Street vendors abound in downtown Manhattan’s Financial District. But weeks ago, on Sept. 14, an especially unconventional seller set up shop in front of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), transforming a patch of Maiden Lane into a colorful quilt of doormats, each spray painted with the straightforward instruction to “pull.”
People enquired, but they were fake and not really for sale. The wares were part of “Rug Pull,” the latest guerilla installation by Nelson Saiers, a New York-based hedge fund manager turned artist who some consider “The Warhol of Wall Street” or crypto’s most creative activist. As an artwork, “Rug Pull” highlights the many victims affected by the type of scam it’s named after.
Over the past year, crypto has been forced to overcome its resistance to centralized regulations. At the same time, victims of rug pulls and other scams have yet to enjoy the protection that centralized bodies supposedly provide.
“The SEC’s shortcomings extended beyond merely failing to safeguard investors from clear scams,” Saiers told Cointelegraph, adding: “While they have a very difficult job, it seems they were too lax in some ways but also too aggressive in others. I feel their rejection of certain investments may have unfortunately led some investors into more fraudulent products.”
Saiers only works on-site when it makes sense. His art practice transcends crypto, too. He takes on other topics like unjust incarceration or the profound union of art and math.
The artist’s family moved from Ethiopia to the Washington, D.C. area when he was five. He earned his bachelor’s and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Virginia by age 23.
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Saiers chose to work in finance after reading the travails of the Wall Street bond salesmen in the book Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. He served as a managing director at Deutsche Bank and as the chief investment officer at his own fund, Saiers Capital, which won the 2011 HFMWeek Award for top Relative Value hedge fund.
In 2014, though, he took the leap to become an artist.
“Art was just way more interesting than finance at that point,” Saiers said. He’d seen significant shifts during his finance career — like the 2008 crisis, to say the least. By comparison, the field was calming down.
“When you’re regularly…
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