Perfecting the cryptocurrency market comes at a hefty price for Jeremy Gardner, a college dropout-turned millionaire, who gained wealth and fame through bitcoin trading since 2013.

It may look squeaky clean at his Crypto Castle — the office and residential housing for his bitcoin investors — but there’s a lot of spring cleaning to do in the industry as a whole.

“There’s so much toxic crap in this industry today; it has to disappear before we can really evolve into something like Wall Street,” said Gardner, now a managing partner and the co-founder of hybrid venture-hedge fund Ausum Ventures.

The San-Francisco-based entrepreneur met with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at last week’s Polycon18 event in The Bahamas. They discussed the current challenges of cryptocurrency-related companies and how to improve investment strategies.

Cleaning house

It was just recently that Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian who invented Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency next to Bitcoin, warned investors to stay away from virtual currencies because of its risk and volatility.

Fully recognizing the risk, Gardner carefully looks at the team structure and team dynamics as the main priority in early-stage investments. As the market matures, he thinks the scams will fade away.

“I think we’re going to see a real shake-out in the industry, a bloodbath in the markets where a lot of these poorly formulated tokens — crypto assets — disappear before we see a really blossoming crypto economy,” Gardner said.

Among the most exciting projects Gardner is watching in the crypto space is Augur, a decentralized consumer application and market prediction platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. Gardner hopes one day these technologies replace banks, governments, and other middlemen in mitigating transactions.

“Blockchains are fundamentally the largest technological disintermediator that has ever existed in human history,” Gardner said.  “… This evolution represents the broadening of the blockchain economy as a whole.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Polycon18.

Photo: SiliconANGLE