Overstock’s Founder Bets on Blockchain, Not Bedsheets
Patrick Byrne is so certain about the technology’s possibilities, he’s planning to sell Overstock’s retail business
Last year, Didi Taihuttu sold almost everything he owned, poured it into bitcoin and moved his family into a trailer park. In this episode of Moving Upstream, WSJ’s Thomas Di Fonzo goes on a year-long journey with the “Bitcoin Family” as they bet everything on a decentralized cryptocurrency future.
In August 2015, Overstock.com Inc. Chief Executive Patrick Byrne rented out Nasdaq Inc.’s Times Square broadcast studio for a lavish party to unveil his newest project, a blockchain-based trading system called tZero.
Three years later, tZero still hasn’t launched commercially, and it is burning through millions of dollars a month. Yet Mr. Byrne is staking his company’s future on it and more than a dozen other blockchain startups.
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