Billionaire bitcoin investor Christian Angermayer credits a surprising source with helping him make his immense wealth…

Psychedelics.

When he visited the Caribbean in 2015 to try magic mushrooms, he’d already made millions… having cofounded and then sold his share of biotech firm Ribopharma in 2003.

But it was during his “shroom” trip that he had a profound epiphany, he says… He “finally understood bitcoin.”

Today, the self-made billionaire’s investment firm, Apeiron Investment Group, manages more than $3 billion, with both psychedelics and cryptocurrency at the forefront of its holdings.

Angermayer is far from the only “crypto bro” getting into psychedelics. 

One of the most notable names in the space is Peter Thiel himself, who’s the biggest backer of atai Life Sciences.

“ATAI’s great virtue is to take mental illness as seriously as we should have been taking all illness all along,” Thiel has said of the company.

He also happens to be one of the most vocal proponents of bitcoin.

“The central banks are bankrupt. We are at the end of the fiat money regime,” Thiel said at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami.

Venture capitalist Brom Rector founded Empath Ventures in the fall of 2021 to raise money for psychedelic research… In its first round, it raised $2.1 million from the medical, finance, and cryptocurrency communities alike.

And Brock Pierce, crypto billionaire and chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, has recently become a general partner of Mystic Ventures, a psychedelic therapies fund.

All of this begs the question, what exactly does cryptocurrency have to do with psychedelics? What’s the connecting thread bringing investors across both spaces?

Where crypto and psychedelics intersect

The crossover makes sense, according to Jahan Khamsehzadeh, author of The Psilocybin Connection.

For one thing, he tells THE FACE, both have a somewhat ambiguous, amorphous nature. He says:

There’s something extremely psychedelic about the way in which the blockchain works. It’s borderless. It’s virtual. It’s decentralized. It’s distributed trust. It’s all of these things that we find in the psychedelic experience naturally.

For another, both have components of helping global society, saying, “Psychedelics often inspire people to want to make the world better—and it can’t get better until the major global issue of economy, and its system of being debt-orientated, is solved.”

Then, there’s the aspect of free-thinking—both psychedelics and cryptocurrencies push traditional boundaries of how we think of medicine and money, respectively… and more specifically, both currently sidestep direct governmental oversight (with the blockchain being decentralized and psychedelics still federally illegal in the U.S.).

Entrepreneur and writer Brandon Quittem refers to this free-thinking, government-avoidant mindset as “cognitive liberty.” 

He tells THE FACE:

[Proponents] believe that it isn’t the government’s job to say what plants or mushrooms people can eat in my house. In a very similar way, you can make a parallel with monetary liberty – meaning if humans decide to make apples money, or Bitcoin money (or part of our money) that should be allowed. It shouldn’t be controlled by the state.

This adds up when you consider what these “crypto bros” are saying about their investments.

Apeiron Investment Group’s mission, according to the site, is “shaping the next human agenda.”

Of crypto, the firm writes: 

At a time when trust in governments and institutions is evaporating, truth and lies are hard to dissect. Blockchain technology, with its unique features—an immutable public digital ledger; 100% secure; instant transactions; decentralized—is an antidote to these problems.

Of psychedelics, it writes:

[Our] platform company, atai Life Sciences, is making significant headway towards unlocking innovative treatments to improve the status quo for the more than 1 billion people worldwide who are suffering from mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In an interview with Benzinga, Pierce says, “The [psychedelic] industry is barely in its infancy. However, the potential reward to humanity, mental health, and those who get in on the ground floor, is immeasurable.”

And in profile from Rolling Stone, he says:

Every smart person that I admire in the world, and those I semi-fear, is focused on this concept of crypto for a reason. They understand that this is the driving force of the fourth industrial revolution: steam engine, electricity, then the microchip—blockchain and crypto is the fourth.

Rector sums up the intersection in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, saying “To really get into crypto you have to be a big believer in crazy bold new ideas. Psychedelics is similar to crypto in the sense that it is a crazy big sort of bold new investment thing.”

And Pierce’s summation is even simpler… In the Rolling Stone interview, he says, “Always be the pied piper.”