South African-born Oxford University fellow Heloise Greeff, who is social trading platform eToro’s first female Elite Pro Popular Investor, says she first got into crypto in 2013 when she received $20 in $BTC for ordering pizza for a friend.
According to a report published in The Sunday Times on May 29, Greeff, who currently lives in Oxford, UK, told them:
“A friend owed me money and he asked to pay me back in bitcoin. I wasn’t a pure convert from the start, but I was happy to take a chance and accept the payment because the engineer in me understood what was going on with the blockchain. I could understand the long-term potential.“
The report went on to say:
“Having stored a small amount on a flash drive, Greeff, who moved to the UK from South Africa to complete a PhD in machine learning, began using bitcoin to split bills with a group of friends who were also overseas students to avoid paying currency conversion fees when they owed each other money. Her decision to keep that original $20 of bitcoin paid off. Today, it is worth more than $3,000.“
During an interview with “This Is Money” in January 2022, Greeff, who joined eToro in 2016, had this to say about crypto:
“Before the pandemic, my portfolio was almost exclusively tech and healthcare. In the last 20 months, it has diversified quite a bit more. The way I use crypto in my portfolio is as a hedge against volatility, it is quite uncorrelated and so the risk-adjusted return can be quite good.
“We have to start talking about this new asset class, because there is a lot of negative experience and media around it because it remains fairly unregulated in a lot of markets. I only use the stable coins, my largest crypto holdings are ethereum and bitcoin. I rarely go over 5 per cent exposure to crypto in the portfolio to [minimise] high volatility, which some of the alt coins can still be prone to.“
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