Former BlockFi CEO Announces New Career Path – And Settles Lost Bet On His Company’s Bankruptcy

Zac Prince, the former BlockFi CEO, is breaking into real estate tech now that his defunct crypto lending firm is on a safe path to recovery.

Excited to announce that I’ve joined the team at RE Cost Seg as CEO!

RE Cost Seg provides cost segregation studies to real estate investors. Cost segregation studies enable real estate investors to take advantage of tax benefits by accelerating depreciation.

When you hear…

— Zac Prince (@CostSegZac) March 11, 2024

In a statement to X on Monday, Prince revealed that he is now the CEO of Re Cost Seg, a firm that provides cost segregation studies to real estate investors.

BlockFi CEO Pivots To Real Estate

Cost segregation studies survey each element of a property and look for certain things that could benefit from accelerated “depreciation” – the period in which a renovator pays for costs associated with improving a property.

This will allow customers to claim tax benefits for accelerating depreciation on those elements, which could include plumbing fixtures, carpeting, and sidewalks, among other things.

Extolling his company’s benefits against more traditional competition, Prince wrote:

“Because of lower price points and streamlined processes, RE Cost Seg is making this valuable tax-saving tool available to a much broader group of real estate investors. Previously it was generally limited to larger, commercial properties.”

Prince clarified that his business will still primarily focus on institutional clients, but still work with some single-family clients once “priced out” of the opportunity.

The focus marks a pivot from Prince’s retail-oriented crypto lending firm, which offered average investors a chance to earn a yield on their BTC and to take out loans against their coins.

BlockFi’s business model involved rehypothecating those coins to their institutional clients, where they would earn a slightly higher yield than they offered their retail clients, and profit on the difference.

One of their largest counterparties, however, was Alameda Research – FTX’s sister trading firm that imploded last year, losing BlockFi’s and its customers’ coins in the process.

While focused on the ensuing bankruptcy for over a year afterward, Prince said on Sunday that he’s now comfortable moving on to other things.

“With estate distributions in flight, and knowing the FTX estate recoveries are trending in a positive direction… I felt that I finally had an appropriate amount of closure to move on to new professional endeavors,” he said.

Settling One Last Bet

Prince’s followers were quick to call him out on Sunday for having neglected to honor his side of a public bet he made with popular Bitcoiner @americanhodl8 on X.

In 2021, both men bet 1 BTC on whether BlockFi would remain a functional company over the next 37 years. BlockFi’s collapse one year later left Prince as the loser, owing 1 BTC – now worth over $72,000 – to his Twitter adversary.

Dm me – will get it sorted

— Zac Prince (@CostSegZac) March 10, 2024

On Sunday, the former executive agreed that he would “get it sorted.”