Exciting and terrifying Crypto just like nineties tech boom says Seek co-founder

The co-founder of $10 billion-valued jobs website Seek says serious investors can no longer afford to ignore cryptocurrencies, likening the technology behind assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum to the development of the internet in the early nineties.

Matt Rockman, who started ASX-listed Seek alongside Paul and Andrew Bassat in 1998, told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald he has around 3 per cent of his investment portfolio in the volatile assets as a gold-like hedge against volatility in the broader market.

Seek co-founder Matt Rockman has said serious investors should take the time to learn about cryptocurrencies.Credit:

“The prime pumping by central banks has a lot of money in the system and unrealistically low interest rates are causing market distortions. I think at some point, the cycle will turn,” he said.

“Crypto is one of the few hedges one can have in a portfolio, other than gold, to give you some downside protection in these crazy times.”

Mr Rockman is part of a growing cohort of sophisticated and institutional investors looking towards the cryptocurrency space as a solid investment opportunity and a breeding ground for innovation.

Traditionally, investors have been scared off the volatile industry due to its unpredictability and lack of regulation and government oversight, with many decrying it as dangerous, worthless, or a Ponzi scheme.

But Mr Rockman believes some of these attributes are what make assets such as Bitcoin attractive, saying his investment both “excites me and terrifies me, as any good technology should”. The entrepreneur has previously invested in successful startups such as Uber, Canva and Fiverr.

He likens the industry to the early stages of the internet when the technology was still finding its feet and tech stocks were booming, despite some trepidation from traditional investors. The late nineties tech boom eventually burst in the dot com crash.

Mr Rockman believes crypto will be a similar “game-changing” technology, and encouraged serious investors to take time and understand it. “I think any serious investor should start to try and get their head around crypto in a sensible fashion and educate themselves,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going away.”

“It’s a wildly fantastic sort of technology, and I think years from now we’re going to see a lot more use cases for it.”

Mr Rockman invests through online exchange Gemini, which is run by the Winklevoss twins, opting to keep his assets on the exchange rather than transfer them to a personal wallet. His investment is split 50/50 between Bitcoin and Ethereum, though he admits he’s also spent “beer money” on joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin which has been heavily promoted by Tesla founder Elon Musk.

He welcomes further regulation of the industry, which many investors and exchanges have been calling for, however he noted crypto’s very nature made it hard to regulate and said he believes the space will self-regulate over time.

“There are some dark users and activities, but it’s early days, there’s a lot of young startups,” he said “It feels very much like the Internet in the early nineties.”

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Dominic Powell writes about the retail industry for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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