone for listening out there. We so appreciate you and we wish you well.
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About Hamiz Awan
Hamiz focuses on operations, risk management, and overall strategy, the growth of his firm called Plutus21, and he’s focused on all things, investing in, especially alternative strategies across multiple, multiple asset types, he has been involved as a principal investor in deals totalling over $50 million on behalf of us as partners and family capital.
Growing up in Pakistan, he saw the effects of economic and political instability firsthand, and given this experience, he has motivated him to understand the many problems faced by the developing world and is confident that blockchain technology will be an important part of the solutions.
