Will Clemente is the Co-Founder of Reflexivity Research, a digital asset research firm covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and more. While just 20 years of age, the Fuquay-Varina native has become a thought leader in the crypto space by providing his views on the asset class through his Twitter feed, which has amassed a following of nearly 700,000.
Launched at the end of September, Reflexivity Research looks to bridge traditional finance into the digital assets space.
1. What’s in your pockets?
Nothing. Just a little bit of lint.
2. What exciting thing has happened recently for you or your organization?
We are very much still just trying to launch and get off the ground. We launched about three or four months ago, at what I hope is and what we believe to be the trough of the decline in the crypto market. We are in the process of building this business out of nothing and trying to bootstrap it off the ground. Of course, it helps a bit to have a large Twitter following, but it’s definitely been an uphill battle with all the crypto blow-ups, obviously the biggest one being FTX.
With the recent crypto rally, it’s been a nice little breath of fresh air, but overall, it’s been an uphill battle for sure for the last few months. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
3. What is your favorite coffee spot?
I just moved from Greenville, N.C., to Winston-Salem while I’m in the process of getting ready to move to Miami. But I grew up in Fuquay-Varina, and they just put in this new coffee shop around the Fuquay/Holly Springs area called Sir Walter Coffee. I used to go there when I lived there. Other than that, the boring answer would be Starbucks.
4. What keeps you up at night?
The fundamental ethos of crypto is to separate money from state. Of course, I think the best form of separating money from state that’s out there is Bitcoin. And then also a lot of these other decentralized applications such as being able to transact in terms of exchange bases like swapping assets, borrowing, and lending permission-less—all these financial cornerstones, but in a decentralized manner.
I think those are incredibly important because what keeps me up at night is the idea of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Something like that would essentially be used as kind of a mass surveillance system and control mechanism over society like it is in China, where people can basically have every single transaction that they’re undergoing tracked by the government. You can have restrictions put on your financial abilities and freedom and essentially be surveilled by the government constantly.
Things like the implementation of CBDCs and similar concerns are very much part of the reason why I’m very involved in the digital asset space. Not only is there a lot of upside from a pure financial perspective, but also from an ethical and moral perspective. It’s a slippery slope, tying in ethics and investing and I think you have to be able to make the nuanced distinction between those two things.
5. What’s your favorite restaurant or happy hour?
Angus Barn is a good go-to.
6. What is next for you and or your organization?
Continuing to build out our research teams and continuing to offer more services to our clients. I am moving to Miami where our co-founder resides so I can be even more focused on the business than before.
And as the crypto market bottoms out, we will continue to build out our ability to serve clients, build out the operational processes of the business, and build out a brand.
On Twitter you can see a bunch of our thoughts. We put out different reports and share snippets at least once a week.
I would say on a high level, continue to push the ideology of the digital assets base and be a guiding hand to some of these traditional folks that maybe vaguely understand that there’s some value in the asset class but don’t know really where to get started.
