This article is a short reflective piece, a narration of how I went from a nocoiner to spending a sizeable chunk of my time researching, farming and investing in Crypto.
While my first interaction with Crypto took place back in 2017 for reasons I will not address here, my interest in Crypto as an asset class began in spring 2020, in the midst of the first of many lockdowns.
I was working in real estate at the time so had a lot of time on my hands (no one had any interest in buying properties as the world they knew appeared to be crumbling around them). With all this free time I took to educating myself about financial markets, a 30% dip in the S&P500 seemed like a good time to get involved! Sooner or later this interest led me to look to Crypto as a more interesting and unchartered alternative to the boomer markets. While I had been exposed to Bitcoin previously, I had never considered its investment thesis or even Crypto more broadly as an investable asset class.
Like many, I was initally drawn to the hard-money, sovereign money narrative which Bitcoin offers and I was avidly reading and consuming the content of Bitcoin maxis like Peter McCormack and other such characters. At the time (mid-late 2020), I saw the combination of these narratives and the unprecedented money printing we saw from central banks as a strong reason to buy Bitcoin, so I did.
With some significant skin in the game, I spent the following months diving deeper into Crypto and the underlying technology, consuming a serious amount of content (written/audo/visual) about blockchains, smart contracts and decentralised finance. Unfortunately despite my deep research, I only allocated small % amounts to some of the Q1 2021 big winners like AAVE as I felt ‘safer’ in my BTC/ETH positions. This is the first of many mistakes which I will address towards the end of this piece.
In mid April 2021 I made my first on-chain transaction which was somewhat of a watershed moment for me. I maintain that you cannot hold Crypto with conviction without transacting on-chain and actually using the technology you are implicitly speculating on. Shortly following this I was caught over-exposed in the May crash which was a painful but formative experience.
The past 6 months or so have been by far my most successful with regards to portfolio performance and my formation as a Crypto investor/farmer as I have attempted to learn from my mistakes, identify trends earlier than most and let my position sizing correlate directly with conviction. I dug deeper into farming, furthering my understanding of the opportunity set, farming methodologies and portfolio construction while continuing to develop my network. For now, I am mostly a humble multichain farmer while keeping an eye on which narratives/trends are likely to emerge over the coming quarters and allocating accordingly. My Crypto-related goals for the coming months are to further my technical understanding and skills (learning to code), expand my network, more deeply tune into market psychology/sentiment and to dedicate myself full time to this craft be it as an independent analyst or within a leading firm.
While my journey is young and my experience limited relative to others in the space, I do feel as though my mistakes have been formative and that the conclusions I have drawn by reflecting on them might be useful for a new or seasoned participant alike:
get on-chain asap; not much explanation needed, you can’t expect to understand Crypto without using it and most of the highest potential opportunities are only accessible on-chain. By the time something is easily accessible, everyone is talking about it and you can buy it on Binance, you are most definitely not early. Some basic farming tools;
vfat.tools
baller.netlify.app
app.fund.movr.network
take performance reporting seriously; keeping track of portfolio performance and allocations on a weekly basis has been game changing for me. I propose denominating in USD, BTC and ETH. If your portfolio is not going up in BTC and ETH, you’re taking more risk and spending more time for no reason.
explore/investigate everything; there are countless instances where I have seen something interesting, taken a quick look and left it at that. Weeks later that opportunity has performed incredibly well. Bottom line is that in Crypto curiosity pays huge dividends. This also applies to actually doing research and digging in; the markets are so inefficient that simply consuming the available information about projects/roadmaps/catalysts can be a major source of αlpha.
farm; being an active farmer, bridging to new chains and searching for yield exposes you to new chains/trends early. E.g., upon the announcement of the NEAR incentive program on October 25th, you could have bridged to the chain (twitter.com/ChulieCap/status/1452685907077869573), begun farming the native tokens and enjoyed the recent pump the entire ecosystem has experienced. Farming opens your mind to these opportunities, allows you to play with the actual chains/applications in question and consequently form an opinion about their UX and potential relative to other chains/apps.
learn to live in the future; applies to all forward looking markets but it certainly pays to develop a forward looking mindset, mapping out the potential narratives or future catalysts. E.g., We know (/hope) that the ETH2 Merge will be taking place around Q3 this year, so what might be the coincident narratives surrounding this? If ETH is up, ETH L2/scaling coins and staking coins (e.g., $LDO/$RPL) may be up more. Mapping opportunities and planning ahead can guide allocations, rather than being subject to feeling the FOMO of missing the flavour of the day on Crypto Twitter (CT).
twitter/discord; CT and discord groups are the beating hearts of Crypto and both represent a sensational information source.
My learnings have been greatly aided by the resources I have consumed, along with the links above, the following list is non-exhaustive but should be a great start for anyone looking to learn more about Crypto and/or dive into the deep-end: (in no particular order)
Thanks, check out my Twitter for more musings in the future: twitter.com/chulie_b