I got into crypto a year and a half ago by buying NFTs, it feels like a lifetime ago.

A few friends of mine had made money by buying early in 2021 and introduced me to it in the summer. I was deep in tradfi at that moment and had only very little money to spare so I begrudgingly bought some random twitter guy’s drop. The price went 2x right after the drop, and I won one additional NFT by being active on the discord. A few days later the price went 40x and ETH was going up, I was hooked.

I started being active on twitter, being very active on discord, the whole shebang. The money I made then funded my living cost for the next few months.

3 months later I’d made some extra money from other drops and airdrops but I was fed up with the chase. Scouring discords to get some alpha, trying to be in early, and most importantly the whole cult-like vibe that NFT projects had, and still do were all tyring.

By then I’d heard about Flashbots - I didn’t know what MEV was yet - I understood it as a way to get transactions through without appearing in the mempool, I thought I could use it as a way to front run the drops and paying gas fees only if I’m successful. Of course I didn’t understand how anything really worked, I tried importing ABIs and use the Flashbots RPC (or whatever I was trying to do then), sending a lot of transactions at once, it didn’t yield anything. I tried to put in production once and I missed out on a very lucrative drop trying to run that bot, on the other a friend made around 100K$ in under 10 minutes only using Metamask. However I’d had a peak into one of the many fascinating facets of this ecosystem, I decided to learn more about smart contracts.

I started learning Solidity and playing around with Openzeppelin’s smart contracts and even though I already had experience coding in Python, C++ and a little Java for some reason back then coding a NFT smart contract seemed like a high stakes project. An error in the code will actually cost you money.

Looking back it’s pretty ridiculous, it all comes down to this simple line of code:

import "@openzeppelin/contracts/token/ERC721/ERC721.sol";

Smart contract developers for NFT projects were getting paid tens sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for - essentially - writing that one line of code. So I wanted in. I worked on a P2E game as a side project for a little while, by then the early signs of the bear market were in. I learned a lot working on that project but it never panned out.

While working on the P2E smart contracts I read Ethereum is a Dark Forest , I went down the MEV rabbit hole then read the Uniswap white paper , the Curve white paper, the AAVE white paper, an article on DEFI liquidations, all of it was fascinating and so much more transparent than anything I’d encountered in finance before.

If you wanted to know what was happening you’d just go on Etherscan, look at the code and query whatever data you’re interested in. Even the private fields were not private, all the memory’s accessible. A truly open, transparent and decentralized finance.

And for all the noise that’s made about how the UX in crypto is terrible, I think the UX in Tradfi is worse, you have to give all your personal information, wait for opening hours, wait for them to review, have their permission to send money to a new person or somebody they deemed suspect, get questioned and basically be treated as a financially illiterate person by some paper pusher whose only accomplishment was to finish reading the employee handbook. Gosh I hate bureaucracy. Opening Metamask, signing transactions and safeguarding the majority of your tokens in a Ledger or a multisig is heaven compared to the Tradfi experience.

I decided to go into DEFI and do it professionally this time, a few months later I got recruited. Reflecting on it today timing-wise it’s like going into finance in the middle of the 2008 crisis, you get to see it all from the inside.

In the coming year I’l be sharing some stories about events in DEFI, quant and math stuff, code.

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