Last fall, he explained to a group of businessmen gathered at his palatial home, a hacker had stolen $300,000 of digital tokens from his cryptocurrency wallet.
He had gotten the bad news at dinner on a Friday, he said, while he was telling a venture-capitalist friend about the time he sank his yacht during a drug-fueled romp in the mid-90s.
Mr. Belfort, 59, is best known for “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a tell-all memoir about his debauched 1990s career in high finance, which the director Martin Scorsese adapted into a 2013 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the hard-partying protagonist.
A long line of celebrities has tried to profit from the cryptocurrency boom, appearing in widely mocked crypto commercials or flogging nonfungible tokens, the unique digital collectibles known as NFTs.
He is also a recent convert away from crypto skepticism.
Whatever his crypto bona fides, Mr. Belfort is unquestionably qualified to discuss the subject of financial fraud, a major problem in the digital-asset industry.
Given that history, it can feel slightly surreal to hear an older, more grizzled Mr. Belfort proclaim that he is “massively looking forward to regulation” in the crypto industry.
The guests — chosen from a pool of more than 600 applicants — milled around Mr. Belfort’s backyard, eating made-to-order omelets and trading tips about Bitcoin mining and tokenomics.
He stopped on the staircase down from the porch to survey the scene: nine men dressed in various shades of business casual — polo shirts, flip-flops, untucked button-down shirts.
After a few minutes of chitchat, he ushered the group into the dining room, where each place at the table was set with a notebook and a copy of “Way of the Wolf,” a sales manual Mr. Belfort published in 2017.
Mr. Belfort has spent the past two decades trying to rebuild his reputation, but signs of the old Wolf were everywhere.
After a round of introductions, Mr. Belfort began a lecture on the minutiae of cryptocurrencies, from the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum to the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations.
For a gathering of crypto evangelists, it was striking how much time everyone spent reliving their biggest losses.
stock exchange, Coinbase is a platform that allows people and companies to buy and sell various digital currencies, including Bitcoin, for a transaction fee.
DeFi.
A “nonfungible token,” or NFT, is an asset verified using blockchain technology, in which a network of computers records transactions and gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership.
Web3.
A decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, is an organizational structure built with blockchain technology that is often described as a crypto co-op.
The energy in the room lifted with the arrival of Chase Hero, one of a series of guest speakers Mr. Belfort had recruited for the weekend.
Did Mr. Hero have any tips? The key to starting a new venture, he replied, is aggressive marketing to stand out from the crowd.
As they dined on caviar and rigatoni, some of the guests shared stories of their own debauchery; Mr. Belfort, it turned out, was not the only wolf in the room.
Soon conversation turned to a club in Japan where women are said to cavort with octopuses.
Artem Bespaloff, the chief executive of the crypto mining company Asic Jungle, leaned across the table to describe his personal conversion to the way of the Wolf.
Still, he said, he regrets his behavior in those days — it was wrong, and he could have gotten even richer if he hadn’t broken the law.