Slow and steady is path to crypto riches says YouTube star

When Nicholas Merten saw a video explaining Bitcoin in November 2011, he brushed it off, later lamenting that “I unfortunately did not do the right thing.” It’s hard to blame him, after all, he was only 13. 

Now 23, he runs DataDash, a YouTube channel with over 470,000 subscribers, making it among the largest focused on the cryptocurrency industry. There, he shares tips about trading and makes thoughtful, balanced, and interesting commentary on various relevant topics along with occasional speculation. What is notable about his channel is that it is almost entirely absent of hype, preferring calculated and tempered analysis. 

Merten is also the CEO of Digifox, a DeFi startup that aims to act as a one-stop shop for new cryptocurrency investors, soon allowing them to automatically deposit portions of their paychecks into crypto by way of dollar-cost averaging.

Drop-out entrepreneur

Merten got started with investing at 13, though “even before that I was doing research,” he adds, leaving one to wonder whether his first words were stock tickers. He was quickly bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and by 17 he was experimenting with a clothing company of his own making, and separately “tried to make relaxation beverages” by formulating recipes with a partner company.

“It was a nice head start to understand a lot of the emotional nature of markets and market cycles.”

It was due to this “intimate interest” in entrepreneurship that Merten, who grew up in Virginia, chose to study business administration and finance at Virginia Commonwealth University. He quickly dropped out, however, opting instead for alternative education through Praxis, which matches accepted students with six-month internships for on-the-job learning after a three-month training period. Often, these internships convert into full-time positions, and Merten “was really hungry to get my first job.”

That first job as a sales data management intern came at age 18, located “six blocks down from where Steve Jobs used to live” in San Francisco, Merten recalls. This was followed by six months as a content manager at ClickUp, a project management software company that is “like a billion dollar unicorn now,” he says, emphasizing the learning opportunities that come with working at such a high-growth firm.

While working at ClickUp, Merten created his YouTube channel called DataDash, which he originally envisioned as dealing with data science and data analytics. Soon, DataDash became a cryptocurrency channel after Merten made a few videos on the subject. “I got a couple hundred views, and I was like ‘you know what, I’ll keep going’,” he recalled.

With the 2017 bull market in full swing, Merten decided to leave his job at ClickUp in order to devote his full-time efforts towards his crypto craft. 

Don’t trade, DCA

In 2019, he expanded by founding Digifox, “which I originally started building back in 2013.” The startup consists of a smartphone wallet app that allows users to trade and earn interest on their cryptocurrency deposits via a plug-in to Celsius.

In the weeks ahead, Digifox will come out with a “get paid in crypto” feature, which will help people to receive a portion of their salary in cryptocurrency, received right in the app. Initially available in the USA and later the EU and UK, workers earning a salary will be able to simply request their human resources departments to direct a portion of their paychecks to a bank account owned by Digifox. ”Your employer doesn’t even have to know your earning crypto,” Merten clarifies, adding that the app charges a 1% flat fee.

“Buying crypto but in the US, I know that a lot of banks, they’ll freeze transactions on debit cards or bank accounts — we think of this as the ultimate crypto on-ramp.”

This method of regularly buying into a cryptocurrency is called dollar-cost averaging, or DCA, and is a common concept from the old world of traditional investing. Merten says that many new investors ask him “if it is a good time to buy, price-wise,” to which he recommends DCA as a way to spread out risk. 

Why should you #GetPaidinCrypto?