The infamous ‘Pharma Bro’, aka Martin Shkreli who became popular for raising the price of the medicine Daraprim by over 5000%, has revealed that he used Uniswap while in prison.
“Uniswap is really cool. I started using Uniswap in prison,” Shkreli stated in a Twitter Spaces call hours after being released early from prison.
Shkreli, then the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals earned the moniker “Pharma Bro” after boosting the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750, a drug used by many AIDS and cancer patients.
Shkreli was convicted on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to conduct securities fraud in August 2017, both unconnected to his Daraprim price rises. He was sentenced to seven years in jail in March 2018.
He was released from jail early and was said to be staying at a halfway home after completing all of the programmes that permitted his sentence to be reduced.
He spoke to a group of crypto enthusiasts on the Twitter Spaces call about his views on the future of Bitcoin and DeFi.
Shkreli also talked about how DeFi could eventually replace the old financial system. He believes the sector would witness an increase in the number of financial goods that end up in DeFi.
“There are so many ways we can do things with DeFi. There should clearly be an Apple coin and a Tesla coin,” he further added.
Shkreli criticized the process of buying stocks in the US and said that DeFi could help. He noted “The idea that I can’t buy a Tesla share without going through this SEC apparatus and all these other steps is kinda nuts… there are people breaking the silo and trying to destroy it forever, I hope.”
During the discussion, Shkreli listed a few more crypto initiatives, some of which are relatively niche companies that are unknown outside of crypto circles. He discussed NFT projects and linked Ethereum Name Service domain names to AOL screen names.
At the time of Spaces call, Shkreli’s Twitter avatar was a Milady NFT. He tweeted it would be good to have the MartinShkreli ENS before joining the call. His Twitter account is currently suspended.
He also mentioned Algorand and Solana as two Layer 1 projects that could erode Bitcoin’s market dominance, saying that the top cryptocurrency’s rule could be eaten away over time.
Shkreli believes Ethereum will eventually overtake Bitcoin in market capitalization, a scenario known among Ethereum supporters as “the Flippening”.
Popular musician Sia aka Bianca de’ Medici also joined the conversation with Shkreli, saying that Web3 had transformed life over the previous couple of years, and that she believes it has the potential to eradicate world poverty in the future.
He also suggested Sia to look into Proof of Humanity, the Ethereum initiative that created the Universal Basic Income token. He revealed that Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, is involved in it.
However Vitalik Buterin was not impressed by the turn of events “How do we create a culture where it’s harder to set (or become) the topic of public conversation by doing something terrible and easier to do so by doing something great?” he tweeted.
