Ryan Horst Podcast Transcript
Ryan Host joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ryan Horst. Ryan Horst is the CEO of Altcoin Pro, an entrepreneur, business strategist, and sales expert who has mentored more than 200 entrepreneurs across multiple industries. His background spans sales, psychology, communication, leadership, client acquisition, and human behavior, with a focus on helping business owners improve performance and scale more effectively.
Following success in the 2021 cryptocurrency market cycle, Ryan began applying his business and communication expertise to the crypto industry. At Altcoin Pro, he focuses on simplifying complex financial and blockchain concepts into practical education for everyday investors, with an emphasis on investor psychology, decision-making, and long-term strategy.
Well, good afternoon, Ryan. Welcome to the show.
Ryan Horst: Good to be here, man. Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. You’re hailing out of Tampa, Florida. I’m in Kansas City. So again, appreciate you making the time. I know it’s not always easy to get on a calendar in different time zones, so appreciate that.
And Ryan, let’s jump into your first question. You got into crypto in the summer of 2017, right before the first ever Altcoin bull run, and built a career on sales, psychology, and entrepreneurship before applying it to crypto education. What was that first cycle like as someone learning the space in real time, and how did mentoring over 200 entrepreneurs across other industries shape how you approach teaching crypto today?
Ryan Horst: Yeah, so that first altcoin bull run in history the 2017 cycle that ended in 2018, it was a, a roller coaster journey of really high highs and really low lows, to be honest with you. I was up about 1,000% on my portfolio in a matter of like four or five months. And then, I was pretty ignorant and I thought I knew what I was doing.
I was in the, Have you ever have looked into the Dunning-Kruger model? It kinda plots like confidence over time when it comes to like, knowledge that you’re gaining as you’re like learning. Yeah. At the very beginning of the- the- in the Dunning-Kruger model, like it- it shows this on this X, Y axis.
It shows a line that goes really up really high on the Y-axis at the be- very beginning and really like short on the X-axis. So like, this is where I’m like trying to do hand signs with my hands, but there’s no video. And then like as you start to learn more, you start to realize that you know nothing, and your confidence in the in the topic actually goes down drastically.
And then that goes into the the so it goes from like peak of like Mount Stupid is what they call it, down into like the realization phase when you like realize you actually know nothing. And this happens with everything that you start to learn, right? When you first start learning, like me with AI for example, something I’ve been diving really deep into.
When I first got into it and I was having awesome prompts that I was putting in, I was like, “Wow, I know so much about AI.” And then I started to get deeper into it. And then I started to learn about everything else and I’m like, “Oh wait, I know nothing.” And then as I started to learn more, I started to progress up back at it again, and then I go like kinda up and to the right with that Dunning-Kruger model.
So 2018 really was that time where I noticed that I really knew nothing in crypto, and it- it just sparked the the decision to where I really needed to like dive into this and figure out if this was something that was gonna be around for a long time. Because as an entrepreneur, I- I- I know it’s important to catch trends early and- I knew that if I could really figure out this industry and figure out a way to teach it simply to people and, get good results for myself, then I could create a company that’s based around helping to solve the knowledge gap that a lot of people have between getting started with crypto to knowing enough about crypto to be able to make some kinda marginal impact on their investing journey.
So that’s what we did. And then in in 2021 we had the, the next bull run that took place, and me and my partner Yoni, we were ready for it, and we had been studying crypto over the, last four or so years up until that point to where everybody else kinda ran away from the market, and we dug, we dug deeper.
We were reading white papers. We were understanding how the blockchain like how the blockchain world works, the layer ones, the layer twos, even the layer threes. And we just built a system for ourselves that allowed us to get repeatable results, and then that system only became easier to implement as the years came on because a lot of what we do is in the decentralized finance world with, like, earning passive yield on your crypto.
And the tools like concentrated liq- liquidity automated market making came out, which made it easier to provide liquidity, become more capital efficient with your, investments. And yeah, I mean, our, our strategy’s g- just gotten better because of the increased tools with the crypto world. So we just…
We teach that to everybody. But my experience with the coaching side of things, so I, I was a business coach for about a year and a half to two years it really came in handy with coaching individuals on the crypto side of things because I got a lot of experience with seeing how the different brains work of different people around the world.
There’s different client archetypes, if you will, right? And in order to be able to teach people effectively, you have to be able to meet people where they’re at. And it- that experience allowed me to see firsthand, like, how to translate concepts in a simple way to get them across from my brain into somebody else’s brain.
And through doing that, it just created this ability for me to explain these complex ta- like, topics in the crypto world in a way that I’ve been told people haven’t really seen before, which is, that got discovered in like 2021, 2022, and that ended up sending me into like a whole world tour of speaking on different, like about 16, 17 different stages in like three different continents.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Love the backstory. Obviously there’s always a story here, right? The pain point or you found a gap in the market. But I remember that, and I’ll just kinda share something real quick. In the 2017 altcoin bull run I got all into that as well. I invested some money. I actually tried building a crypto miner in my basement at that same time.
It was crazy. Nice. Yeah, yeah, it was c- some good times. And I’ve got other stuff I can share with, on, on blockchain and Web3 and the stuff I’ve done. But, but it’s really cool. Your story was interesting, how you learned the hard way in investing in that DeFi space. It was still kind of early on in, in some aspects, but that aha moment I liked is how you hel- could help people learn and get into crypto with your educational system, that framework that made it easily digestible for folks.
And obviously, things grew from there and, and the rest is history, and I really love the story, so thank you. And Ryan, you work at Altcoin Pro. Your work at Altcoin Pro anyway emphasizes investor psychology and decision-making as much as the technical or financial fundamentals. What are the most common psychological mistakes you see new crypto investors make, and how is that different from the mistakes seasoned traders make once they think they’ve got this all figured on?
Ryan Horst: So there’s a lot of mistakes that pop up both in the, the beginner traders as well as the seasoned ones. I- if I were to really break it down to the top two that I see for new investors that come on board and start working with us, the first one would be emotional attachment to the coins that they’ve gotten, invested into.
So the reason that this is a problem is because in the crypto world, you can’t just rely on buying a single coin and waiting for it to go up, right? Because we’ve seen just through the history of crypto and the crypto markets, a coin might go up 400%, but then it might drop 90%, right? And if you never…
If you remain emotionally attached to that single coin and you ride that wave all the way up and then all the way back down, you just canceled out possibly three to four years of progress along your overall journey of trying to get to the end result that you’re looking to get to. So for many people, that’s like they wanna reach a million-dollar portfolio.
It’s a big goal for a lot of people that work with us. It’s like step one, reach a million dollars, and then step two, create generational wealth for my family. And we jump on demo calls with people all the time, and when they jump on with us, they’ll… We typically will ask them what their current portfolio v- value is at, and then we’ll ask them what their all-time high value is at for their portfolio.
And a lot of times they’ll come to us and they’ll say they’ve got like 200 grand in crypto, but at one point they had 500 grand I, I mean, that’s a pretty steep drop-off, but where it gets even more dangerous is when a lot of these individuals will say, “Well, I’m okay with that because I’m still dollar cost averaging into this same coin that I’ve lost all this money in.”
And it, it creates this issue to where since they’re so emotionally attached into that specific coin, and it could be a number of different coins, right? It’s not just like any single coin. It’s… It happens all the time and like with different types of coins ’cause these, these cryptocurrency projects, they, they have their marketing strategy, right?
To where they create like cult-like followings of their specific token, and then people go all in. And then when things go poorly, they find a way to reason with themselves for why it’s actually a good thing that it’s going poorly, and then sometimes they dig theirselves deeper into a hole. And the danger here is that with the crypto world being so new, the nascency of this space, there’s a chance that some of these coins that they’re getting into might never recover, and they’re stuck with being in the, the…
They’re stuck in the marketing side of things and what the coin’s been talking about and what influencers on YouTube have been talking about to where we’ve got people that jump on calls with us that are like 70 years, years old that have got their life savings into crypto and no real strategy other than just buying and holding and then just hoping it works.
So that’s one of the biggest problems that we see, is the emotional attachment to a coin and then finding ways to reason, like find, finding a way to like look at the current situation with rose-colored glasses as to why things going down is not all that bad And we’ve seen multiple coins where like, you know, like, Binance c- sorry, Bitcoin Cash, for example.
If you look at the chart, the all-time high from it was like in twenty seventeen, right? And some of these coins like actually never come back. So if you have this cult-like mentality, then you probably should do some looking into, if that’s a healthy thing for you. So and then that also leads into the second problem, which is a lack of diversified like a portfolio that’s not diversified and one that’s not earning passive yield.
So to dive into that a little bit further, some people think that they are properly diversified with their portfolios because they might hold like… A good example that we see all the time is like they might hold a bunch of different ISO twenty oh twenty two projects, right? So that could be like XRP, XLM, HBAR, Quant, like all of these here Algorand.
And the– They’re under the interpretation that by being in all these different coins, that they’re diversified between multiple different projects in the space. However, all of these projects are under the same narrative, right? So that’s like going into the stock world and, buying only AI-related stocks and thinking that you’re properly diversified.
Or going in and buying only social media-related stocks and thinking that you’re properly diversified, right? Because you gotta think about the, the different levels of diversification, right? There’s a diversification level of making sure that you’re in different coins, but also in different sectors, right?
Because if something in the ISO, if like XRP is going up like crazy, right? XLM, there’s a good chance it follows. Quant might follow, right? But the crypto world moves based on narratives. So while the ISO twenty oh two tw- coins might not be moving for a while, and we’ve seen that where they went stagnant for like three years, you might get other coins that, like Hyperliquid, which we’ve loved recently.
Well, we’ve loved that for like two years. And where that one’s going like crazy. So then Perp DEXs might be the narrative that’s going crazy, or you might see AI coins that are going crazy, right? So the other one is like not really being properly diversified, and the danger of that is many people think that they’re diversified, but they’re really not
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That, that’s helpful, and I’ve, I’ve heard people talk about this before. And again, those top two reasons for new investors, and, and a big one, you talked about this, you really unpacked this, is that- Yeah … emotional attachment. You can’t just buy a single coin and be attached, and wait for your investment to bring back that huge return.
You have to think about the long game. And we all been there. We’ve been burned. I, I bought a lot of different altcoins over the years. And yeah, I’ve lost, I’ve… I wouldn’t say I’ve lost my shorts, but yeah, I get it. And the emotional attachment is there. I think we all have it. So I, I appreciate your insights there.
But of course, the other one, lack of that diverse investment portfolio. And, and, and as you said, not just different coins, but also different industries. Really kind of diversify and make sure that you’re at least getting a basic yield on that. So I, again, appreciate your, your insights here for our audience.
And Ryan- Of course … you’ve, you’ve built your business around translating complex financial and blockchain concept into practical education for everyday investors. What’s an example of a concept that almost everyone misunderstands at first, and how do you break it down in a way that actually sticks?
Ryan Horst: So the I’d say the one that s- that, that really stands out to me would be how we actually earn yield on our crypto with liquidity pools and providing liquidity to these liquidity pools.
Somebody… just so that the, the listeners are, kinda can pick up on where I’m at. Like, if you’ve ever heard of the terms like yield farming or, like, liquidity pool mining or, like, anything like that, it kinda goes under the same, terminology with what I’m talking about. So I’ll kind of explain how that works.
So in the crypto world, we have both centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges, okay? So a centralized exchange is like Coinbase, it’s like Binance, it’s like Kraken, Uphold, KuCoin, you know, you name it, all these different types of centralized exchanges. What makes them centralized is that they’re owned and operated by a central entity, right?
That central entity has governing control over that exchange, okay? Now, one of the issues with this is kinda twofold, right? One, this centralized exchange earns all of the trading fees for any of the trades that you do on that centralized exchange, which means those fees go straight to a third-party intermediary that’s a centralized company, and they don’t get distributed out to the people that are helping to put together the crypto world.
Now, that’s very normal, right? You can’t fault them for that because they’re a centralized business. That, that business has to make money, right? That’s, that’s not necessarily a problem, but it is when you look at the, the second option, the decentralized exchange, which I’ll talk about in a second. The other problem with using a centralized exchange is that in the crypto world, you have to choose where you’re gonna custody your assets, right?
And there’s two different options. There’s custodial solutions and non-custodial solutions. Custodial solution is something like a centralized exchange. Now, I’ll elaborate on what the difference is for a second. It’s important to understand that when you store your cryptocurrency, you’re storing it in a crypto wallet.
That’s whether it’s held by yourself or held by an institution, it’s still a crypto wallet that’s being held in at the end of the day. That’s the only way that you can hold a cryptocurrency other than it being in, like, a smart contract vault or something like that, right? So since no matter what, at the end of the day, whether it’s a custodial or a non-custodial solution, it’s still being held in a crypto wallet, what is the big difference?
The difference is the method of seed phrase storage. So whenever you create a crypto wallet, you are getting a seed phrase. This seed phrase, to make it super simple, is basically a master password that allows you to unlock this crypto wallet from any device in the world, right? You just have to download a crypto wallet and then import your seed phrase, and then boom, you have access to it.
Now, the danger of this is that whoever owns that seed phrase has ultimate control over the funds that’s inside of that crypto wallet So if you’re using a custodial solution, then the exchange has the governing authority at the end of the day of what goes in and out of that crypto wallet. They just give you access to that crypto wallet, right?
This is why when we’ve seen situations like FTX or BlockFi or Voyager or any of these that you might have seen, like the downfall in like 2022, that’s why so many people got screwed there. It’s because they didn’t own the seed phrase to their crypto wallet. So that means that the centralized exchange can just block the withdrawals to where you can’t take your money out.
And if a crypto institution of some sort, like Coinbase or something like that were to go down You, they can just block your ability to withdraw the money, right? And there’s no, like, FDIC insurance with your crypto or something that, like, protects like how you have with, like in the case of, like, bank runs and stuff in the central…
in, like, the, the traditional finance world. You don’t have that with crypto. So if you’re gonna store your crypto with a centralized entity, that’s a risk that you’re taking on. So then I’m gonna move into the decentralized exchange side of things now, which is what we genuinely prefer for a number of reasons.
One, when you connect your wallet to a decentralized exchange, you connect it with your own non-custodial wallet that you have the ability to hold the seed phrase to. Right? So this gives you sovereign ownership of your crypto, which, to be fair, is the entire reason crypto was created so that we could have sovereign ownership of digital money for the first time in history.
You can’t do that with the dollar because the dollar has to live inside of a bank account that is ran by a centralized entity, right? So you… The only way you’ve ever been able to have sovereign ownership of digital money in history is because of crypto and the ability to have a crypto wallet. So by using centralized exchanges, you’re kind of, moving against the entire thesis of why we had crypto created in the first place.
So then when you use these decentralized exchanges, you’re actually allowed to take your crypto that you hold in your own sovereign wallet. So think like, Ledger or Trezor or MetaMask or Rabby or Phantom. You know, these are all examples of non-custodial wallets. Some are cold storage, some are hot wallets.
And you can log into these decentralized exchanges. So like if you’ve heard of Uniswap, right? Or PancakeSwap was a pretty popular one back in the day that somebody might recognize or Jupiter or, Meteora. There’s, there’s a ton of different deci- decentralized exchanges out there.
You can click the button on that website that says “Connect,” and then you can connect your own non-custodial wallet that you own to this website, and then you can enable it to move your funds in and out of that wallet to interact with that decentralized exchange. What this does is this allows you to trade your crypto without using a centralized exchange, so without having third-party custodial risk And it also opens up the ability to you make passive in- to make passive income on your crypto.
So the next part is, of this is understanding how the actual de- decentralized exchange works, right? So unlike a centralized exchange, right, you don’t have market makers that are like, institutional investors and whatnot that provide liquidity so that, trades can always be made, right?
You couldn’t have that in a decentralized finance world because that would be against the ethos of DeFi, right? So how do they solve that problem? They created something called liquidity pools, which is exactly what it sounds like, right? So to, to give you an example If I wanted to trade, let’s say, Ethereum for USDC on, call it Uniswap, right?
Uniswap.org. Then you can go onto onto Uniswap, and then you could submit on their platform, “I wanna trade Eth for USDC.” It’ll go through a liquidity pool to give you that money. But how does it actually operate on the back end with those liquidity pools? So basically, in order for that to actually operate, there are…
These liquidity pools are what we call two-sided liquidity pools. That just means that there’s two coins in the liquidity pool. So for this to work, there has to be outside, people that have money, like investors, that decide to put their Ethereum and their USDC into this liquidity pool. And then what the decentralized exchange does is it says, “Okay, this person wants to get USDC with their Eth.”
So it takes the person that’s trading the Eth, puts it into the liquidity pool, and then pulls USDC out of the liquidity pool. And when it does that, it charges what’s called a swap fee, and that swap fee is a very small fee, typically like point, 3%, sometimes even lower, like .05%. And then that swap fee is then paid out to the people that provided their liquidity to this decentralized exchange in this Eth-USDC liquidity pool so that other people could actually trade.
So the beautiful thing here is that because of the nature of this, this decentralized exchange and how they work, instead of Coinbase getting paid the trading fees, it’s actually disseminating that wealth to everybody that wants to be involved because of the nature of decentralized finance. So now you and I can become market makers.
The, the idea of being a market maker isn’t just reserved for the institutional investors of the world. It’s not just in, for the, for the Citadels of the world. It’s not just, like, for the large people that have billions of dollars of capital. That opportunity’s now available to, Cindy and Lucy down the street.
It’s available to your yoga instructor. It’s available to you, Brian. It’s available to me. And the amount that you can actually make from this is ways more significant than anybody really realizes because the, the there’s this huge knowledge gap right now between the amount of people that know how to trade on a decentralized exchange but…
and the amount of people that know how to provide liquidity on a decentralized exchange And you make, the amount that you make per swap is dependent on the amount of money you have in that liquidity pool in proportion to the total amount. So you get like a cut of that swap fee that’s proportional to the percentage of the overall pool that you actually make up.
So yeah, that was kinda long, but I, I hope that, I hope that came across clearly. Do you have any questions about that?
Brian Thomas: No, it’s great. Overall makes total sense, and like I said, I’ve been in this space as well for quite a long time. But for our audience, it’s certainly gonna be a- amazing how you impact all that.
And just to highlight a couple things real quick here. You obviously broke down how you actually earn yield crypto and look at it… You talked about the liquidity pools, and obviously on the decentralist side, there’s an incentive for the people that do invest, and, and I like that of course. And, and again, learning lesson here for the audience, for those folks that are new to this space.
But… And then of course, Crypto Wallet. You talked about how that works, what’s its purpose, a central exchange versus a decentralized ex- exchange, and have, how decentralized exchanges offer the most I would say, giving power back to the people, right? That’s really what DeFi… The, the premise, the thesis, as you mentioned, is what it’s built on.
So I appreciate that. And Ryan, the last question of the day, if you could briefly share, as AI tokenization of real world assets and institutional capital continue reshaping the crypto landscape, where do you see retail crypto education heading in the next bull cycle? And what do you think separates investors who actually build wealth in this next phase from those who’ll get left behind again?
Ryan Horst: I think that the big thing that’s gonna separate investors is going to be the ability to separate an emotional attachment from their coins, right? And the reason I say that is because we are in a different era of crypto, right? The era of crypto that we’re in today is no longer the era to where you can just throw money at any cryptocurrency and just wait long enough and it goes up, right?
Then the question that follows after that is typically why, right? So why is that the case? And the reason for that is that the barrier to what is required in order to create a cryptocurrency has dropped to virtually zero, right? You could go on a site like pump.fun or, a similar one like that, and you can create your own cryptocurrency in a matter of, like, three to five minutes, right?
So when you have this many cryptocurrencies that are created, it creates a problem that we call altcoin fragmentation. What is that exactly? Well, in twenty seventeen, pretty much every coin get… went up because there was a flood of money flowing into the cryptocurrency world, and there wasn’t that many…
Comparably, there wasn’t that many coins that that money could flow into. But in today’s world, there’s, good Lord, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of coins that are out there. So in order for us to have a similar type of up, like the rising tide that lifts all ships like what used to happen, we need, like, a crazy amount of capital to come in because th- there’s not enough money in comparison to the amount of coins to bring up every single coin anymore.
When you’ve got, like, all these low cap coins that have fifty thousand dollars in market cap to a hundred thousand dollars in market cap to five million in market cap, it just creates this situation where if there’s, like, five million in this coin, ten million in this coin, fifty million in this coin, that’s money that could have flown…
that could have, like, gone into the other coins, right? So, like, because there’s so many, it’s, like, created this situation where the entire market is fragmented to where you have to be more precise to be able to pick the winners inside of the cryptocurrency space. So in order to really be able to do that effectively, you really need to be able to have an understanding of the market and know what the gaps are in the market so that you can be on top of the solutions that come in in order to, change the world, right?
A really good example is Hyperliquid. We’ve been talking about Hyperliquid since twenty twenty-four, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. Or actually probably earlier. Early twenty twenty-four is when we first started talking about Hyperliquid. And the reason we were so bullish on it was because Hyperliquid was cre- was solving a serious problem in the crypto world, which was a really good perp DEX, right?
And for those of you that aren’t familiar what that is, it’s basically a decentral- centralized exchange that you can go on, and you can seamlessly, long or short with margin, right? So, like, if you’re not familiar with lo- with margin, with like, you know, borrowed capital, right? So you can trade with more money than you actually have on like 3X, 5X, 20X, even more sometimes on different perp taxes.
So Hyperliquid created a solution that was 100% the best on the market, and because of that, they started to bring in a lot of liquidity into their blockchain they built on their own private blo- not private blockchain. They built on their own blockchain, which then allowed them to be able to pull a lot of liquidity into the HyperEVM, which now there’s a bunch of other apps that are being built on there.
So it’s just being able to like see the problems and the holes in the market before other people do, but in order to be able to do that, you have to understand the market. So it’s gonna be people that like understand crypto, see the holes in the market, and are able to find opportunities before other people do because they know what the gaps are in the market.
That’s how we knew Hyperliquid was gonna be a winner. And today, Hyperliquid is the most successful company in the world when you talk about in terms of revenue per employee. I think they’re doing something stupid like, I think it was like $100 million per employee. They’ve got like 11 employees. I don’t know the exact number, but you guys can look it up.
Hyperliquid is now the, you know, the most successful company when it comes to revenue per employee. So that would be the, the main thing is, actually learning the industry, but the tough part is knowing where to start. And the reason that’s the tough part is because until, I- we created Altcoin Pro, one of the difficult things is that like I didn’t feel like people were teaching this industry in the correct order that it should be taught in.
You go on YouTube, and you’re gonna learn about the ISO 20022 tokens, right? Or you’re gonna learn about, you know, cross-border payments and the issue with that, right? So you start to learn these things, but what you’re missing and that you don’t know quite how it works is how do you bridge from blockchain to blockchain?
What is a Layer 1 blockchain? What’s the difference between a Layer 1 blockchain to a Layer 2 blockchain? It’s the understanding of how the entire ecosystem works that’s critical for you to be able to actually make proper decisions with your investing portfolio and to understand the risks of each coin that’s in your investment.
‘Cause if you’re investing in a Layer 3 project, for example, that might have a risk that trickles down to the Layer 2 and the Layer 1. So then if the Layer 1 blockchain goes under, then the Layer 3 built on top of the Layer 2 that’s built on the Layer 1 is also gonna go under, right? So it’s just getting a proper education of like learning like how to actually go through crypto from A to Z in a way that’s actually built in the correct order ’cause so many people are trying to learn calculus before they learn pre-algebra, and it’s just never gonna work that way.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. There was a lot to unpack there, for sure. I know my audience is gonna have to listen to a follow-up part two of this podcast. Obviously, there’s just so much information. But just to highlight a couple things, in the future, as you said, big things are gonna separate those investors or those that can separate themselves emotionally from their investment, obviously.
But you unpacked so much more about altcoin fragmentation and perp dex and being precise and picking the right crypto investments, finding that gap, people that really understand the market are gonna do well. So I really appreciate that. And Ryan, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Ryan Horst: Of course. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Ryan Horst Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
