South African-born Oxford University fellow Heloise Greeff, who is social trading platform eToro’s first female Elite Pro Popular Investor, says she first got into crypto in 2013 when she received $20 in $BTC for ordering pizza for a friend.

According to a report published in The Sunday Times on May 29, Greeff, who currently lives in Oxford, UK, told them:

“A friend owed me money and he asked to pay me back in bitcoin. I wasn’t a pure convert from the start, but I was happy to take a chance and accept the payment because the engineer in me understood what was going on with the blockchain. I could understand the long-term potential.“

The report went on to say:

“Having stored a small amount on a flash drive, Greeff, who moved to the UK from South Africa to complete a PhD in machine learning, began using bitcoin to split bills with a group of friends who were also overseas students to avoid paying currency conversion fees when they owed each other money. Her decision to keep that original $20 of bitcoin paid off. Today, it is worth more than $3,000.“

During an interview with “This Is Money” in January 2022, Greeff, who joined eToro in 2016, had this to say about crypto:

“Before the pandemic, my portfolio was almost exclusively tech and healthcare. In the last 20 months, it has diversified quite a bit more. The way I use crypto in my portfolio is as a hedge against volatility, it is quite uncorrelated and so the risk-adjusted return can be quite good.

“We have to start talking about this new asset class, because there is a lot of negative experience and media around it because it remains fairly unregulated in a lot of markets. I only use the stable coins, my largest crypto holdings are ethereum and bitcoin. I rarely go over 5 per cent exposure to crypto in the portfolio to [minimise] high volatility, which some of the alt coins can still be prone to.“

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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