"Inspired to Invest" Podcast

Can You REALLY Make Money With Crypto Currency?

• Serena Holmes

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💸 Can You Really Build Wealth with Crypto & Network Marketing? | 
       Wealth Wednesdays ft. Vlad Bulban

🔥 In this week’s Wealth Wednesdays, we’re sitting down with Vlad Bulban — a powerhouse in the world of crypto trading and a top leader in iGenius network marketing — to unpack the TRUTH about building wealth in the digital age.

👉 Whether you're crypto-curious or already knee-deep in charts and candlesticks, this episode is your chance to learn:
✅ How Vlad got started in trading & scaled through iGenius
✅ The systems and strategies he uses to grow wealth through crypto
✅ What most people get WRONG about network marketing
✅ How to spot real opportunities vs. hype
✅ Why mindset matters more than ever in this game

✨ Get ready for an unfiltered, honest, and seriously inspiring conversation that blends financial strategy, entrepreneurial grit, and a look behind the scenes of the iGenius world.

🎯 Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
03:15 – Vlad’s journey into crypto & iGenius
12:40 – How network marketing actually works
20:55 – Crypto trading tools & tips
32:10 – Common mistakes new traders make
41:00 – Why community & mentorship matter
49:20 – Vlad’s top advice for building multiple income streams
57:05 – Rapid fire Q&A 💥

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Have you ever tried crypto trading or network marketing? What's your biggest question or challenge? Let’s chat in the comments👇

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Speaker 1:

Thank you, hey everybody. Hey everybody, welcome to Wealth Wednesdays. A new webinar series launched in January of this year, hosted by Inspired to Invest, to discuss all things related to abundance, prosperity and wealth. Today, I've got Vlad Bolbin joining me from iGenius to talk about everything related to crypto investing. He's got a background in civil engineering and he's worked in the field for five years. In 2020, he started his network marketing online business with a financial education company that teaches people how to make, manage and save more money. Over the last five years, he's used his business to help thousands of people leverage the financial markets to start making money, making their money work for them, instead of only working for their money and trading their time for money.

Speaker 1:

We'll be going through some questions for the first half of the webinar and then opening it up, if there's any guests, for the second half, but before we get started, I just want to read a very brief disclaimer. The views represented on the webinar are for general information only and don't constitute investment or other professional advice or an offering of securities. The hosts and guests featured on Inspire to Invest in this webinar make no representations as to the performance of any particular investment. Should you decide to make an investment, you're completely responsible for conducting your own review and analysis. It's recommended that you obtain independent legal accounting and tax advice from licensed professionals before making any investment. So, with that being said, how are you today, vlad?

Speaker 2:

Exceptional. How are you, Serena? Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1:

I'm doing great, thank you. So obviously I've had the chance to get to know you a little bit through the Wealth Club and I have sit on a couple of your presentations, and I think crypto is just such an interesting space. It's something that I think you know feels elusive for anyone that's outside of it. So maybe you can just kind of take a step back and you can share a little bit more about how you discovered this industry, because you have made some big strides, especially in the last couple years, so take us back to where that all began.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I find that there's two types of people in this world, and there's the people that believe in cryptocurrency and there's people that don't believe in cryptocurrency yet and, you know, for the first 24 years of my life, I was the person that didn't believe in a cryptocurrency. Uh, heard about it in high school from some some, uh, some of the nerdier people in the class who are probably now retired and driving lamborghinis. But, uh, fast forward. You know, from when cryptocurrency came about in 2009 up until 2020, I first got involved. I got my feet wet in the crypto space and the financial markets in general. I came across a platform that kind of found me at the right place, right time, during COVID, when, you know, I learned a lot of truths about the world that exposed themselves to me, and I learned that you know making, you know trading my hours for dollars wasn't going to get me far and I had to find another way, and figuring out how to make a trade my dollars for dollars opened up.

Speaker 1:

When you say the truth, I just don't want to miss the moment. Can you explain exactly what kind of truth that would be? I just find it really an interesting way that you just explained it. Like what?

Speaker 2:

yeah, so okay. So let's put it this way my whole life I was, I was working towards, since I could remember I I was building buildings out of Lego and putting puzzles together that are a thousand pieces large when I was like five years old. So I always had this mind that I wanted to build things and become this big engineer, or save the world in that sense. But I did the whole thing that the society teaches us, meaning you go to school, you get the good grades, you get a good job and then you retire after four years or so. And I don't know what kind of dream I had in my head, but over time that dream started to diminish and when I finally got out of school and my boss put me in a cubicle and he said you know, you do a good job in here for 20 years. I'll put you in that bigger office for 20 years and you have a window there, I, you know.

Speaker 2:

That dream quickly turned into something else and it was kind of like I felt like I had been lied to or Santa wasn't real, Something. Something didn't make sense to me, uh, at that point, because I was getting paid for my engineering job that I thought was going to pay me. Well, uh, could barely afford to live. We live in an expensive city. Uh, couldn't qualify for a mortgage. Uh, then, uh, my dad lost his job and he was my role model that taught me how to work hard his whole life, and he's the one that taught me how to save, save, save. Put your money in a bank, make 1% a year. So, again, a lot of these truths that I thought were true about the world didn't turn out to be so kind of in a very short period of time, in 2020.

Speaker 1:

no-transcript.

Speaker 2:

Right. So let's step back to 2020 and the culmination of all my life experiences, to a matter of a few weeks, in March 2020, during the COVID you know the onset of COVID when a lot of these truths came to light and my dad lost a job in the same month that I couldn't get a mortgage. In the same month that you know, I started seeing how the government was treating their people and for the first time, I realized that, you know, I had my suspicions that the government wasn't our best friends and they didn't want us to become wealthy and live in abundance and pay less taxes and all this. But it really came to light when I saw them abuse their power and leverage they had on society in 2020 during the COVID crisis, on society in 2020, during the COVID crisis. And I guess my mindset that I had for the first 24 years of my life before this, this aha moment, was that I guess we can say that I had an indoctrinated mindset from this, from what we can call the system, the society, the matrix that money doesn't grow on trees, average people go to jail. And it was a, it was a conditioning set, you know, program set of beliefs that I had that I had to reprogram and his question was what kind of mindset shift I had to make.

Speaker 2:

Well, I just had to reprogram.

Speaker 2:

You know the neurons in my brain and then different neural pathways, and say, listen, you know the neurons in in my brain and then different neural pathways and say, listen, everything that I was taught for the first 24 years of my life was taught to me by somebody else, and I wasn't born like this.

Speaker 2:

This was all programmed. So I can essentially reprogram my software to where I want, you know, to what I want, and I upgrade my, my software to live the life that I want, because the first 24 years of my life was taught to me by, in majority, by people whose lives I didn't want to live. You know, with all due respect to my teachers, who were struggling themselves, making 50, 60 grand a year, but they were teaching me for eight hours a day, and my parents, who I love and respect but are still working very, very hard in a modern society with their traditional beliefs, so it was hard for them to figure it out too. And again, this programming, in large part by people whose lives I didn't want to relive. I had to program and reprogram myself.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, I had a mentor that talks a lot about that as well, and he talks about some of the same things that you're talking about when it comes to the narrative and the things you know when you come from a family that's maybe like on the lower end of middle class or something like that, and he said something that I thought was really profound, just talking about how money is like a magnifier.

Speaker 1:

So basically, if you're wealthy, like if you're naturally giving and helpful and resourceful, like you'll be like that with other people when you have more money, but if you're not really like, unable, like it will magnify all of those different things, and that can be maybe where some people with money get that bad rap because it does amplify all of those qualities in them and you know, money just makes it that much worse. But I find that really interesting. Now, when you look at things like limiting beliefs, like I think it is an interesting concept because, again, a lot of people just don't understand the fundamentals when it comes to crypto, maybe right. So it's just lack of education, lack of experience. It's holding people back. When you think about wealth in general, what are some of those challenges that you see that are kind of holding people back from making that big move and, like you know, how have you seen people overcome them once they are educated?

Speaker 2:

Right. So it's very easy to say that money is a mindset, but at the end of the day it's. It sounds like a cliche because it's true, and I'm not going to discredit those that are that come from, you know, lower income housing and they make it to to the top, uh, but you know, at the end of the day, the cards that you're dealt with in life are the cards you're dealt with in life and you can't reshuffle the deck and ask the dealer to give you a new hand. You have to play the best uh hand. You know, uh, you have to play your hand that you're dealt with in the best way possible. Every single move on on your chessboard of life has to be the best, has to optimize for your life. So at the end of the day, it is a mindset, because that's all you got at the end of the day.

Speaker 2:

And a lot of limiting beliefs again stem from the programming that we've had in our lives and again, like you mentioned, kind of what we focus on grows, right, magnifies. And if you were to ask, okay, elon musk, do you think making money is hard, mr musk, he'd probably tell you well, how much money are we talking about? A billion, yeah, billions. Not that easy, but if you're talking thousands of dollars with elon Musk, I'm sure he'll tell you it isn't hard for him to make, and that's because his philosophy and his paradigm on the concept of money and making money is different than the average person. Is all we got at the end of the day, because there's somebody that may have had it worse than us, but still did it better than us anyways. So we can't fret about the cards we're dealt with in life.

Speaker 2:

We can only shift our paradigm and act accordingly.

Speaker 1:

Now, when it comes to just crypto, with the basics, I found it really interesting at the event back in November where you walk through some of the history and all the details around currencies. Can you go into a little bit of detail for someone that just really doesn't have a basic understanding of crypto and what those fundamentals look like and why you see so much potential in it going forward? Because I think it's a construct that some people really can't wrap their heads around and it's kind of like there's a currency aspect to it and then there's a trading aspect to it. You know, I think for a lot of people they just feel like it's not real, right? So, and even what the difference is between, maybe, crypto and blockchain you know what I mean? Or the ETFs or EFTs am I saying this wrong? Yeah, so like it feels like you're kind of trading these like video game avatars or something, right?

Speaker 2:

so maybe you can just explain the differences between them, just for anyone that doesn't have a basic understanding yeah, like, like I feel for, for people that don't understand how this, something like this, is real and how you know, like how it can make you so much money or lose you so much money, I can understand that because people again, people are living for decades touching, feeling and smelling their money right, their so-called money. Yeah, and the concept of cryptocurrency is Bitcoin has been around for decades. The first cryptocurrency, technically, was Bitcoin. That was invented in 2009. And it was somewhat of a retaliation to all the government antics that were happening up until that point. We remember the 2008 financial crisis and lo and behold, the retaliation from an anonymous creator of Bitcoin called Satoshi Nakamoto that's what he calls himself. He created this digital currency that he called Bitcoin with this blockchain technology that was essentially a public database where anybody can see transactions, anybody can use, anybody can use and it's verified by everybody else on the blockchain, which created sort of decentralized currency, which was vastly opposed to what was, at the time, only centralized currencies that were issued by these big banks and institutions and leaders of the world. Right? So, as a sort of retaliation against the free world, what people would call the free world. So, as a sort of retaliation against the free world, what people would call the free world.

Speaker 2:

Bitcoin gained a lot of notoriety and a lot of popularity off the bat. You know it started trading in the market in early 2009 under a penny. There's a story about somebody buying two pizzas with Bitcoin that are now worth like millions of dollars. That happened in 2010. But since then, since 2009, bitcoin's been the fastest growing asset class and it's called an asset class in the world now, with an average from 2009 of over 100% a year.

Speaker 2:

So, on average, you can extrapolate it. You'd be doubling your money every year. Now, of course, you can extrapolate it. You'd be doubling your money every year. Now, of course, when I say an average, some newer cryptocurrencies that are developed by individuals and others that are trying to. I guess and I'm going to be optimistic they're trying to help the cryptocurrency world because Bitcoin may be sort of a, let's say, outdated technology to some of their standards and they're creating faster blockchains and cheaper blockchains and more scalable blockchains that are being adopted worldwide. But the reason why Bitcoin itself has remained such a strong and outperforming asset class is because of a few things. Compared to other cryptocurrencies and compared to fiat money in general, one being its fixed supply.

Speaker 2:

This is a huge fundamental value for Bitcoin, the way that Bitcoin was invented. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin that can ever be circulating in supply at once once.

Speaker 1:

right now, there's currently about 19 million so it's not like printing or when you hear about the government printing money and how that inflation and stuff like that right exactly so.

Speaker 2:

so the reason why bitcoin goes up in value, people like want to know. Well, it's not that bitcoin is that like. It's like somebody asking well, how did this house go from 500K to 3 million? We didn't add a room to it, we didn't put another story on the bungalow. It's the fact that the base currency is devaluing. So, compared to that dollar, the house is more expensive.

Speaker 2:

Compared to the dollar, bitcoin is more expensive because they're printing cash faster than they're printing land and homes. They're printing cash faster than they're printing Bitcoin, which is what's causing the dollar to weaken versus these assets. And Bitcoin is so fixed in supply at $21 million and it's amongst its other fundamental advantages that literally just as a store of value compared to the dollar, it's such a crazy inflation hedge. But again, if you're to search up the US national debt, for example, and you see how much money they owe and how much money they're printing to pay off that debt, yeah, saving your money will put you in a tough position. So you've got to find ways to beat inflation. Really, bitcoin is a big way that people are doing it.

Speaker 1:

Now, can you talk about some of the biggest mistakes that you're seeing with people that are trying to build wealth through crypto, and I'm sure part of that is just you know there could be volatility right, just like the stock market, but can you talk about, maybe, how that could be similar but also different, and what kind of things that people need to watch out for?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So you know, with any emerging market there's opportunity for good and for evil, right? Nobody wants to get rich slow, but getting rich quick comes with its own inherent risks, right? I like to tell people that are getting into the crypto space that like to tell people that are getting into the crypto space that you want to understand how the markets work more so than you want to just get lucky and get rich. Uh, because you might like people, I've seen people get lucky once, but it's very hard to get lucky more than once. You know your, your odds of getting lucky once are very slim. Your odds of getting lucky once are very slim. Your odds of getting lucky twice are almost impossible. So to avoid, you know, disappointment, it's almost inevitable in the crypto space. But you have to pay your tuition by learning how markets work. You have to understand the fundamentals, the technicals, you have to understand market psychology. You have to understand your risk management, to understand, uh, your risk management your your own personal risk tolerance, your own personal financial situation.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot to learn first and and think if you're thinking of, like you're building a building, okay, you want to build a deeper and wider foundation so that the building can go as high as possible above grade. But a lot of people are getting into the crypto and the financial markets without trying to build a foundation. They're just trying to build on soil, dirt, and what happens is, you know you're building, collapses and it leans over and, uh, catastrophe, right. And then they got to rebuild it and sometimes they don't rebuild the right way again. So yeah, again, it's about learning the fundamentals and really understanding how the markets work in a constructive fashion. That's the best approach at it.

Speaker 2:

One of my friends who's in med school he's been in school now post-secondary school for seven years and still not working full-time as a doctor and he's like I got into crypto seven years ago and I've made so much money and I haven't made a single dollar as a doctor yet. So it's very weird for a lot of people to fathom right as a doctor yet. So it's very it's very weird for a lot of people to fathom right. But again, you know, you learn when I compare it to med school, it doesn't take 10 years to understand how these markets work and actually start creating some sort of a return from them which is very, very lucrative.

Speaker 1:

Now you're talking about educating yourself, so I understand that you're with iGenius, so can you talk about that platform and how it is, you know, a powerful vehicle for people that do want to learn this space?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So iGenius is what I attribute my knowledge of the financial markets to. It's a financial education platform and it's sort of in the online e-learning space. It's a platform that has hired over 30 different experts in the financial markets between the forex market, crypto market, stock market. These experts are essentially paid by membership subscribers that pay a monthly fee, and these experts essentially go on live sessions, pre--recorded sessions with the members through the online platform. They deliver trade ideas in real time.

Speaker 2:

So, if you think about a brand new person that's walking in to a buffet, they have all these different things they can choose from. They can kind of say, okay, I want to try this, I want to try this, I like this, I don't like this, and they eventually learn by leveraging experts in the markets, which is a really cool way of doing it, and this is a mindset shift that I had early on was like if I can pay for access to this information that can expedite my success, why not? I find a lot of the more successful, the more affluent friends I have in my life. They pay to save time and to get ahead, whereas a lot of others would say, oh no, it's okay, I'll watch a YouTube video and learn how this works, and then they just pay in time and money anyways because of the mistakes that they're going to make through the free resources that everybody gets access to right.

Speaker 1:

And when you talk about mistakes, can you talk about a time that you might've made a serious misstep and how you came back from something like that? Like, were you ever in a situation where you lost like half your portfolio or all of it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'll talk about this one time. So in March 2020, I got involved in iGenius, where I started paying experts to actually show me how the hell this stuff works. Actually, today's March 26th I got involved in iGenius March 26th 2020.

Speaker 2:

So exactly five years ago today, but about two weeks before that, in 2020, the market started to fall, crash because of COVID and I heard all like I was working my old engineering job at the time and I was hearing all this fuss about the markets being cheap and they're crashing and there's a lot of buying opportunities, but I've never I was the first one in my family to ever buy a stock Right Never knew, understood how this investing stuff worked.

Speaker 2:

But I had a lot of money saved up in my TFSA that was making me a percent a year, even though I had an intuition that the bank was a business and they were making money with my money but giving me back 1% a year. But besides the point big mistake I made. But besides the point big mistake I made, okay, this was, I guess mid-March was when stocks started to fall and I had these people around me in my office or friends that were telling me about these stocks that were on sale and, without doing any sort of research or any sort of analysis or any sort of like risk management, any sort of in-depth analysis, I just took my TFSA and I bought a bunch of stocks with them all at once and I can remember I bought Air Canada stock and let's say, for example I can't remember the exact number- but it was crashing Right before the travel bans.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, right before the travel bans, so, so everyone's telling me it's on sale. I think it was like at like 20 bucks and it dropped like 10. So well, let's say arbitrary, arbitrarily, I put like 10, 10 000 in air canada. The next day I wake up it was at nine grand and so it dipped another 10.

Speaker 2:

And for somebody that's never invested in money before, who's only been putting money in a bank every day and they don't see the volatility, they're not used to it, I started freaking the hell out and I was like, hey, like yeah, I don't like this, I want my money out. What I did was I sold a lot of it at a loss. A lot of it at a loss, uh. But I kept a little bit because I'm like, okay, I can afford to stay in a little bit because I have people telling me that, hey, like you know, it might recover. Uh, it's not all over yet, uh. But again, somebody who had no idea how these markets work and operate and somebody that was completely over leveraging my, my, uh, my capital. I got scared of the market because the next day it dropped even more, and then I sold the rest of it at a loss, and that was Air Canada and a bunch of other stocks.

Speaker 2:

So, I didn't understand what I was getting myself into and I kind of just threw my money at the market and hoping for the best. Hoping for the best, About two weeks later, around the same time, I saw a lady who was marketing the IGN's platform online and she was so. I asked her about it and she was telling me how. You know, these experts showcase their analysis and their ideas and they share them with us. I thought that was a cool concept because I'm like, okay, if I'm going to learn how to fly a plane, I'm probably going to learn from a pilot or you know somebody who's qualified to train me, not just read a manual. And on my first flight, right while I'm flying the plane. So that's the I guess that's. The mistake I made was was getting into something without the knowledge of it. But that's so. I can understand why people make that mistake the first time.

Speaker 1:

But again, yeah, I think it's a combination of like maybe not being diversified enough, and I mean no one could anticipate the impact of COVID and what was really coming and like all the things that happened afterwards. Right, like it's something we heard about overseas, but you know, just once it touched down on St Paddy's Day and everything closed down, nobody could have ever expected that. Right, I had a similar situation to that where I was working with a mining client out of Vancouver and I'd never bought any stocks either, but I ended up buying stocks with them with preferred shares, and I think I put in 5,000 and if I sold it a week later I would have made $3,000. But then 2008 happened, so it dropped to like $500. And then I think I just left it in for a while. It went up to maybe $1,500 and essentially just finally cashed out over a period of time.

Speaker 1:

But it just was something that you know. It wasn't a complete loss, but I obviously lost. I didn't make anything on it, so I can appreciate where you're coming from. Now, on the flip side, you had told me that you were kind of getting into network marketing so that you could make, you know, $500, $1,000 a month. Can you talk about where that started to where you have it today and maybe talk about a calculated risk that has really significantly paid off for you, whether that comes down to trading or, if you want to reflect it, with working with iGenius in that capacity.

Speaker 2:

Right. So network marketing how to describe network marketing? Essentially, it's a philosophy of word of mouth, referral marketing, that people do every day, naturally already. But the network marketing profession is where people do it and get paid for it. So I was fortunate enough to get involved in iGenius, not knowing that the business model was a network marketing business model. So the way the company had generated revenue was through their customers, who became affiliates of the platform, referring other members to the platform. No traditional advertising, no TV ads, no radio ads, no billboards, just word of mouth, referral marketing. That's what the network marketing philosophy is.

Speaker 2:

And so when I got involved in iGenius, I got involved as a customer. Only I wanted to make money under the table. I wanted to hide it from the CRA, I wanted to hide it from everybody that thought I was going to come steal it. And part of the reason was I had a scarcity mentality about money, and a lot of people that I still talk to this day they remind me of that mentality I had, because they're like if you found a way to make money, why are you telling people about it? And now I look back I'm like that's such a weird mindset to have, like why wouldn't you want to spread abundance with the world, like I'm so grateful for for, for you know, life itself, uh, and I'm grateful for the finding the way to make money? For me, not to share it, uh, would be, yeah, not good.

Speaker 2:

Put it that way Not good Because if the lady that was marketing the platform in March 2020 wasn't marketing it, I don't know where I'd be without this paradigm shift In your cubicle in iGenes as a customer and I found out quickly that I can essentially waive my monthly fee let's put it that way arbitrarily by referring a few friends to the platform, and I knew off the bat a few friends that needed this opportunity to find a way to make money on their phones, because my friends spent 10 hours a day on their phones anyways for free. So, you know, I got a few of my friends involved and naturally I realized that I was pretty good at referring people to products that I already used. I was doing it for my whole life, right, and I found the concept of doing it and getting paid for it interesting because I could take that money that I was getting paid and reinvesting into the markets. I just blown a lot of money buying Air Canada stock and selling it low.

Speaker 2:

I'm like this is a cool business model because it takes the two quadrants from Robert Kiyosaki's book Poor Dad, the investor and the business owner and it takes you away from that employee mindset because you can grow a cash flowing business business through network marketing and you can reinvest that capital as an investor into the markets and you have two of the quadrants working for you where you're building up time, financial and location freedom eventually for yourself, detaching yourself from that employee hours for dollars, uh trade. So, yeah, you know, five years later, uh, after getting involved in iGenius, uh been able to make, um, yeah, I replaced. I was able to replace my engineering salary about two years into into the journey and journey and it's been, it's been a wild ride, very, very rewarding. Not easy, but rewarding for sure.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you can go back and talk to your younger self, that's been like a big thing recently. I feel like on TikTok had coffee with my younger self. What would you tell yourself in terms of advice when it comes to things like money mindset and investing?

Speaker 2:

so my younger self. I tell people, like you know, when people ask me at an older age, for example, if I have somebody in their 50s or 60s, then they're just telling me, like my around my dad's age. They're like, yeah, I just don't understand how this crypto stuff works, and they just it's they. They, you know I can tell that they're so, yeah, I just don't understand how this crypto stuff works, and they just it's they. They, you know I can tell that they're so tied up with their lives now and they have so much responsibility and that they're they can't afford to put their you know retirement pensions on on, uh, cryptocurrency. They just can't. They don't have that risk that, that risk tolerance that somebody, for example, is 18 years old, who has all the risks in the world to take and learn about, to endure.

Speaker 2:

So what I would tell myself, as that kid in high school who didn't listen to the nerds that were buying Bitcoin at 10 cents, is take the risks, don't be afraid to take the risks, especially early on, because you have a lot of time to recover early on. You don't have a family, you don't have kids, you don't have bills, you don't have a mortgage. You don't be afraid to take the risks, especially early on, because you have a lot of time to recover early on. You don't have a family, you don't have kids, you don't have bills, you don't have a mortgage, you don't have this, you don't have that. You just have a lot of time and you have a lot of opportunity to make mistakes and fail forward, which is the best way to learn from.

Speaker 2:

If I didn't buy those Air Canada, can you know? I look back and I say, if I didn't buy those that air canada stock and lose money on it, I would have never trusted a platform to teach me how to do this thing correctly yeah, right, but it's not the necessity for the value in it, right like because you tried to do it on your own and it didn't go the way that you anticipated.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, yeah, so exactly I? I don't think. Yeah, so exactly, I don't think. You know, starting in the school system, I was programmed to that mistakes were bad and you could fail your course and redo the course and you know again in school is very, very scary. That's why you see and I have a lot of friends personally, especially in entrepreneurship, that are not necessarily your straight A students, but they have straight A students working for them in their businesses, right, it's funny how that works, because they're able to take the risk and the people that weren't taking the risk somehow end up working for the people that did.

Speaker 1:

And it can also be some of the things that you're exposed to. Right Like, I feel like I didn't really hear a lot about crypto or Bitcoin until even just a couple of years ago, right? So can you sometimes be just that one person that you meet that makes a passing comment about something, or even now it's different, because with social media and you know these different platforms, it's a lot easier to figure those things out. But sometimes it could just be as simple as that. Now, in terms of things like short-term gains with long-term wealth building strategies, how do you find that balance? Because obviously you've been doing this for a while, but do you have a strategy that you keep in mind to kind of stay on budget? Or like, how do you put on on your trading and stuff like that?

Speaker 2:

right. So cryptocurrency investing in a nutshell up until now, historically, cryptocurrency has been working on four-year market cycles where you have essentially three years where the market's moving up and one year where everything goes uh, goes to hell, uh. But that market resets and you have four-year cycles and every time your market peaks out, it peaks out higher than it did in the previous four-year cycle and and and vice versa, when it crashes, it doesn't crash to where it crashed, to the cycle before, and I'm referring to the major cryptocurrency assets Bitcoin, ethereum and all that you're asking about long-term and short-term. So my cryptocurrency investing philosophy to date is essentially playing that market cycle. Now, of course, these market cycles are changing now with all this institutional money and all the pro-crypto institutions that are, I guess, taking over this space now. But we still see a lot of volatility and I'm still, to this day, playing the cycles where I bought low during the bear market and I kind of dollar cost average, where you can't time the very bottom of the market but you can accumulate when prices are low after they've crashed 70, 80%, and then you can take profits in a bull market where prices are appreciating and you won't time the very top of the roller coaster, but you'll be okay if you get off somewhere near the top and you've tripled your money. Five extra money, in some cases, seven to 10 extra money. So that's my philosophy in crypto is basically looking at in a four-year span, accumulating for the first half and then taking profits in the second half. That's, in a nutshell, crypto investing.

Speaker 2:

But there are day traders that trade crypto with leverage and with platforms that allow for futures trading. It's kind of like options trading crypto, where you can bet on the market going long or short with leverage, very fast, based in and out trading. Some people do that with crypto. It's very risky, in my opinion, because the market can get manipulated very easily. People do short term like that. Some people are buying Bitcoin. These are the extremists. These are ones that buy Bitcoin and never sell it. Literally, they're called Bitcoin maximalists. I don't know if you've heard of Michael Saylor, who's the head of a company called MicroStrategy that's now renamed Strategy, but he's just using debt to buy bitcoin and it's worked off very, very well for him, and his plan is not even to sell the bitcoin, it's just holding it.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, yeah, someone was telling me that about um, you know, not to have like an resp for your kids, but to buy them a bitcoin when they're young so that they get older, like that could be something. Um, now, in terms of looking forward, would you say that you have any intention of diversifying into real estate or stocks or like other asset classes, or do you intend to just stay in this space?

Speaker 2:

No for sure. As much as I love my cryptocurrency, I know I can't live in my mom's basement with with a bitcoin and, uh, you know, sleep with it with it under my pillow. Uh, you have to understand a couple things. Because cryptocurrency is such a volatile asset class, uh, there still needs to be some sort of backbone, uh, in your, in your investment thesis, and I find real estate to be a very viable backbone in your investment thesis. And I find real estate to be a very viable backbone in that sense.

Speaker 2:

I signed on my first pre-construction condo in fall 2020. And a lot of that confidence came from my ingenious business and my investments that I started earlier that year, finally closing on that condo five years later. Now I got my firm occupancy date in August 2025. So it took five years to build. But what I really like about real estate is that it's God's investment right. It's land that cannot be printed. It's a proven strategy that has created the most millionaires, uh, that history has ever seen, and you know it's it's it's. It's very useful. Again, it's it's uh, there's so many wealth building strategies when it comes to to real estate. It's crazy. I just can't understand why, how people can't fathom, if you buy property in a in a place where the economy has historically been good yeah and you just, you just park your cash there, right, like you're gonna be good long term.

Speaker 2:

You're gonna be good if there there's uh very few places in the world uh where you know that that hasn't panned out for you in that sense because in in uh every, every fiat currency to date has died eventually. So if you're going to keep, like if you have the option to keep your money in in canadian dollars or buy a property in the GTA, for example, long-term, in 20 years, right, you're probably going to be better off parking your money in an asset that's going to make you more money than your Canadian dollar is going to make you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Right, I also earlier this, I guess February my mom and I purchased a studio in dubai too. So very. It's crazy how cheap they are. They're still, even though it's a booming market. All the investors are throwing their money there. We were able to get a studio for 200 000 canadian dollars. So again, same philosophy people are throwing their money there from all over the world. And where are we going to be better off having that $200,000 in Canadian in 10 years? Or are we better off putting that $200,000 Canadian into a property in Dubai for 10 years? Where are we going to be better off in 10 years? So we're thinking back, right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, obviously, just from talking to as many real estate investors as I do, a lot of them study the demographics and where populations are headed and stuff like that. Right, and I think that's like why Texas is so big right now, like it just seems like it's an area where everybody is moving to and it's got the highest concentration of rental trucks that are just one way in terms of like moving trucks and stuff like that. It's got the highest concentration of people just going one way because they intend to move there and they get relocated back and stuff like that. But in terms of anyone that wants to get in touch with you and learn more about iGenius because I think you've got such an interesting path and I think it's something that would pique the interest of a lot of people that could be tuning in now or later on so what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Speaker 2:

They can reach out to me at Vlad Baldwin on Instagram and I will respond to you. I don't gatekeep. I love recreating the first time that I found a way to make my money make money. I love recreating that feeling in other people. It gets me going every single day because I can see people's mindset paradigm shift happen in front of my eyes. That's a. It's a different way to save the world than I thought engineering would be when I was solving my boss problems more than my own back then. So yeah, that's amazing.

Speaker 1:

Well, I appreciate your time tonight. I'll make sure that I include that detail once this is loaded officially on YouTube for anyone that can't find you, of course, for anyone that is watching. We appreciate your time as well, and remember, when you invest in yourself, the sky's the limit. Thanks again.