Podcast

Tony Herrera: Immigrant Activist Turned Multi-Million Dollar NFT Collector

Tony Herrera’s story of how he stumbled into the world of cryptocurrency is unlike any I’ve heard. Most commonly it’s techno-libertarians who have grown up on video games and the internet. In contrast, Tony’s story begins with immigrants.

An immigrant himself, he came to the U.S. at the age of 7 and has invested much of his time helping undocumented immigrants with worker compensation benefits due to injuries. He spent decades working with the vocational rehabilitation benefit and training the community about it.

As part of this he ended up looking for solutions to help his clients send money back to families in their home country. This sent him down the crypto rabbit hole beginning with Bitcoin and eventually Ethereum. Eventually he wound up with Cryptopunks in 2017 and is now the 25th largest holder of them.

The use case of cryptocurrencies that many in the space originally refer to is helping those in third-world countries that have unstable government. However if you spend most of your time perusing the NFT communities you’ll be bombarded with individuals who are splashing out insanely expensive pieces, appearing fully disconnected from those in need.

Tony is not one of those individuals, despite his growing portfolio. In this episode he walked me through not only how he entered the space but provided some context surrounding the early days of the CryptoPunk and Ethereum communities. He’s an important voice in the community and I was excited to have him on the show. I’m sure you’ll enjoy as well…