Now 20, the US millionaire is putting everything into Metal with his QuickCoin partner Marshall Hayner. Functioning as a P2P payment system, Metal supports a variety of tokens as well as the cryptocurrency market’s dominant players like BTC and ETH. Taking to Twitter – where he is regarded as something of an agent provocateur, often with gaudy images surrounded by cash – the youngster set out his battle lines.
“We’re going to finally bring crypto to the people – in ways that Facebook Libra only wishes they could,” he boasted.
“This. Is. The. Libra. Killer.”
Far from being laughed off as flippant social media bragging, Finman’s project is getting a warm reception.
Metal Pay – designed as an all-in-one system with a 17 digital asset exchange, banking and payments app coupled with social features – is catching the eye and praise of the crypto community’s senior figures.
This rise in popularity is being put down largely down to the youngster’s remarkably wise outlook – something described as being way beyond his years.
“Right now, the space is too hard, too fragmented – it’s not legal enough,” Finman says.
“I’m willing to put all my money into this – everything, and I’m doing this not as a bet, but a belief.
“We want to be the digital money platform of the world. This is genuinely the future – this is what I have wanted cryptocurrency to be since I was 12 years old.”
As news of Finman’s project filters down, there will no doubt be a flurry of disparaging comments – as is the very nature of crypto-related social media. But amid that fog, there are some serious players giving a nod of approval in his direction.
“There’ll be cries of ‘scam’ or suggestions that Finman and Hayner are cashing out, for sure,” observes market watcher and investor Jason Kruus.
“And that’s to be expected – not only because that’s just the way the crypto world is when anything like this happens, but also because of the polarising image Erik Finman projects on his own social feeds.
“That aside, when you examine what they’re doing here it has a legitimate claim as something that could indeed be the Libra killer, so to speak.
“I think this project has legs and that you have to take into account where in the generations of the world crypto sits – his age is a huge plus point for people who are coming in and starting their journey in the financial world, and they’re the ones who will sweep this through and decide if it is a winner or not.”
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