How I became a crypto millionaire by the age of 30, turned it in…

How I became a crypto millionaire by the age of 30, turned it into a $20k/mo money printer… and became free 🗽🌟

December 16th, 2021

Three months ago I was working my ass off trying to make my new health-tech start-up get off the ground, and raise $60k from an unnamed venture accelerator, in order to do that. It wasn’t working. I was putting in 7 days a week. I struggled with my cofounder(s) and I struggled to find clients to commit a single cent, even on paper. I was burning out…

Fast forward three months and I am worth north of $1 million, doing nothing, yet generating an income in excess of $20k, each month. How did this happen? Well, I’m lying. Not about these figures but about how I got there. It wasn’t as easy and fast as I’m making it seem. I put my first money into crypto in 2014, after my geeky developer friend mentioned Bitcoin to me.

Back to the beginnings

My friend was so excited about the potential of this technology that I couldn’t resist and went off to do some research. I didn’t fully understand the inner mechanics but the potential of what this can do to the world and where the price can go, was obvious to me. Back in 2014, I had 5 years of architecture school behind me, with one more to go. I was broke. Well, not really broke, I had some $4.000 in savings, generated over the 23 years of my life so far.

I wasn’t a very calculating person at that time (spending most of my time and money on rubbish) but the binary economics of this decision were clear to me.

Scenario A: I invest all my savings into BTC. In 5-10 years’ time, it goes down to 0. I will have lost all my savings but by that time, I will have graduated and been working for 4–9 years. I will have made this $4k back several times over. I will have made a bold bet that didn’t work and I will have no regrets.
**Scenario B: **I invest all my savings into BTC. In 5–10 years’ time, it goes up 100–1000x. I will have made millions and, needless to say, owe a big thank you to the 23 year-old me!
Scenario C: I pass. In 5–10 years’ time, BTC goes up 100–1000x.
%^@£%:&(£$£&(_!@!%:! Sorry, I had to censure that. :)

I think by now it’s clear that I did invest. And Scenario B is unfolding, as we speak.

What it really means to HODL

The reason why most people who do invest in crypto don’t end up rich is that they can’t hold — or, in the crypto parlance HODL. HODLing is much harder than it sounds. At the time I invested my $4k, the price of a bitcoin was about $600. I got 6.55 BTC. I will never forget that number. Over the next half a year, bitcoin’s price kept steadily declining, until it bottomed out at $152, in January 2015. That’s a 75% loss just like that, before I knew anything about how investment (or crypto) cycles work!

I think a lot of people sold here, or way earlier. I thought it’s a goner but I HOLDed on. I mean fuck it, now that I’ve lost 75% of my life savings, might as well, right? To cope, I stopped following the price too closely, maybe once a month. I had my life and my final year of studies to finish, after all. It took another 18 months (pretty much the entire bear market) for the price to reach $600 again, in June 2016. Yey, much success!

By now I was 25, living in London working in my first real job, and again, way too busy to worry about this too much. I lived a modest life and managed to get my savings back up above what they’ve been when I invested. As to my investment, I was at break-even point on my $4k, two years after I came in. Enter the bull market.

The price kept climbing steadily from here on, until it reached about $1.2k in April 2017. From there on, things went haywire. Everyone who didn’t know what it was up until then started talking about crypto… and putting their own (and their grandmother’s) money into it. Between April and December the price climbed about 16x, until it reached almost $20k at its peak, two weeks before Christmas that year.

Once again, I was too busy to pay much attention. By now, I have quit my (about 1.5 year-long lived) architecture career to join a proptech startup. We were still in the beginnings, and things were very hectic. I was running an operations team working to manage guests and properties 24/7 (literally). We were constantly overworked and understaffed. International expansion to Asia was on the radar. People around me were talking crypto but I had no time to pay serious attention. I was still checking the price once every few weeks only.

I bought in somewhere around the arrow. The long run up to the 2017 bull market, above.

The big fall, and the big rise

Immediately after the market topped out, the price started to tumble. And oh boy, tumble it did! Down to a somewhat stable $6k in June 2018, and then a second bottom of $3.1k in December. That’s down 84% from the top. Once again, most people that got in the last few months before the top sold at a loss, way before it got to this stage. I wasn’t thrilled to see my holdings shrink from (at that time eye-watering) $128k to $20k but hey, I was still up 400% since I invested. That’s a 43% annualised return over 4.5 years — still much better than any bank will ever give you, or what most traders make.

By this time I had more savings and, following the fall, bitcoin started to look cheap to me, once again. Without thinking about it too much, between December 2018 and Jan 2020, I deployed about $82k, to buy another 8.4 BTC, at about $9.750 per coin on average (the price kept going up). My net worth was about 50% in crypto, by the end of this. It seemed about the right balance. And my faith in it was stronger.

At this point I have newly moved to Malaysia to run a much bigger team there, still for the same startup. I was still busy! And I didn’t consider crypto worth too much of my time (even though I did consider it worth putting most of my money into). The price remained mostly flat between $8–10k until October that year, whilst the world was busy dealing with covid (which was supposed to be over by the next month, seemingly forever).

October last year would have been a good time to start to watch the price again, but I was too busy having left my previous startup and trying to launch a new one, this time in Singapore. It was a couple of hell weeks (or hell months!). I don’t know how the price reached $30k by early January this year (2021). My total net worth was now north of $500k (81% in crypto). I’ve noticed. But I really, once again, was too busy to get involved more. I kept hustling on, trying to build my startup and raise that ****ing $60k.

This is a pretty typical crypto market behaviour…

Enter CeFi

By now the DeFi craze has reached relative maturity, and my housemate (non-tech, non-crypto) wouldn’t shut up about yield farming on BSC. I mean, really? I was skeptical. And had no time to investigate. As my startup wasn’t taking off though, and as I had no real income to draw on, I decided to pay at least some attention. Three months ago, at the end of February (with the price of BTC now north of $50k), I spent one weekend researching and ended up opening Nexo and Celsius saving accounts. It’s no DeFi, but it was a step forward, for my (until then dormant) BTC.

I dug deep in my drawer for the pen and paper record of my (by now almost 7 year-old) private keys. Then I dug even deeper on the internet, to figure out how to decrypt them from the BIP38 format, which has been discontinued years ago! After hours of vigorous research, I was in luck. I still remembered my decrypting passphrase and managed to swipe all five of my private keys onto a hot wallet. (Yes, I took A LOT of effort to create good security when setting this up back in 2014). My $600k worth of bitcoin appeared in my hot wallet and my hearth jumped. They were still there. They were real!

From there, I spent the next month slowly figuring out how to set up the right (centralised) savings accounts, so I can end up getting 6% annualised interest on my $600k worth of crypto — essentially giving me an income of $3k / month. This could pay my bills! And I could keep on building my startup, free of guilt. How beautiful this was!

Nexo savings account. The daily accruing interest came to about $100 at that time.

And then DeFi

At the same time, I was starting to get curious about decentralised finance (DeFi) — which was and still is the raging wild west of crypto and the real arena where the adrenaline-powered gambling… uhm I mean investing… happens. My records say I bought my first 178 CAKE (using about $2k worth of my BTC) the last week of March, to test the waters of yield farming. And boy, oh, boy, how did I like those 100+% APRs!

By the 1st of April, I have increased my altcoin fortune to 3.400 CAKE (about $40k), using my bitcoin. Over the next few weeks, I remember the ramp up of watching my monthly income (yields on top of my principal) grow from $3k, to $6k, then $12k… and then $30k. I was converting more and more of by BTC into altcoins, and I liked what I was seeing!

I will post a separate article about the ins and outs of my DeFi yield farming experiments — the setup, investment strategy, risk management, etc, shortly. I was still very conservative with my allocations, overall. All I need to add in for now is that my net worth broke the magic $1M number on the 10th of April, almost exactly 1 month before my 30th birthday. I know this is a technicality, but it definitely gave me this extra jolt of joy, and victory. By now, I have stopped building my startup, and found myself focusing on researching and playing with this space full-time.

Definitely happy to open my blockfolio tracker app to this kind of home screen!

Stay tuned for my next article, detailing how I’m generating my $20k income, doing yield farming

I’m saying $20k and not 30, because since the prices of all cryptos dipped 50% this month, my income figure has also dropped. I won’t focus on this too much, as knowing the markets somewhat by now, I believe this is just a technical correction, and the current bull run shall continue, higher on. In the meantime, $20k is more than enough to pay my bills and leave me with plenty extra cash to keep reinvesting, as I keep learning more about this space.

Whilst I will keep working hard to keep getting further, it is a good time to look back and evaluate my key takeaways from the last 7 years, to see how I got to this spot -

Patience and calm. I watched my holdings dip 75% almost right after I bought. I held. Then I watched them dip 85% again in 2018. I held. And I bought more. I’m not even counting all the other 20–40% dips in-between.
Timing is king. Yes, I was lucky that I heard about bitcoin in 2014. But it was my decision to seize the day and not wait a couple of years to see if the technology proves itself. Then again, in 2019, when the price was low, I topped up. It was the right time do so, even though the returns were far from immediate.
Less is often more. I know many people who at some point became active traders in crypto. All of them either lost money, or made several times smaller gain than they would have if they just held BTC, as I did. The first rule of trading is — don’t lose money. Don’t trade the market if you lack the experience (which I can almost guarantee you do), or the patience to wait for the right opportunities.

Most crypto buyers :)

That’s it! If you enjoyed this article, ➡️ find me on twitter 🐦. Feel free to also follow me here or clap, like this -

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