Made it for a month, but now me and all my friends are dead. A brief post to revisit throughout the next cycle.

I held a portfolio from $30k to $1.2m to $18k. A round trip. Made it to the moon, went for Mars, and the ship exploded en-route.

DeFi Summer kicked off with the launch of Uniswap V2 in 2020. A novel idea, low friction and at the end of the day a decentralized casino. Meme/shitcoins were launched everyday, everyone thought they could become the next millionaire. As @gcrclassic says, long humans being desperate, greedy, degenerate and lonely.

What happened next

• They launched a token, airdropped the token (remember that bonus stimulus?), and incentivized behavior (liquidity provision) through the token.
• Similar ideas popped up shortly after - think Sushiswap, 1inch, pancakeswap. Vampire attacks were launched to gets consumers to shift trading elsewhere.

Lessons

• Experiment with new technology (here it was new dexes and lping)
• Spinoffs of new tech will see success
• If early, hold farming rewards. If you know you’re not early, and know that you’re probably not early, dump rewards immediately

Fast forward a couple months. it became extremely cost-prohibitive for consumers to participate in the shitcoin casino. Gas fees through the roof. How could consumers keep playing? A new solution had to emerge. Binance Smart Chain emerged in the fall of 2020, consumers could keep playing the same game on another chain. Migrations to other chains also happened - Avalanche, Fantom, Solana.

Lessons

• Experiment with new technology (here it was chains, and bridges)
• Trudge through friction to be early. The friction to get on Avalanche in Jan 2020 was HIGH. AVAX was on a few dexes and you had to deal with the X/C chain hurdle. The ones that got here then, were early. I bought avalanche between $4 and $14 and was liquidity farming one of the first dexes on the chain. If you’re early, hold until the masses arrive. You’ll know what it feels like when you’re early.
• Follow the money. Multiple smart-contract enriched chains offered massive incentives programs for developers to go and build on those chains, the developers followed shortly after.

Next up, I hit my first 50x. Alchemist. I found it by creeping on the tweets of a big thought leader - @Fiskantes. I was looking to see what posts he was liking, going one level deeper and then looking at the posts those people were liking. I did this and found a token with very few holders and a promising developer behind it. Bought a bag and had my expectations of this project confirmed when I saw @veC0zy subtly tweeting emojis and images associated with the project.

Lessons

• Observe the winners, observe what they’re observing
• Once you start 10xing. Start selling at least small portions of your position. There’s nothing wrong with cashing out 3 years worth of your salary.
• There will be many, many, many coins that 10x+. You don’t need to rely on one to make it

A little bit later, I found one of Dani’s big projects. Dani was many things, but what he was best at was 1) being a salesman and 2) community builder. Finding one person with these two attributes is rare. He had a powerful populist message at a time when new people began flooding crypto. He also had external community advocates (Messi).

Lessons

• Find the “Salespeople” early, double down on other projects they launch that haven’t pumped yet
• Ignore those who crown themselves (Charles H., Craig Wright), pay attention to coronations done organically by CT (Dani & Do)
• Find people CT believes in, but don’t believe in them for too long
• Track the account growth of these deities along with community sentiment on Twitter, Discord, Telegram.
• Be cautious when the idolatry of innovators becomes excessive (novices fomoing their entire life savings into their projects)
• Normies arriving doesn’t mean supercycle, it probably means the end is near

Overall Lessons

• Do not marry your bags.
• When you make life-changing amounts of money. Pause to change your life.
• Ponzis exist, look at what you’re invested in. If the APY/rewards/whatever is too good to be true, it will end. It’s up to you to know whether or not you’re early,
• Unoriginal ideas can be profitable, make a little money & get out. Don’t be greedy. (TIME)
• Once a project or person has been tainted, it will remain tainted. Sell immediately when this happens. In the rare event a project manages to de-contiminate/resolve these issues you can buy back in
• The macro environment matters, when money tightens up the party stops. Pay attention to the macro.
• Do not marry your bags.

Often, the signs that the top was there, become clear too late. These signs can be generally observable, but some may only be evident to you. Here are the ones that I experienced.

• Multiple friends (non-crypto) asking you about crypto at the same time
• Crypto Twitter quitting their jobs to start funds
• You’re bragging about gains
• You think your life has changed
• Politicians start paying attention (think Congressional hearings)
• Your dad tells you to sell
• Rampant scamming is visible
• Physical dog coin advertisements in major city
• Overplayed out trends (think 6th OHM fork on Fantom)