Courtney and Charlie Shrem. Photograph by Michael Kinsey.
I first met Charlie Shrem, 32, and his wife, Courtney, in an office that overlooks Sarasota Bay from the seventh floor of downtown’s Palm Tower Suites. It’s from here that Shrem runs Crypto.IQ, a consulting company that works with investors in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
A decade ago, Shrem was one of the biggest names in crypto. In 2011, he founded BitInstant, one of the first cryptocurrency exchanges, and later helped launch the nonprofit Bitcoin Foundation. The Winklevoss twins, famous for their role in the development of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg and the acrimonious breakup and lawsuit that followed, bought their first stake in crypto from Shrem. (According to Forbes, the twins are now both Bitcoin billionaires.) Thanks to crypto, Shrem’s official net worth grew to $500,000, a number that underestimates how wealthy he was, considering the amount of Bitcoin he owned. His life was a fantasy of luxury and tech celebrity.
“I walked around like my shit didn’t stink,” says Shrem. “I was 22, just out of college. I met Courtney. Life was grand. We owned a nightclub in Manhattan that we were living on top of.” Bitcoin was going for $1,000 a unit and rising.
“I did the very first transaction for Bitcoin to be accepted in a nightclub,” says Courtney. She showed me a picture from a Bloomberg article that shows her exchanging cryptocurrency for a cocktail.
The good times didn’t last long. In 2014, when he was 24, Shrem was arrested for aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business related to Silk Road, the now-defunct online black market. He spent a year in prison in Pennsylvania.
“My whole world came crashing down,” he says.
Courtney stuck it out with Shrem, abandoning an acting career in New York to move to Pennsylvania to be closer to him. After his release, traumatized by his incarceration and his fall from grace, Shrem moved into his mother-in-law’s basement with Courtney. He had no idea what to do next.
That’s when he came to Sarasota. In 2016, he visited the city after Courtney’s grandmother passed away and immediately decided this was where he wanted to live. He told Courtney, “Let’s never leave this place.” He proposed to her on Lido Beach.
Shrem says that at the time, there was no real crypto community in Sarasota to speak of. But then Shrem met Jesse Biter, a Sarasota entrepreneur who, at the time, ran a tech incubator called the HuB with Rich Swier. Biter had gotten interested in Bitcoin years earlier, and the HuB had begun accepting rent payments in Bitcoin.
“Jesse Biter has supported the tech community a lot,” says Shrem. “He basically didn’t charge me rent when I worked out of his building at the HuB.” (Biter calls Shrem a “superstar in the business.”)
Five years after moving to Sarasota, the Shrems have rebuilt their Bitcoin empire, and now own homes in Laurel Park and Lido Shores and on Bird Key. “Sarasota gave me the second chance that I needed,” says Shrem.
Crypto.IQ isn’t the only cryptocurrency operation based out of Palm Tower Suites, where I met Shrem for the first time. These days, nearly all seven floors of the building located at 1343 Main St. are filled with crypto entrepreneurs. In just a few short years, Sarasota, a place best known for its white sand beaches …….
Source: https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/news-and-profiles/2022/05/sarasota-cryptocurrency