The First Ever True Military Cryptocurrency With Russ Davis and Navy SEALS
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
crypto, token, people, coin, projects, cryptocurrency, shiba, challenge coin, donating, group, veterans, unpacking, trending, charities, business, friends, Russ Davis
SPEAKERS
Russ Davis, Crypto Travels Michael
Michael 00:00
Welcome to the New To Crypto Podcast designed to guide you through the crypto landscape with pinpoint accuracy created for the new and intermediate crypto investor. Join your host Crypto Travels Michael as he takes you through the different facets of getting started and succeeding in your crypto journey. New To Crypto Podcast brings you new episodes daily Monday through Friday with surprise bonus episodes sometimes on the weekend. Let me ask you, Are you new to crypto and don’t know where to start? Are you more experienced but have questions? Then you’re in the right place. This podcast is designed for you coming at you from the training center in the lifestyle design studio. Here’s your host Crypto Travels Michael. Hey, welcome to today’s podcast. Today’s guest is a celebrity crypto consultant. He has been on CNN BUSINESS, Fox Business, CNBC, and Cheddar. Today we are going to be talking all about a project that he founded along with retired Navy SEALs, which benefits military families. It is called a challenge coin. And this is the first-ever true military cryptocurrency. Please welcome Mr. Russ Davis, to the show. Hey, man, it’s a pleasure to have you here.
01:25
Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Michael 01:27
Absolutely, man.
Russ Davis 01:28
Hey, before we dive into today’s interview, can you just share a little bit about yourself with our listeners around the world? Yeah. I always say this question. But, you know, I’ve got a background in finance and business marketing and mathematics. And that’s kind of the long story short because you know, this is all about crypto. That’s how I got into cryptocurrency. Just kind of looking at all these numbers thinking, you know, how can I make a lot of money for myself, my friends, my family with this new concept? And let you know, roll the dice. And, you know, let’s gamble a little bit and see what this cryptocurrency thing is all about. And so I started looking into it in 2015. And I knew absolutely nothing. And I started joining some groups online on WhatsApp, Facebook, Reddit, and everything. And then after a couple of years, I just decided to make my own groups kind of hand-selecting some of the people that I’ve met online, the ones that I would say I liked or I thought were smart, the ones that didn’t give newcomers a lot of bullshit for asking the dumb questions that I had just asked the year before. And so you know, one thing leads to another and here I am. It’s my full-time career, crypto consulting for a lot of different celebrities. And I still do friends and family and have my Facebook group and recipe trust. And on all the social media platforms either in recipe trust or in recipe trust crypto. And I’ve got a team of analysts and consultants and admins, the 12 other people that are with me just as important as myself. So it’s not even just a one-man show. It’s really just kind of blown out of proportion in a great way. And here I am and I get to be interviewed by you. So this is cool.
Michael 03:36
Awesome, man. Thanks for unpacking that for us. Hey, before we dive deep in deeper into the challenge coin, can you just share an overview with our listeners as to what is your project challenge coin and you know, just an overview?
Russ Davis 03:54
Yeah, a couple of years ago, I got to meet a guy named Kaj Larsen from SEAL team one. And we were sitting at the same table at this event and in Miami, and we started talking and we just kind of hit it off. You know, we had a lot of stuff in common. And he was very interested in cryptocurrency. And I was very interested in I had never met a Navy SEAL before. So this was cool. And we got to just start hanging out and then we were talking about, you know how my grandfather was in the military and, you know, friends, family members on a lot in the military, and I never really wanted to be, but I also wanted to help the cause and I saw a lot of room for just betterment of veterans. And when I and Kaj were talking it found out I found out that it was all pretty true that people are very just ill-compensated after they come back home. There are not as many opportunities as people really think and everyone can use, you know, a little bit of help. So how do we do this? How do we incorporate cryptocurrency and what started out as kind of just like a joke at lunch turned out to, you know, be something we were talking about all the time every other day? And we decided to actually go for it. And, you know, assemble a team of very smart individuals that were also ex-Navy SEALs.
And the tokenomics of the token are 4% of every buy, and every cell goes towards a military charity. So we now have a bank, like a pool of money, a wallet online, that has Ethereum in it, which we will donate to military charities in the form of that Aetherium, or challenge coin. And we’ve actually, in only a few months, since June 3, when we launched, have already been able to donate 10s of 1000s of dollars, we still have a nice bankroll, even with crypto being so down right now. And we’ve really exceeded expectations. It’s tough, to see that in such a down market, but we’re actually we’re heading in a really great direction. If we can do this. Now I’m really interested to see what happens when Aetherium gets back to the $4,000 mark, and everything and our money is stretched a lot further. So it’s just a really great program. It’s the first-ever true military cryptocurrency. And no one has ever tried it before, I think because you really do need, to get military personnel. You know, I wouldn’t have started this coin, this coin or token, whatever. Without them. And, you know, hearing their, their advice on where to give the money and what, what departments need it, what projects need it, this and that. And just learning about everything about life after being a Navy SEAL. It’s amazing. And we’re doing a great job. And I’m really looking forward to the future of challenges going
Michael 07:07
Fantastic, man. So I see that. I assume that you decided to release it on Ethereum ERC 20 token is that correct?
Russ Davis 07:17
Yeah, it’s, you know, cryptocurrency is so confusing to so many people. That’s the one that is just the most visible in the United States. And we, since I’ve been doing marketing for a lot of different token projects, in the last year and a half, we’ve noticed that we get a lot more traction, as opposed to going on like a Binance chain or any of the other networks. So it was just it was an easy choice to go. ERC 20.
Michael 07:45
Fantastic, fantastic. I wanted to ask you about, you know, I actually have retired military, my own family and actually have a friend, his son is a Navy SEAL. I’m a big, big fan of Navy Seals and SpecOps. Guys and I wanted to ask you about the recent donation to the Special Operations Warrior Transition fund, can you share with our listeners, you know, a little more about what that is, and who had benefits
Russ Davis 08:15
For the Warrior Transition Fund. I mean, we do a lot of all of the charities we’ve been donating to like force blue, and where transition fund is about transitioning this military personnel, all these veterans into the next stage of their life. And it’s very hard, because when you get to know what they actually do, I mean, they are, let’s say, you know, in Ukraine, they’re leading, huge you know, platoons or they’re leading tons of soldiers. Their purpose is, is in your face, like they have so much obligation, and then they come back here, and it’s a struggle, and I don’t blame them at all. They you know, they have this team, and then when you’re not on the team anymore, it’s like, what do you do for that next stage? So the foundations that we’ve been donating to was all about transitioning.
One of the ones that we just went to in New York City we went to one of the galleries that we had donated to learn more about force blue, and they deploy veterans underwater because you know, a lot of them were navy seals in the Navy, you know, they they have this the skill sets and what do we do with those we are repairing coral reefs, we are cleaning up trash, but more importantly creating a better ecosystem underwater because 75% Don’t quote me on that number or more of our planet is water. And we focus too much on land if you ask me when there’s so much unexplored and we’re trying to keep that clean for the next generation and thereafter. And what better people to deploy than people that are the best in the water in the world? And it gives them another better purpose. They teach young kids, and adults how to dive and you know, get in the water and make a difference. You know, so those are some of the things we’ve been working on recently.
Michael 10:25
Fantastic, man, I’m a big fan of the ocean. You know, I’ve spent many years in Hawaii, literally, right by the beach and Australia. Yeah. And actually, earlier this year, I interviewed the founders of an NFT project, which is all about saving the oceans, and even helping the coral, I’ll probably connect you with them or us. That’s pretty
Russ Davis 10:46
Cool. Yeah, we can I’m always looking for partnerships. You know, even since the beginning with just like tokens, I think that that’s what we need is a lot more partnerships. And so projects don’t have to do everything on their own and stop competing and start joining forces. So that’s a really, I would really appreciate that.
Michael 11:05
Absolutely, man. Hey, I wanted to also ask you about your experience with Shiba in the past and you know, the recent crypto bull run that we had, and you know, some of your background in crypto. I know you’re a humble guy, but you played a very interesting part in the run of Shiba, can you share with our listeners?
Russ Davis 11:25
Yeah, um, you know, as I said, I had been studying crypto since 2015. When I was an absolute noob. I knew nothing about it. But then, when the other business that I own, started running itself. And I could spend more time on everything I started getting into analyzing charts and white papers. And I was fascinated by the projects that had like nine or 10 zeros. It was like I was excited to just say I could spend 100 bucks and have a billion of something. And so I started looking up these far out projects that had 10 zeros. And after I mean, every day, I was on WhatsApp, we were trading information on what we thought would be big and this and that. And I never had anything that I was excited about. And then I found Shiva. And I looked into it so much. I brought it to a couple of my different groups. And I was like, Guys, Am I going crazy here? Or is this the most undervalued token I’ve ever seen? And so I gave it to a couple of different groups who did not know each other. So there was no like collusion with Okay, well, we’re just gonna agree with Russ. And every single group came back to me, they’re like, I think you’re onto something here. Now, obviously, it only been around since August 2020. I stumbled upon it in mid-February of 2021.
And it still had 10 zeros. But the charts were ie you can’t really rely on some charts on basically a coin that nobody even knew existed, the market cap was probably $3 million or something, it was really, really low. And I was looking at some of what they call wolf papers, which is what they call their white papers. And then I did some deep dives on what I could find on Roshi and tried Toshi, the guy who created the token, and I just kept coming back to the same conclusion, I am gonna regret not buying this. So I loaded up at that point you could get I mean, like the day one, we’re getting 16 billion coins for $100. And right now, if we were to do 16 billion, I mean, we’re in hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And this isn’t a market that’s 90% down. So all my friends were like, well, we believe in your research. So what’s a couple of 100 bucks, let’s just toss it, you know, toss it against the wall, see if it sticks. And so I created the Facebook group with one of my friends, Brad, who was also very enthusiastic about the token. And we started recruiting people. It’s just kind of like a fun thing. I know, we weren’t making money. It was a fun experiment. And people were more than willing to work for free on just kind of, you know, being around us hearing what we had to say our knowledge on cryptocurrency. And then we just said I will I said, Look, guys, let’s really make this let’s at least put the effort in. And let’s see if we can make this a really big like a global thing. And you got some laughs whatever. But I was like, this is simple. Nobody’s attacking Twitter. Nobody’s doing a Twitter raid. Nobody has any structure. So let’s do, let’s say 2 pm Every day, we had over 1000 people in the first few weeks that were tweeting at the same time. And then that group grew to 20,000 in a few weeks. And then we got approached by Roshi. She just contacted us he wants to be the official page on Facebook for Shiva. And that he was like the only stipulation is just to keep it about Shiva don’t talk about any other projects. And we’re like okay, cool. So we started During that we started doing just calculated like all but we ran out like a business with a lot of labor, just tweeting and posting on Instagram and posting on Facebook and spreading the word. And then within a couple of months, we had 50,000 people in our group, and we had no idea what happened. And that 10 zeros dropped to nine dropped to eight, and we’re like, holy shit, we just turned 100 bucks into $100,000.
Like, this is crazy. And, then people were really starting to believe. And like I said, you know, just kind of spiraled out of control was a great time in the market. There weren’t a lot of scams at that point. I know, it was only less than two years ago, but there really weren’t, the scams like they are today. So people were easier to believe in projects, and we use that to our benefit. And yeah, then as you know, the next thing you know, we’re the number one trending token on just every stock twits and everything. I mean, it was it happened so fast because we were working like round the clock that we didn’t even, like, have time to stop and think about what we had accomplished and what we had done. And, you know, that’s when people were like, wow, okay, well, now we’re just gonna, we’re gonna trust for us. And that’s when the whole rain recipe trusting started trending. At first, I didn’t like it. But then it was just, people just kept using it so much. I was like, I might as well embrace it. And now and, and so yeah, I mean, that’s pretty, that’s pretty much like a two-minute drill on really the start of what we did our participation in Shiba. And it is, you know, it’s gonna pretty much go down in history as one of the most successful quote-unquote meme coins that have ever existed. And hopefully, it keeps up some Yeah,
Michael 16:50
Yeah, I definitely remember. Thanks for unpacking that for us. I definitely remember that was running. I actually did not get in on that run, you know, but I was definitely watching it. I wanted to ask you if you could share with our listeners about your crypto consulting service, and maybe you know, some of the some of who you’ve worked with, and that kind of thing for our listeners around the world.
Russ Davis 17:15
Um, cool. So yeah, it’s, like I said, it started off just working with friends and family, and then got into the group thing. And, then I had just started the industry trust Facebook group, so I could talk about other projects. And then some, I mean, it so many, so many people have come to me, so I don’t remember like how, but when one thing led to another, they were like, I got this friend, you probably know him or her. And I’m like, okay, and it was like these celebrities that were wanting to know about crypto. And then I was doing pretty well for some of these people. I’m not gonna name names only because there’s a lot of stuff going on with celebrities and in crypto and I don’t want to name drop, in case they don’t want me to. But I’ve, I’ve consulted with a couple of billionaires.
A lot of athletes from UFC. Basketball, football, boxing, everything, you know, TV personalities, a I mean, you can check out my Instagram in recipe trust crypto, and you can see some pictures. So you know, there, you can get the names on some of them. But yeah, things like I said, spiraled out of control. And when the market was hot I was, I was doing pretty well at predicting what was going to happen next. And like I said, it’s not just me, I had I always bounce what I think off of some of my most trusted analysts and my groups. So we just became a quote-unquote, overnight success with a couple of different projects. And so after the whole Shiva thing, I had such a mass following that people were just salivating over my next picks. And just from sheer numbers, the next couple of picks almost replicated exactly what Shiva did if it wasn’t for, some inside sabotage from some shady devs we were on the same pace for $100 was worth over a million dollars that I get initially investment within a month was worth seven figures on three projects on Sheba on the one that’s in a lot of the news right now, and this one called Bezos Earth BZ OGE Earth was like the first real Metaverse project I got into, and I got to meet the devs there. It’s a great team from all over Dubai, Chicago, France, and Russia, I mean, they’re from everywhere. And I got to meet them when I was in Miami at one of the Bitcoin conferences. And you know, that’s a really cool project ahead of the game. And yeah, that’s really what jump-started, I guess Everything with just me saying I’m gonna do this full time, which is kind of a dream like I never thought I would be doing crypto full time. I mean, it really was an overnight thing. I was like, Holy crap, I can do this full-time. We’ve got this fan base and we’re making people money. People are happy. It’s great. So why not? I mean, I love cryptocurrency I want to educate people as much as I can.
Michael 20:22
Fantastic. I also wanted to say I really liked the new apparel line with Challenge Coin. I was actually looking at your merch, you know, my bowl and a few items. Yeah.
Russ Davis 20:34
Yeah, that was it was a joint effort. Myself and obviously the whole team. But Jeff, GM owns his own line of clothing called Suga life, su n g a life. And so with his expertise in the field, he was able to select the best fabrics, and I went over some of the designs with him. And it was not an easy project, we spent months and months and months, you know, refining everything to really what we wanted prototypes, this and that. And we’re really happy about how that whole line came out. And so, yeah, that’s very fresh. That’s within the last week. And we’re running a bunch of specials, some of them are for 20% off. And yeah, that the line is pretty extensive, from hats to tank tops, to shirts and hoodies, men’s and women’s. And that’d be great for holiday gifts as well. Or to like support veterans being it’s Veterans Day today. Still, we’re going to be donating proceeds to these military charities from the apparel line as well. So yeah, it’s, it’s evolving into a really cool ecosystem of between grocery trust and challenge coin. It’s really cool.
Michael 21:55
Yeah, I really, I really liked the line. And also, I wanted to get some clarification for our listeners on the back of some of your apparel. I love the phrase kills zeros for heroes, but we just want our listeners to understand really what the meaning of that is, there’s no, you know, there’s no killing going on. It’s more if you want to unpack that for them. The Kill zeros are heroes.
Russ Davis 22:17
Yeah. So that was one of the marketing tactics that we used. When I was running Shiba, I so what you never have you never take for granted that the people that you are trying to teach crypto to or math to know the answers. And what I found out was from every person that I told that if you drop a zero, like if your coin is worth point, 0001 and then you get it to go to point 00, once you drop a zero is actually 10 times your money. And people didn’t know that. And so when I put it in, you know, basic math terms, and I’m like, for every zero guy, it’s gonna be 10 times your money. So that we made that trend like crazy on Twitter. And then when I was thinking about the challenge coin thing, like just, you know, a catchy phrase, it came almost instantly killed zeros for heroes. So trending. So just easy. And it’s funny, and it makes sense. But no, we’re not killing anybody.
Michael 23:22
No, it’s great. I really like how you guys came up with that. What is on the roadmap for Challenge coin, finishing off this year and going into 2023?
Russ Davis 23:34
Well, things have been delayed just because of the world economy market crypto, everything is so down, but we have the roadmap, it is ready to go. We actually have an ecosystem in place. We’re just waiting for a little bit better market since everything is paired with a theory. And we’d like to see a theory over 2000 Before we start these things, but we’re going to have staking available. And for staking your challenge coin, we will be giving out a new token that we’re going to be releasing with the staking. And we are going to be using that to donate to other specific charities like first responders, police, we’ve got a couple of different coins. And we want to keep all the coins specific so that we know exactly where the money’s going and who you know when somebody is buying that token, where the where that 4% is going towards. So we are excited about that. We’re just kind of we’re patiently waiting. There’s no reason to launch anything in this market. So we’ve got that we’ve got a couple other, we’re adding to our use cases.
Apparently donating 10s of 1000s of dollars in your first couple of months isn’t enough for anybody. So we’re coming up with some pretty cool things. We’re actually going to have really an actual physical challenge coin that we’re going to give to some of our long-term holders and So we are going to be giving out we’ve got signed apparel, signed hats. Rob O’Neill, the guy who killed Bin Laden, you know, a signed hat from him is pretty awesome. And, you know, ad buyers Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. We’ve, you know, from Jeff Gum, Kaj Larson. And I don’t think anybody needs my signature or Jesse’s signature here, but we will if you want it, but you know, we’re going to be given out some, I guess, just like fun, you know, rewards, I guess, you know, and just trying to give as much use case and functionality to our project to make keep it fun for everyone. And, you know, we’re always up for suggestions as well. But yeah, we’ve got some things in the pipeline, just waiting for the right time.
Michael 25:50
Excellent, excellent, Russ, what is the best way for our listeners to reach out to you and your team? Join us during the conversation. You know, I assume you guys have all the regular socials, and we’ll have them on the episode Blog Posts page.
Russ Davis 26:04
So in recipe trust on Facebook, if you go and click on join the group, it’ll ask you two questions like, you know, if you’re a bot or something, and if you, you know, just really easy questions just to make sure you’re not a computer. And the thing is, that’s where you should be asking these questions. That’s why we have the community, I get 1000s of messages every day, and it’s impossible for me to keep up. So if I do respond, it’s out of pure luck that I caught it. And so please, really, try and avoid DMing. Me, because it’s I got a lot of people that used to get really angry. Oh, Ross has been asked. So he’s not answering this and that and it’s like, I never saw those. I was backed up over one and a half million messages on telegram at one point, I had to clear everything out. Facebook was a complete Zoo. Twitter. Oh, yeah. Took me just absolutely done with all the Twitter stuff. But yeah, again, that’s what our community is for. It is the most honest community in a crypto currency that I have ever come across. You’re allowed to ask dumb questions, you’re allowed to ask what is when Moon mean, you know, when z coin or token going to a moonshot, what is going to, you know, go 10x. Like, you’re, you’re allowed to ask those questions that I was asking in 2015. And, and not get made fun of. So we have this community for that reason. And we get some very funny questions. And then we’ve got some really technical questions, and we’ve got a very good audience. And there are times where, you know, I’ll just tend to survey, the survey the scene, the whole page, look at some of the comments.
And sometimes I’ll see that somebody is helping someone who they have no idea who they are, but they’re reaching out, answering all their questions, taking their time to answer these questions for somebody who they don’t know. And so I’ll go and message them and say, Hey, what’s your Ethereum address, and I might send them a couple of $100 worth of Ethereum or challenge coin. It’s, it’s rewarding people that aren’t doing it to get rewarded. And that’s what our whole thing is about. Our admins are the best in the business. You know, if you call someone a name, you’re immediately getting called out and just say, you know, we don’t do that here. You know, you can’t call people names for you know, who people want to learn cryptocurrency we do not want people discouraging people from learning crypto currency. So it’s a great platform for people of all ranges of the knowledge in crypto.
Michael 28:41
Hey, Russ. Man, I wanted to ask you, how and where can the token be purchased.
Russ Davis 28:47
Oh, good question. Yeah, all you have to do is go to www dot the Challenge Coin.io It’ll say get challenge coin. And when you scroll down, it will show you a snapshot of Uniswap, you can connect your wallet. And then it has control over the coins that you would want to convert into Challenge Coin, I would recommend hitting the settings wheel towards the top right, and changing the slippage to 16%. Because with new tokens, the price is always fluctuating. So this gives you a better chance of being able to get all the tokens that you want at the same time. And then you click swap, and it’ll swap out your Aetherium in exchange for Challenge Coin. It’s pretty easy. If you ever have any questions, we can always answer those questions on my Facebook group.
Michael 29:48
Excellent. Excellent. So all of our listeners can head over to Facebook and join. join your group. Russ in closing, is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners?
Russ Davis 30:00
Let’s see in recipe trust on Facebook is free. But we do have packages that are anywhere from $20 a month to $200 a month, which get some inside perks, for instance, discounts on pre-sales, tokens that we launch, and more detailed inside information from myself and my team, you’ll get a monthly newsletter, which you know, some of this information, even finding out an hour or minutes before others can make a very, very, very big difference in your portfolio. And so it’s all about, you know, getting the information to the, to the paid subscribers as fast as possible. And second, our community and all of us working together is a great thing. But other than that, I didn’t mean to talk so much about the group. But no, I mean, I would just say everybody holds tight in this market, it’s definitely a good time to buy some of those dips, and hedge your bets down cost averaging. So for instance, if you bought a token at $10, and now it’s at $2, instead of getting discouraged and selling, you know, by the same amount of tokens, assuming that you can afford it. So now your average cost is $6. So instead of having to wait for that token to go all the way back up to 10, to break even now, it’s at six, and teaching math and crypto are hands in hand. And, you know, that’s what we do, we want to make sure that people at least know all the tools that we’re using in order to you know, make our portfolios more robust. And, as I said, make it fun. And also hopefully make some money doing it. So besides that, stay patient, it will get better. It’s not a great time. But embrace it, buy the dips if you can never invest more than you can afford. And that’s about all I got.
Michael 31:53
Awesome, Ross man, thanks for stopping by. And we welcome you back in the future. It was a pleasure to have you on the show today.
Russ Davis 32:00
Thank you so much. That was fun. I really appreciate it. And I’m sure that I will be contacting you in the future to try and get back on here. You know, was fun.
Michael 32:09
Absolutely. Hey, if you liked today’s episode, definitely like it. Subscribe to the podcast, show your support, and chime in here tomorrow for another special episode. Until then, make it a great day.
Michael 32:23
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