Brenda Gentry left USAA as a mortgage underwriter in October 2021. This was after working there for more than ten years. She quit her job in conventional banking to focus only on bitcoin.
Today, Gentry is the CEO of BundlesBets.com, a Web3 Sports betting platform and Gentry Media, a marketing firm also run by her daughters, Cynthia and Imani.
The Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 provided the chance for Brenda to begin investing in cryptocurrency. After this, she focused fully on crypto thereby quitting her 9–5 job.
She started small then invested more.
In 2021, she made an interesting discovery. “My investment portfolio surpassed my 401(k) — what would have taken me 11 years to make, I made in six months”, Brenda explains.
Although she is aware that investing in cryptocurrency is dangerous, Brenda Gentry hinges her success on her background in finance. This includes taking reasonable care before investing by doing ones research.
She resides in San Antonio and views cryptocurrency as a means of acquiring and spreading generational wealth. Her excitement about the “extraordinary prospects that bitcoin presents as a fair playing field for the unbanked and under-banked” is shared by her family.
16 years in banking and finance
Mentally she was done with day-to-day finance. Still, it took a year for her to walk away from her job. The main cause was she wanted something more exciting and it came in the form of DeFi. She had also started a media company and was taking on marketing and consulting jobs in the NFT and DeFi space.
Transition
The transition was rocky at first because she loved her job and loved the work relationships she had built over the years. She felt like it was the end of an era. The reason for the rocky start. What made it smoother, however, was looking forward to being at the front of a new technology and a new asset class that was going to usher in generational wealth.
Today, Brenda Gentry is known on the internet as the “Crypto Mom”. She continues to invest in digital assets but primarily runs her own brands which she oversees with her daughters Cynthia, 24, and Imani Gentry, 20.
On how she became the crypto mom, Brenda has this to say,
“My daughters got me into crypto and at first, I was like…maybe I should try and be like everyone else, and just blend in. Then I was like, Nah, I love being a mom and I will own up to it!”.
Brenda feels blessed to have both her daughters in the space with her. Cynthia and Imani both run Gentry Media Productions with her. This allows them to spend even more time together than they did when the Crypto Mom had a 9-5 job at the bank.
Her biggest win in cryptocurrency, asides her family, is taking ownership of BundlesBets.com where she is building a great product in hybrid sports prediction pools. This adopts the Web3 space that will also incorporate some aspects of Web2. Brenda has also advised on NFT projects such as BossBeauties, WomenAndWeapons and TheRoyalsNFT.
On losses and lessons
Brenda Gentry is not without hers.
“I lost money trusting other people to host my mining but I came to find out later they were scammers. To me that’s a loss. Otherwise, you don’t lose until you sell”.
When asked what she would change in the blockchain ecosystem, Brenda maintains that the ecosystem is still in its infancy. And like any space, in the beginning, one has to deal with scammers and rug pulls. “It’s like the wild wild west right now”, in her own words. She advises that it is important to educate people about scams because it needs to be highlighted.
