FOUNDER

Gleipnir is the creation of Steve Dick, a visionary business owner with 25 years of experience in banking & finance. Steve has worked as a bank officer, a brokerage employee, & owns a retail registered investment advisor.

Steve has decades of experience successfully working directly with retail investors, regulators, exchanges, developers, attorneys, accountants, and every type of person or entity that a business regularly interacts with.

He has dedicated a considerable amount of resources to learning about blockchain & digital assets. Though he doesn’t keep track, he estimates that since 2020 he has devoted 300 – 400 hours of time to blockchain & digital asset training through formal classes & conferences. In doing so he has earned a Certificate In Blockchain & Digital Assets from the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, a Certificate from NASDAQ Advisor Academy: Digital Assets, Certificates of Achievement from the American Crypto Academy, & multiple certificates from Ivan On Tech Academy. That is all in addition to completing courses offered by many industry firms.

But Steve is not a digital asset theorist. He has personally invested a substantial portion of his net worth in digital assets. He’s invested onchain, through centralized exchanges, through qualified custodians, & through advisory firms. As an Accredited Investor, he has private Pre-Seed investments in promising blockchain projects. He also invests heavily in blockchain support industries & companies; miners, exchanges, hardware manufacturers, software developers, banks, & gaming companies. He knows from first-hand experience what does & doesn’t work for investors.

His passion for retail advisory & digital assets led his firm to become one of the first, maybe even the first, retail registered investment advisor in the U.S. to offer customers direct investment in digital assets. He is battle tested when it comes to business formation, regulatory registration, vendor organization, & implementation of professional digital asset management.

Through his depth & breadth of hands-on experience as a digital asset investor he quickly identified the strengths, and more importantly the weaknesses, of the different avenues available for retail investors & institutions to invest in digital assets. And there are a lot of weaknesses among current outlets.

For the past 3 years he has privately bemoaned the extraordinarily limited, almost nonexistent, custodians offering direct professional digital asset investment to retail investors. What’s more, he has grumbled about their miniscule number of offerings, lackluster platforms, anti-customer service, & inability for customers to take advantage of what blockchain has to offer; all while charging extremely high fees & commissions.

Publicly, he is outspoken in stating that the blockchain industry is going to have to become user friendly before it can go mainstream. As a whole, the industry has a large vocabulary of unnecessary jargon; HODL, whale, crypto winter, P2P, … That’s in addition to necessary new industry jargon; node, miner, hash, NFT, … All that jargon is fine for blockchain natives (another unnecessary term?) when talking to one another, but it’s a foreign language to the average person. Throw all that niche lingo on top of a new technology that people don’t understand & they become intimidated; too intimidated to use the technology or invest. Those few that do venture forward then run head-first into a user interface designed without the end-user in mind. Industry interfaces are incomprehensible to the average person. Almost everyone knows the basics of how to use the internet. Most can also operate the simplest functions of major software, like Word or Excel. What people haven’t done is move beyond those point & click fundamentals.

Combine an anti-customer user interface written in a foreign lingo with irreversible transactions and most people turn their backs & walk away. They never progress to using the technological marvel that is blockchain. They never invest in the myriad of great projects that are available to everyone. And all because it’s unnecessarily unfriendly.

While at Consensus 2023, Steve heard several speakers say what he has been saying; the blockchain industry is going to have to become user friendly before it can go mainstream. He spent a day grumbling to himself, asking why no one is listening to that statement & why no one is doing anything about it, because it is going to be wildly profitable to the company that acts to make it easy & convenient for retail investors to invest in digital assets. And better yet, that company will contribute significantly to helping blockchain achieve Metcalf’s Law. The next day he had an idea; he is the someone who can do all of these things. He’s worked directly with retail investors for 24 years. He understands retail investors; what they want, what they need, & how they behave. He has over 2 decades experience behind the scenes working with platforms, developers, attorneys, accountants, exchanges, regulators, …. He is the person who can help transform digital asset investing into a user-friendly experience.

That night Steve broached the subject with his wife. She was quickly onboard & very supportive of the project. Work on Gleipnir began immediately.

Steve has the education, knowledge, skills, experience, & network necessary for Gleipnir to achieve its goals & become a success. He has devoted hundreds of hours & a substantial amount of money to developing the organization. All that’s missing now is the capital to implement the groundbreaking organization that is Gleipnir. That’s where you, the forward-thinking investor, come in.