Every once in awhile it’s very therapeutic for me to write out my thoughts in a long, rambly type way. I usually do this over a voice call with a friend or in bits and pieces in group chats, but I figured I’d give it a shot in a public setting. This is going to be long and certainly incoherent or illogical at certain points. I’m not trying to convince you of anything and none of this is advice. It’s simply to help me organize my thoughts. I’ve tried to label it so you can skip around to certain sections if you’re interested. If you want to talk about any of this, DM me on twitter and I’m happy to dive into anything in detail.
I view in crypto through two distinct lenses:
1. New technology that is going to fundamentally change how finance and commerce are conducted in the world. This is also the bucket that provides financial tools for savings, yield, payments, etc.
2. An advantage gambling game similar to daily fantasy sports or poker. You have a bankroll and your job is to put on certain plays within a strategy to grow this number as large as possible before the edge is gone.
Frame number 2 is often the lens which I think crypto is implicitly discussed on crypto twitter. Participants are here to make money. Some guy banging off a 1000x memecoin trade or 100x leverage trade is exciting. This is also the frame I spend a lot of my time in crypto on because it’s the most personally lucrative.
Frame number 1 I think is what will give crypto long term standing power in the world, but it won’t necessarily make you rich. It’s intellectually interesting and a lot of those tools can also be useful for protecting your wealth and compounding it to make you rich slowly.
I have done exceedingly well since pivoting back attention to crypto markets around October/November of 2023. I did a horrible job of DCA’ing into majors during the bear, but I did manage to catch RLB and Unibot early with some big run ups. I was more focused on raid leading a group of complete idiots through heroic Ulduar while doing contract work full time as a developer.
The startup I was doing work for ran out of funding and I lost my contract late in 2023 so I had a bunch of free time. This proved fortunate as Solana and memes were starting to cook. I went decently big into SOL at around 40-60 dollars. I was earlyish to BONK (200M mcap), and I bought both WIF and SC (Sharkcat) at sub 1 million marketcaps. I still hold a sizable WIF position but I’ve liquidated a fair bit on the way up according to my lifestyle and goals.
Even with all the mistakes I made which I’ll talk about below, I’ve manged to stable up significant runway for my lifestyle even if I make no additional income or money (which is not my plan, but it’s nice to know).
I think I’ve done an excellent job of curating my twitter feed and finding sharp, but less followed accounts I take seriously when they mention things about crypto. Big accounts can be decent for pulse, but right now they are not going to tell you anything you don’t know. ex. I think Ansem was a very good follow in the September-December 2023 time frame because little attention was being paid, but that edge is now completely gone. I also keep receipts on what people say and how their calls/theses play out.
Even with a twitter information diet, I create my own theses and 100% own every decision I make.
I try to be very honest with myself about how big of an edge I have in whatever I’m doing at the time. Early on, I thought trading memecoins was a massive edge if you had half a brain and could look at dexscreener and just realize which sub 500k mcap meme wasn’t a dead zero on arrival. Now, with pump.fun raking the shit out of participants and the technology and meta spreading like wildfire I think the memecoin edge is few and far between.
I trusted my gut instinct and faded Friendtech. I thought the product was dogshit at first glance and still do. It’s an extraction tool for creators and the team with basically 0 edge for any participants unless you were very good at sniping and trading keys. Also the product is also dogshit because no creator wants to feel like they have to do extra work to make a horde of angry keyholders happy. It’s also literally just a chatroom with no other mechanism for publishing content?
I realize I don’t know a lot about a lot of shit in crypto and I’ve accepted that. That doesn’t mean I won’t make plays, it just means I accept that as a risk in the play. A few examples of this are I still can’t explain to you exactly how the CRV/Balancer/Aerodrome locked token voting incentive system works. I’m okay with that, I just know I get yield for locking my tokens through some sort of bribery mechanic. A lot of DePIN stuff, no idea how it works or of it the tokenomics are any good. If it’s cheap enough on a relative valuation perspective and I can see a decent narrative, I’ll “buy it on spec” and do some deeper research when I get around to it.
Although I was early to BONK, I suffered time based capitulation when I sold half of it for JLP and the other half of it for PUPS. I think BONK is still a strong token with some fundamentals in the background that make it a great beta on SOL. I was chasing a narrative with PUPS. I don’t regret the JLP exposure.
Speaking of PUPS, I didn’t listen to my own instincts. “Oh, it’s the chain with massive TVL, of course the coins on there will be huge!”. This was flawed because people with a shitload of BTC were early to crypto and certainly knew what ETH and SOL were. If they wanted to ape alts, they would have. Simple as.
I thought WHALES (Whales Market) and by extension a token called GUPPY, were great products for crypto with the current points meta. I put a sizable position into WHALES and staked it. This obviously didn’t work out as the market did not want utility tokens at all. I’m still not entirely sure why this was the case. I don’t consider this a process mistake and I’d make a similar play again.
BODEN. I top ticked the absolute fuck out of this coin. I was buying strength and declaring it a cycle winner with tons of election catalysts and Sleepy Joe doing Sleepy Joe things. Price action proved me to be an absolute moron and I didn’t cut fast enough to the downside. I think I’d still make the same thesis play, but be quicker to cut when it looks like it’s getting invalidated.
HAMMY. I bought this at 30M when it looked like it’d bottomed. For a second, I thought I was an absolute genius. Cute animal, not a dog or cat, viral tik tok sensation. This suffered from what I call “midcap hell”, where the token isn’t big enough to be considered safe beta, and not small enough to feel like you’re early for big returns. I avoid this marketcap now. If I missed it, I missed it.
SharkCat. I was extremely early to this coin buying it at like 400k mcap. My major fuckup here was not selling it all as it went parabolic to like 300M in the span of a few days. Yes, I liquidated a massive win, but I round tripped probably 2/3 of the potential profit justifying that everything was just going to rip to billions. Coins need consolidation periods and pullbacks. They need healthy distribution. They don’t just go straight vertical to billions.
BLAST. I fucked up this farm putting to much stock into a hypothetical valuation of the token. Learning from this, I never will airdrop farm by spending capital I know I’m unlikely to get back. Only farm with capital I want to hold or plays I think are +EV on their own. Now I’m left with a bunch of trading cards of influencers that are down horrendous. I’ll probably just play the decks out as it’s not very time consuming to recoup some losses and sell into any liquidity event.
“BASE SZN”. Scam. Should have never fallen for this. Maybe it happens at some point in the future, but SOL is just the chain for memes. There might be some good tokens on BASE, but I doubt the real winners on this chain will be memes.
I think crypto is currently suffering from a lack of non institutional (“retail”) capital. This is not a unique view, but it’s blatantly obvious just watching how money rotates from coin to coin and meta to meta. I’m not sure just a memecoin casino is going to be enough to attract guys punting on parlays on NFL sundays. Crypto needs a trojan horse to attract this liquidity. Whether it’s in AI, Gaming, Payments, etc. I have no idea. If I did know, I’d just build it myself.
Last time around, newcomers (like me!) were gaslit heavily into believing NFTs were a revolutionary technology that was going to permeate every industry. You were also told buying (tokens! not equity lol) like LINK were akin to buying the Apples and Microsofts of the future. Participants this time around don’t believe that and are just swinging away at the memecoin casino. While that was fine and dandy for the beginning to get some sidelined capital and a few new people in the game, I doubt it will be enough for a true breakthrough moment of retail capital.
The counter argument is that gambling is never going away and greed will take over once Bitcoin reaches significantly new all time highs due to institutional inflows. Crypto will be the hot thing again all over CNBC and Bloomberg. People will open up their old Coinbase accounts and realize memes are the thing this time and start ripping it in. This would be great for my bags, but I’m skeptical.
It’s very possible this product looks something like a super finance app. You can get 10%+ on your money just holding it in something that resembles a traditional checking account and it works at POS like a credit card by just tapping with your phone. It’s fast, easy, and free to send money to anyone, anywhere in the world. However, if this abstracts away too much of the onchain component, it’s unclear whether any of this money flows to the tokens.
It’s never been easier to launch a coin. pump.fun it’s a picture, some words, and a button click. Not only is the amount of coins out there astronomically larger, but the rake has never been higher either. I am concerned that even if TOTAL3 increases heavily, the peak MCAP for the biggest memecoins won’t be anywhere what we saw with DOGE and SHIB simply because that money is spread among so many options.
One metric I’ve been trying to get my hands on is the historical meme marketcap versus what it is now and what the dominance of top memes looked like. You can get the spot current from coingecko (~49B), but I’ve struggled to find accurate info about a total meme MCAP at the peak of ‘21 and what the dominance of the top 2-5 looked like. I imagine it was VERY high dominance for DOGE and SHIB. I do not necessarily expect dominance to be so pronounced this time, even if total MCAP is much higher.
This is probably the thing that scares the shit out of me the most. I have no idea whether it’s just I’m in the “in group” now and I’ve curated my feed to a point where everyone knows this is common knowledge and it’s pre-ordained crypto will blast through ATHs again. Last time around I didn’t see anyone talking in this terminology. Maybe they were and I was just on the outside. For my sake, I hope that’s the case.
Larry Fink and the institutions are bidding. Harlabob put it beautifully when he said we made a championship winning trade by ousting SBF and Do Kwon for Larry Fink and the rest of the asset manager arm. Passive flows to a supply constrained asset have to be bullish and I do believe this will spill over down the risk curve to other crypto assets as well.
Gambling never dies. In my career in poker I’ve seen losing players who have been playing for decades because they win just enough to delude themselves that they are just getting unlucky. In lottery style events, like tournaments, this is particularly pronounced. Risking a small amount to win a lot? Sign me up. Once a fish bangs off a 100x on a memecoin trade, they aren’t ever leaving.
Blockchains are simply a superior technology for settlement of financial transactions than currently in place. Slowly as banks and other financial institutions replace their tech stacks, they will lean towards blockchains. Will this happen on public chains? No idea, but my vote is probably yes just due to the fact there’s no infrastructure to set up and they come with the best set of trust assumptions right out of the gate. The obvious downside to this is privacy and I’m not enough of an expert to comment what hurdles that causes. Privacy features added on to public chains is my best guess.
The current United States regulatory regime is outright hostile to crypto. All indications point Trump as a likely president with pressured rate cuts and Gary Gensler ousted. I have no idea if Trump will do any of the shit he says, but it likely can’t get worse than it has been.
Ever since Travis Kling published that viral thread about “lack of pretense that this shit does or every will do anything”, many people have taken to heart that crypto in general is useless and no progress has been made.
I actually reject that viewpoint only with the caveat that none of the innovation in crypto will probably let you get shit rich. That’s why people have adopted this nihilistic viewpoint. I obviously have made the majority of my money this time around in memecoins because it’s a volatility play and I got lucky I was paying attention. But I don’t think memecoins are the most useful thing in crypto. If you define “useful” as “can I make a shit load of money on this?”, then yea, there isn’t much of that besides memecoins this time around. You cannot invest in new L1s at a 20M mcap anymore. Alt coins have predatory tokenomics, etc. etc. The only hope of really “fucktonning it” is in memes or other seemingly insane gambly shit.
Independent from money making endeavors, crypto has remarkably improved in the last four years. I’ll touch on some of the specific things I find interesting (but won’t make you rich) in the sections below.
Crypto is definitely generational. Bank of America recently did a survey of wealthy millennials who listed crypto as their most likely to buy asset behind real estate. As Boomers die off and that wealth is inherited by millennials and zoomers, I think BTC and crypto as a whole see increased flows.
I believe at some point a major pension fund like CALPERS will allocate a small portion of their funds to BTC and possibly other crypto. Other funds will follow and the passive bid faucet will push the price up astronomically over a 3-10 year time frame.
Commented on this already. But due to pump.fun, high rake, proliferation of meta and technology and I think this game is -EV for most participants. There will be some winners and pockets of outperformance, but it’s not worth my time anymore to do it daily. If you are winning and enjoying it, cool, keep playing.
I do still hold sizable WIF and POPCAT positions. My general thesis is both of these coins are upside beta to the premier major asset of this “cycle” (SOL). If SOL starts to rip past ATHs and these coins lag or under perform over a long enough timeframe , my thesis will become invalidated and I’ll cut them. You can insert whatever major memes you want here on whatever chain, these are just the ones I happen to have bought early and have big positions in. I don’t rotate for tax reasons and because I’m not sharp enough to know what’s going to outperform when.
Pivoting back to Frame 1, I think crypto offers some of the best wealth building tools in the world. With some effort on defi llama and reading docs, you can regularly get 10%, 15%, or higher yields on capital you probably want to own anyways (stablecoins, majors, etc.)
Things like Meteora’s DLMM, Hawksight, Kamino, JLP/GLP/HLP (perps LPs), Beefy, or even Aura (Balancer Incentivized LP yield) have helped me slowly grow and protect my stack after hitting some home runs.
Alt tokens are fundamentally dogshit and most have 0 reason to exist.
You don’t own any equity in the company that makes any money. “But it’s like owning a stock that doesn’t pay dividends!”. No, it’s not. Shut the fuck up. Legal ownership rights in a successful company is very different than owning some random token that let’s you vote on useless shit.
There is a fundamental decoupling from good products and a good token. LINK might be the best product in crypto. The token is pure fucking hot garbage.
The most financially successful projects in crypto (polymarket, pump.fun, trojan bot), don’t have tokens and have 0 reasons to. For my sake, I hope trojan launches one so I can dump it for free money, but if I was them I just wouldn’t launch one. There’s 0 incentive as the operator of that product.
Tokens should only exist for 2 reasons:
You need the token or the protocol/application doesn’t work. L1s like SOL, ETH fit in here. I assume some DePIN tokens fit this criteria too, but I haven’t spent too much time reading that space. It’s also possible that stuff like CRV/AERO/BAL also fit this category with the way incentives work.
The token is a hard substitute for equity and cash flows and asset rights go to the owners of the tokens. AFAIK, this doesn’t really exist and won’t until there’s a major shift in the regulatory regime.
I do own a couple of alts on spec just because I think other people will think they are more valuable than they are. This is probably a bad take and I should look again and probably sell them to stuff I have an actual thesis on. I also own stuff like AURA because it has a sizable yield in stuff that’s not the token itself.
RWAs make a ton of sense and will probably be the first step in institutions adopting blockchain technology before everything just natively lives onchain. I don’t really know if there’s any opportunity here as a retail participant except spec buying things like Ondo, CHEX, etc.
DePIN makes a ton of common sense from the perspective of having a peer to peer network accomplish a task while providing incentives versus a centralized provider. Phone service, internet, compute power, etc. The key here is making sure the incentives are properly constructed in a manner that provides both a better service from the centralized provider while also being less economic cost to the consumer.
I haven’t read enough about the tokenomics of specific projects like Helium to know whether just buying HNT is a good idea, or the token only functions as some sort of incentive function if you are using the product itself. I like the concepts here though and I think it’s one of crypto’s most promising use cases.
Most crypto games are complete dogshit. And if they aren’t complete dogshit, they are financial games first. For example, Photo Finish Game is probably the best crypto game out there today. It works because the game itself is centered around horse racing, money, gambling. It also works because the team is competent and experienced.
I simply do not buy into the thesis that gamers give a shit about owning their own assets and being able to freely buy and sell them will win over gamers. In fact, I think that’s actually a net negative. People play games to escape and be whimsical. If you want to fuck around but you are accidentally destroying $X of real value every time you do something, that’s a non starter.
I’ve barely touched NFTs. I own one piece of generative art I think was objectively cool and took a gamble on it becoming the next Fidenza type collection.
Mid/low tier PFP projects are probably just dead and never coming back.
I’d buy a punk or a pudgy if I get shit rich enough as a luxury good type buy. I think there will be very few top end PFP collections, everything else a 0, and some art things. The problem for me is I’d rather just buy a watch or rare book collectible than a luxury PFP. To each their own.
Happy Chain Games -
Cartesi -
AO The Computer -
I am very interested in exploring the concept of “daily game loops” in crypto. I’m not trying to “onboard the next one billion users”. The games I build will be extractive (to me) by definition. However, I do think I can provide experiences that are unique and fun that haven’t been explored yet.
I still think this space is relatively uncompetitive in terms of founder and developer talent. Your audience is also a group of users willing to spend a lot of money = a great place to build an indie business.
I also just generally feel better about myself and life when I’m writing code and having fun learning things than experiencing the intense brain rot of combing through dexscreener or twitter figuring out what’s the next thing to trade over 12 hours. The reason I did so much of it was because it was so financially lucrative that passing on it would be insane. Now that I think the edge has waned, I’m excited to get back to slower pace and intellectually stimulating activities like coding and research.
If my thesis is actually correct that the entire financial infrastructure of the future will be built on blockchains somewhat resembling what we have today, it would probably be prudent for future career prospects to learn about these systems deeply.
I have an undergraduate degree in Math and Computer Science and have spent some time learning about cryptography, ZK proofs, etc. and would like to get back to that at some point.
I also think there is deep edge in learning how different protocols work in depth from the standpoint you can connect things that others might miss.
Always on the lookout to farm something that’s liquid with assets I would hold anyways
My bags are generally packed and I’m just continuing to monitor them. My ultimate goal is to eventually transfer all my super risk on assets to stables or majors and protect and compound this wealth with defi tools. If something seems like a slam dunk and I’m around to play it, I’ll play it.