After ‘Civil War’ and Anti-Immigrant Tweets, Ryan Selkis Told to Cool It by His Crypto Startup’s Leadership

Ryan Selkis, founder and CEO of crypto data platform Messari, rarely if ever holds back on social media, regularly lobbing insults via X (formerly Twitter) at Gary Gensler’s Securities and Exchange Commission and others.

Still, his tirades this week after an assassin’s bullet grazed Donald Trump stood out, even for Selkis. And colleagues at Messari, which has financial backing from major firms such as Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital and hedge-fund titan Brevan Howard and was reportedly once valued at $300 million, apparently asked him to cool it.

“Just had a terrific ‘tough love’ session with Messari leadership, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate people who approach me in good faith and help rein me in because they know my vision and where my heart is,” he posted Thursday. “I ran too hot this week, and will address that in full soon.”

So what’s this about? It might have something to do with how worked up he got on X after the attempt on Trump’s life. (As of Thursday, he’d made his tweets private. They remain visible to his 354,000 or so followers.)

“Anyone that votes against Trump at this point can die in a f*cking fire,” he posted on X the afternoon of the shooting. “Literal war.” (This post has since been deleted.) He added in another tweet: “The Civil War for the country started today, and if you are anti-Trump you are against the men who are willing to fight. Good luck.”

The next day, violence, at least in self-defense, was on his mind. “Bolshevism cannot be cured with votes. We must excise the metastatic cancer and evil of the left, by force if necessary. This is why the Second Amendment was and is so important. Do not initiate violence, but if it’s brought to your door, finish with violence.”

War still was, too. “Unfortunately, unity can sometimes only be achieved after a decisive victory. This is one of those moments. The previous three were in 1776, 1860, and 1942. Praying for peace. Preparing for war.”

Selkis echoed the MAGA movement’s anti-immigration rhetoric. He asked an X user if they were “a citizen or just a green card holder?” The person replied that they are a green card holder about to apply for citizenship. Selkis’ response: “I hope we send you back. … You are not entitled to citizenship. I hope it stays that way.”

Selkis posted pictures of a bloodied Trump right after he was injured. Beneath them was the famous photo of then-President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden in a conference room as Osama bin Laden was killed by Seal Team 6. Selkis wrote, “Too true.”

He addressed another post to a prominent Washington crypto critic, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), posting side-by-side photos of her and Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. “Are you happy that Trump is still alive? Or disappointed to have missed your shot in taking out a ‘dictator who will destroy democracy.’ Physiognomy doesn’t lie …”

Use of the term physiognomy, a long-discredited practice of discerning someone’s character from how they look, was an apparent attempt to imply a physical resemblance between the bespectacled duo.

He replied to a tweet from SEC Chair Gensler: “We’re so close to your inevitable jail sentence, I can almost taste it.”

Selkis, when contacted by a CoinDesk journalist, declined to elaborate on his posts the past week.

This is not the sort of online behavior one normally associates with a CEO, particularly one with serious venture capital backing – though brashness is not uncommon among crypto users of social media (and X’s owner, Elon Musk, is known to push the envelope, too).

Messari, a platform that lets users monitor and examine data about digital assets, plays an important role in crypto. Selkis has emerged as a key part of the industry’s attempt to regain influence in Washington following the disappearance of Sam Bankman-Fried’s massive clout there.

Selkis spoke to the crowd, standing beside Trump, earlier this year at the former president’s NFT gala at Mar-a-Lago.

After his initial “tough love” tweet on Thursday, Selkis tweeted further. He wasn’t much quieter.

“I sent tweets aggressively screaming from the rooftops about self-defense and taking the current political situation more seriously than the media does. You’ve been warned. I wish haters spent the same effort protecting kids, preventing war, and defending American values,” he said.

Also: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I got knocked down from a punch I didn’t see coming. Good. Fewer tweets. More long form. More channeled rage, but same mindset: OFFENSE.”

Michelle Bloom contributed to this story.