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Dave Portnoy, the outspoken founder of Barstool Sports, used his debut appearance at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2025 to train the conference spotlight XRP. Speaking on the Metro Toronto Convention Centre mainstage, Portnoy acknowledged that he bought the token for one reason only: fear of missing out.
Joined on-stage by media strategist Sam Ewan, Portnoy opened with light banter about Toronto pizza—“North of Brooklyn still is, I would say, my favorite,” he insisted, giving “shout-out Bill the Greek, who’s like my chaperone for Toronto”—before turning to the market that drew thousands to Consensus.
Pressed on whether the current cycle is dominated by so-called meme coins, Portnoy cut to the chase. “Even Bitcoin is, frankly, a memecoin,” he said. The remark set the tone for a discussion that oscillated between portfolio confessions and cultural critique.
When Ewan tried to pinpoint Portnoy’s boldest wager, the 47-year-old rattled off winners the way others recall birthdays: Axon stock at roughly $200 (now about $700, he noted), Michigan’s Rose Bowl triumph, and Scottie Scheffler capturing the Masters. Yet he called those victories “two different things” from the instant, couch-bound gratification of watching a line of green candles. “There’s something about it when you place a bet, you see Bitcoin go up, you see XRP go up, and you’re just sitting on your couch—‘I made that money not working.’ That’s a great feeling,” he admitted.
Why XRP, Not Bitcoin
Portnoy’s self-diagnosed FOMO emerged in sharper relief as the conversation turned to real estate. He recalled smashing his fist on a desk after being outbid on a Miami apartment by “a crypto bro” who “heard about Bitcoin when it was, I don’t know, eight bucks, seven bucks.” The episode, he said, crystallised the anxiety of missing an asymmetric trade: “I’ve slaved for twenty years and he just out-bid me.”
That same impulse, Portnoy confessed, now drives his position in XRP. “It’s what—two bucks forty cents or something like that? What if that’s the next Bitcoin?” he said, emphasising that his allocation reflects a speculative itch rather than a thesis about Ripple’s technology or tokenomics. “It’s FOMO. It’s not like I have some grand belief in it.”
In perhaps the panel’s most revealing anecdote, Portnoy traced his fraught history with Bitcoin to a chance encounter: “I bought Bitcoin the first time for around $10,000 … the Winklevoss twins were staying next door to me at a hotel and they came and explained what Bitcoin was. It was the dumbest explanation I’d ever heard, and I sold it all right there.”
The forfeited position—“about $2 million”—would have dwarfed every other win in his career, he conceded, underscoring the emotional swing between conviction and capitulation that defines many retail journeys through crypto’s boom-and-bust cycles.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.40.
