National Post (National Edition)
FINANCIAL POST
The ballad of Anthony Di Iorio, a Canadian crypto-king in midlife with a plan for his next big idea.
ANTHONY REALLY IS A TEAM CANADA GUY. BRINGING HIS KIND OF THINKING INTO WHAT IS JUST TRADITIONALLY A CONCEPT CAR IS PART OF WHAT WE WANT TO ACHIEVE WITH THIS PROJECT, AND THAT IS TO DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY. — FLAVIO VOLPE
Anthony Di Iorio wears the same thing every day, call it his uniform: a white t-shirt, which he orders in bulk at $10 a pop, blue jeans and white sneakers. The outfit isn't a fashion statement; rather, it's a time-saving measure, since he tends to have a million thoughts reeling through his mind when he wakes up in the morning and the last thing he needs to worry about is figuring out what to wear.
So, a white t-shirt and jeans it is. As for those morning thoughts, numbered among them lately are being sure to visit regularly with his 70-year-old-plus parents, Lino and Lynne, pondering how to fix corporations that only care about the bottom line, occasionally fretting about his own personal safety and working on his “white paper,” which he plans to have peer reviewed.
The paper details Di Iorio's next big idea. It is something the 46-year-old is not ready to discuss quite yet, but he hints that the project to come is geared to altruistic ends, will be of benefit to Canada, tackle big and seemingly intractable problems and, perhaps, somewhere down the road, see him remembered for being something other than the thing he is most famous for today, especially among the crypto-currency crowd.
Di Iorio is one of the co-founders of Ethereum, a made-in-Canada, opensource cryptocurrency platform whose units, known as ether, are second only to bitcoin in terms of global popularity. He was also an early adopter of bitcoin, buying up coins back when they were trading for $9.73.
Five years ago, ether traded for a measly loonie. Today, the digital currency is hovering around US$1,700.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, rocketed past US$53,000 last week, achieving another vertiginous height in a notoriously volatile space that recently landed Di Iorio and fellow Canadians/Ethereum founders, Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, on a Crypto Rich List created by Traders of Crypto, an online information site.
The list pegged Di Iorio's net worth at US$750 million. In 2018, a Forbes article did him even better, referring to him as a billionaire, hence all his fretting about personal safety.
“The whole cryptocurrency space, the whole concept is that you are your own bank,” Di Iorio said from his 5,000-square-foot condominium with a closet full of t-shirts in Toronto's financial district. “When people know I've got crypto, it's a little more of a risk profile than traditional things, because the money is not in a bank.”
Bad guys take note: Di Iorio is not, was not, nor has he ever been a billionaire.
The bulk of his fortune, post-Ethereum, has gone into Decentral Inc., his blockchain technology startup, and developing Jaxx, a crypto-currency “wallet.” If
all goes according to plan, he hopes to sell the wallet and the blockchain business in about a year's time for … a billion dollars.
The hockey-loving kid from the suburbs, often hailed as a crypto-king, is planning to get out, not because he doesn't believe in digital currency, but because he is 46 and wants to focus on addressing the particulars of that white paper he is not quite ready to talk about yet.
“I am a technologist,” Di Iorio said. “But what scares me the most is technology.”
The world, he said, has some pretty profound problems: Fake news; anti-vaxxers; conspiracy mongers; monster social-media companies and search engines gobbling up personal data; algorithms pushing out ads tailored to the individual and nudging them to buy crap they don't really need; companies crowing about shareholder returns at the expense of ordinary people.
It is a big, daunting mess, and perhaps a relatively old crypto-guy can be part of the solution, at least that is what
he hopes.
“We need to shift peoples' focus towards creating positive impacts — towards helping their neighbours,” he said.
Di Iorio comes from a long line of problem solvers. His Italian grandparents didn't see a future in Italy, so they solved it by immigrating to Canada with pennies to their name and hacking out a good life in the construction industry. The second generation started a patio door company in 1978, growing it from eight employees to 120 employees.
Di Iorio's father, Lino, was that business's resident troubleshooter, working in product development, ironing out kinks. In his spare time, he built classical guitars and in 1994 he took up curling.
After falling all over the ice, Lino invented and patented a “slider” for curling shoes and later started BalancePlus, a curling equipment company, with Di Iorio's mom, and another partner, Scott Taylor.
“The Delux Curling Shoe”
is today regarded as the gold standard among elite-level curlers, including in Russia, where Lino has served as the national team coach.
“Our family, going back to the old country, we always had this thing about working for ourselves,” Lino said.
“We like to think of ourselves as problem solvers.”
Asked if he ever worries about his son, Lino launches into a story about hockey. Anthony was never the biggest kid, but he was always the one who emerged from the corners with the puck. After he was cut from a high school team because the coach judged him “too small,” he joined another team and was named its captain. He then went out and scored the championship-winning goal against the team that cut him — in double overtime — while shorthanded. Problem solved.
“I've never really worried about Anthony,” his father said. “He always played tough.”
Taking some knocks is just part of the game, and Di
Iorio bounced around, somewhat, after graduating from Ryerson University with a commerce degree in 1998.
He worked in marketing, and didn't really like it; he did some grunt work at the family business, but it wasn't really his thing; he started a geothermal drilling company with the help of his father, but it got strangled in red tape; and he bought a house near York University, carving it up into rental units, which was perfectly fine, if not exactly riveting.
Di Iorio also read a lot, and got hooked on the Austrian school of economics, a central tenet of which holds that a product's true value is only determined by its usefulness to the consumer.
He had always fooled around with computers, but he experienced an “ah-ha” moment in 2012 when he heard bitcoin mentioned on a podcast.
“I saw it as the next coming of the internet,” Di Iorio said.
Soon after, he founded the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup Group, and began hosting gatherings at a downtown office space. His parents organized the snacks.
The gatherings steadily grew in size, bringing smart people and other early bitcoin disciples together. They would talk about smart stuff, stuff Lino still doesn't quite “get,” although he knew his son well enough to park any doubts. The result would be Ethereum.
“My dad's an inventor, a creator,” Di Iorio said. “He was always asking why, and whether there was a better way to do things.”
Some of the things Di Iorio is involved in helping to tackle now that aren't top secret include executing on a zero-emissions car with his old high school buddy, Flavio Volpe.
Volpe is president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association (APMA), representing the majority of the independent Canadian auto-parts makers.
The two met 30 years ago at St. Michael's College School in Toronto.
“Everybody knew Anthony, not because he was the captain of the football team, but because he was a good guy and very well-liked,” he said.
The APMA is behind Project Arrow, a well-funded push to build a zero-emissions car using Canadian-made parts, technology and engineering knowhow. The concept vehicle is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2022, and it came up when Volpe and Di Iorio were talking, as old friends do.
Di Iorio, the non-car guy, started throwing out ideas that, to the car guy, made a lot of sense in terms of how to best showcase the Arrow virtually, while cyber-safeguarding its interior software and other assorted bits and bobs.
The macro-thinking behind the car is to hook Canadians on the idea, and maybe hook an entrepreneur on the idea of building it here, not simply as a oneoff project but potentially as Canada's car going forward, a Tesla north.
“Anthony really is a Team Canada guy,” said Volpe, who invited his friend to join the project. “Bringing his kind of thinking into what is just traditionally a concept car is part of what we want to achieve with this project, and that is to do things differently.”
Doing things differently, collaborating on gamechanging ideas, this is the crypto-king's bread and butter. It hasn't made Di Iorio a billionaire yet — and, for the record, he considers the current run on bitcoin as being “investor driven” — but money, digital or otherwise, is ultimately beside the point.
The world has bigger problems, and he has an inclination to try to do something about it, just as soon as he finishes that white paper.
“I've learned through my time that building up communities and bringing like-minded people together around certain common things is really how the ideas start flying,” he said.
Stay tuned.