The Playbook

I’ve been a market participant in crypto since early 2017. I’ve made almost every mistake in the book. I worked in multiple web3 startups, was a part of several NFT communities, made and lost over 7 figures collectively.

Now I share my playbook so that you can speed up your journey or maybe learn something new. I’m leaving this primarily for my friends and family but others might find this interesting too. Enjoy!

On Assumptions

Crypto is an outlier industry with the highest ROI profile across any sector on earth. And thus it should be treated with a very specific set of beliefs and assumptions.

How you approach this market will determine your results. Based on my experience, these are a few assumptions required for you to understand what you’re dealing with here:

1. Crypto is a global 24/7 casino where every single player is trying to extract money from each other. The only way to survive here is by working together with pros/experts that actually make big money. Having a lonely wolf mentality or joining the wrong group will drain your pocket sooner than you think. Learn to identify winners and stick to them. Ignore everyone else.

2. Crypto is the most emotional and volatile market on the planet. It will always try to wear you out or scare you out. Your ability to remain stoic regardless of what’s happening is the only way to be profitable here. Besides, volatility is the price you pay for outsized returns so don’t run away from volatility, embrace it and learn how to use it to your advantage.

3. It takes at least two full cycles (8 years) to properly build wealth in crypto (7-9 figs). Learn to be patient and think long term. What helped me the most is approaching life as a business and always planning for tough times. Those are inevitable. I recommend keeping your job until you can prove that you can be profitable consistently and ideally have at least 6-12 months worth of savings to maintain your lifestyle in case something goes wrong. Also, be aware that many web3 startups overextend themselves during good times too and they will fire you a second their cash reserves are low. I’ve been there, it sucks.

4. Passive income in crypto is a scam. Projects, protocols and even games will often masquerade rewards via staking, yield products, etc. Don’t trust those. The smart contract or centralized party risks are not worth 4% or even 10% APY. You should always try to minimize your risks and stay liquid at all times. Big crashes (e.g. Luna $41B -> $0) can happen in less than 24h. Prioritize an ability to sell fast, avoid any lockups when possible.

5. Crypto is a forward looking market. People buy with an expectation of something happening in the future: major announcement, conference, product release, airdrop, TGE, etc. Always be aware of the main reasons behind certain price action. Buy early enough, sell a few days before the major event happens. The best long-term investments are coins with everlasting thesis, not event based or time limited thesis.

On Cycles

Bitcoin and the entire crypto market operates in 4-year cycles. Knowing where you are in the cycle will help you to navigate this market with a long-term view and approach it from a mature perspective, instead of a gambling one.

This is a simplified version of bitcoin cycles. We have recently completed “Corretion Phase 1” (last update April 1st, 2025).

Below are some videos that will explain a bigger macro picture and show where we are in the market. TLDR: follow the global liquidity.

On Extraction Flow

This industry is very hierarchical. There’s always someone who’s trying to dump on you. VCs, angels, founders and KOLs typically have the best entries and allocations. Many of them will often try to push their own agenda, fake narratives and promote overvalued coins with no substance and users. Everyone is pumping their own bags after all.

Knowing this, you need to find a way to advance in the hiararchy pyramid to get the earliest entries possible. You have the following options:

1. Join high level networks, groups, NFT communities, memberships and masterminds that give access to early deals at good valuations. Most of them are paid but at least you know what you’re paying for - access. The only concern here is that most projects that launched in 2023-2025 were listed below their last investment round price and then came down 90% due to lack of demand and oversupply of tokens. The angel investment trend is declining but you can catch some outliers if you know what you’re doing.

2. Focus strictly on fairly launched projects with no VC or KOL backing. Many projects today are self-funded or have a very minimal investment. That allows them to focus on building a real product, instead of getting pressured by big VCs to lauch a token faster. By having a full control on how you can distribute the tokens, those projects can be very lucrative for early participants. Examples: Hyperliquid.

3. Become very good at thesis-driven investments. This implies that you find bottomed projects that have a big gap between their value and mcap. You need to be able to think multiple steps and multiple months in advance for this to work. It’s the most rewarding skill there is.

4. Ignore everything and grind onchain in the trenches. Many people make 6 and even 7 figures by following newly launched coins across various chains. With this approach, you need to be super early (10k-100k mcap) and get out fast but always keep a moonbag in case of 100x+. It’s a hardcore PvP game where most people lose, unfortunately. So unless you have a very high stress tolerance, consider yourself a 1% trader and do it with other 1% traders, the odds to win are very low. But I’ve seen people make crazy money, it’s possible.

5. Build your own systems to extract money from this market. Airdrop and social campaign farming operations, gaming guilds (if/when they are back), NFT whitelists, etc. are some of the examples. You rely on your skills of navigating this market and looking for mispriced opportunities that can be automated or delegated. You can also do them yourself if you have a lot of free time and not a lot of capital.

On Portfolio Allocation

Portfolio allocation is probably the most important thing when it comes to growing your capital over time. A lot of people never learn the value of having a properly balanced portfolio. They want to make money faster and add too much risk at the wrong time. Resist that temptation and you’ll do just fine.

An ideal portfolio allocation looks as follows:

• 70% bitcoin. Bitcoin is the biggest and the most important asset in crypto. It is a digital gold and a store of value. The goal is to accumulate more BTC over time. My biggest lesson - don’t touch or trade BTC, hold long-term.
• 10% stables. Always keep stables to deploy during mass liquidation events or when you find promising opportunities. Cash is the most underrated position and patience the most underrated skill out there.
• 10% L1 casino. Each cycle there’s always a new form of speculation and activity (ICOs, NFTs, DeFi, games, memecoins) and thus there’s always a chain that hosts the biggest casino for a given form of speculation. Bet on that asset until a big major event happens. L1s top when speculation stops.
• 10% home runs. Home runs are your big bets in crypto. Those require a clear thesis and a lot of patience. They are risky and take a longer time to play out, but if you know what you’re doing, that’s your 50-100x opportunities.

To simplify it, make it hard to fuck it up - keep majority of your portolio in BTC, not altcoins. Add BTC and alts during bear markets only. Don’t touch BTC, sell alts 9-18 months later when the market is overheated. Do not overcomplicate it. Big money is made from holding a handful of big positions for a long time, not executing 100 smaller trades.

The reason why people often neglect this allocation is because they start with little or no money. So for them this allocation doesn’t make sense. That’s why they try to chase super high risk opportunities and sometimes they get lucky.

The problem becomes when their portfolio gets substantially big but they still ignore the basics. That’s how fortunes are lost, unfortunately. Never go against the basics if you want to play a long term game. Always remember that.

On Skill-Based Environment

Over the years, the crypto market has evolved from a luck-based game into a skill-based arena. The times of buying random coins and hitting crazy multiples are gone. Here’s what changed and how you can adapt:

• Strategic Bitcoin Reserve reiterated the importance of holding BTC as the main part of your portfolio. There will always be a constant bid for BTC from different nation states, corporations, etc. The demand for ETH and/or other alts has not been proven yet. Therefore, holding BTC is the safest and most logical way to compound your wealth over the next decade or two.

• Despite SOL strength and increased activity, BTC still has outperformed SOL in 2024. This is why the absolute minimum outperformance you need in your alt is 3x on a BTC chart. The question becomes why hold anything besides BTC in this case if most alts can’t give this kind of returns.

• Previous altseasons had a very limited amount of tokens and thus had market-wide pumps for 1-2 months with hundreds of tokens doing 10-100x. The future of altseasons is moving towards continuous, sector-specific pockets of market outperformance, with faster dilution times and smaller pump windows, in a heavily skill-based PvP environment with brief moments of PvE. Skill will play a crucial role here, so you need to get better and more connected.

• Pumpfun democratized access for launching coins and destroyed a demand for altcoins at the same time. It’s fascinating how one infra product can cause a massive dilution and attract lots of scammers, grifters, and professional ruggers. The best way to capture this value is to own the casino where those projects are getting launched, not the chips. Dilution affects those who own the chips, not the casino. Tokens that are house (e.g. SOL, Virtuals, Hype) can escape the impact of the dilution to a large degree. Note, those casinos rotate constantly between different sectors so avoid holding for too long. You need to learn to sniff the topping signals and a shift towards a new trend/narrative.

• Solana extraction meta has shown that celebrities and even governments will extract money from you without hiding their intentions. Nobody cares about anyone anymore and you should be ok with that. The only way to heal this industry is to stop giving money to rich or famous people.

• Old coins have underperformed this cycle, many of them went down to new lows. That means that you should be buying only new coins created recently. They are easier to pump because there are no bagholders from previous cycles and they have no chart on the left. Many projects will rename or rebrand just to have a fresh clean chart. Sometimes it works but the history is still there.

• There’s always a bull run somewhere, even during the most depressing times. Look for outliers that hold their price or go up amid a river of blood. Look for new metas and new ways of making money because I can assure you they exist.

On Diversification

Never fall into a trap of having a well-diversified portfolio. Diversification is how you protect your capital, not how you make it. It’s one of the biggest lies that most KOLs feed us to make sure we buy all of the tokens they’ve invested in early or got for free.

Your portfolio should be clean and contain 3-5 positions max. BTC, the L1 of this cycle, 2-3 home runs/alts/memes. That’s it. There’s no way you can keep up with more than 5 positions anyways, especially if they reside on different chains and belong to different sectors that pump in different times.

Simplicity, clarity and ability to sell fast are the keys here. If you have 20+ tokens across 7 chains, you won’t be able to keep up with any of them. You need to get to the level where you don’t even need to trade daily, weekly or monthly anymore. You make a couple of decisions a year and you let them do their thing. Study how Raoul Paul manages his portfolio, you’ll learn a lot.

Lastly, based on personal experience, gaming is a sector that will rekt your portfolio the most. There are countless games, infra projects, NFT collections, nodes, metaverses, questing platforms, chains, etc. The odds of finding the winner are very low so you kind of have to diversify. This goes against my core philosophy so if you don’t understand this sector deeply, simply avoid it. Safer that way.

An example of over diversified portfolio:

On Home Runs

Home runs or high conviction bets are my favorite type of investments as they require lots of patience. Most people want to get rich quick so this will not work for them. I’m the opposite. I’m willing to wait for many months if needed for my thesis to play out.

There are three main components of a home run. I call them a holy trifecta:

1. Good entry. Most alts and memecoins have no fundamentals, they merely have technical capabilities or ponzinomics. That means that buying alts and memes is about asymmetry, not about fundamentals in itself. As you recall, every VC and every market participant is fighting for a good entry so that they can dump on the next person. Your goal is to find already established projects within $2M-$20M mcap range. You buy them in the bottom of a range and you let them run to hundreds of millions or multi billions, depending on the market conditions, sentiment, narrartive, and liquidity.

2. Conviction. Conviction is your level of belief and confidence in your thesis. You build conviction by doing more research and understanding the project’s upcoming catalysts more than anyone else. Conviction allows you to hold longer and ignore the temporary price fluctuations, inevitable fud attacks, liquidation events and 80-90% drawdowns.

3. Size. Most people never make big money because they allocate pennies into dozens of projects and dilute their focus, energy and capital. Instead, you could make highly concentrated bets with a high payoff potential. Based on my research, $10k-$15k is an optimal amount for a good home run. This is exactly how bonkguy, crash, murad and many other folks have made 7-8 figures on a single trade. This amount is enough to accumulate 0.5-1% of supply around $2M-$5M mcap. Those are approximate numbers of course and they depend on your current available capital. Don’t forget, your total home run allocations should not exceed more than 10% of your portfolio.

There are a few things for this method to work:

• Have all three keys in place. One of the keys is off and the whole thing doesn’t work. Being bullish with a massive bag on the wrong thing will make your wallet empty. Good entry with pocket change will make you feel both incredible and miserable at the same time. Decent size with low conviction and you’ll end up selling early out of fear or panic. You need to use three keys at the same time to unlock a home run. Those keys are your tripod, a holy trifecta, etc.

• Learn to see value in projects before others do. It’s one of the hardest skills to develop but it pays off the most. If nobody agrees with you, you might have stumbled upon something interesting. Your goal is to learn to apply second and third-order consequences in your thesis. You make money by positioning multiple steps ahead into something you believe has a high probability of occurring but very few people understand now.

• Have a clear written thesis that you can come back to during tough market conditions or harsh pullbacks. You need to have enough reasons to hold and see a bigger vision others aren’t willing to see yet.

• Have invalidation conditions to make sure you don’t hold something that is no longer has a homerun potential. Things change fast so you have to always think if it’s worth holding a given token.

• Be early or wealthy enough so that you can accumulate 0.5-5% of supply without messing up your portfolio allocation. Everyone with 8+ figs net worth in crypto know that the key is to own a chunk of supply long-term, not to trade shitcoins daily. Study why CZ holds more than 60% of BNB supply.

• Focus only on projects that have a multi billion dollar narrative and a high KOL tweet/shill probability. This mindset will help you to be extremely picky and have a very high hit rate. My KOL aims are always Elon, Vitalik and CZ. I don’t aim less, even tho you can use this method without the big KOL trio.

• Be emotionally strong and be able to stomach 6-7 figs price swings on a monthly basis. Not many are willing to do that, which is why this is not for everyone.

• Be patient. For long-term positions, you almost always have enough time to buy lower. Also, most big coins take more than a year to fully explode. Sometimes nothing happens for months, then months happen in days. If you can’t hold, you won’t get rich.

• Understand that conviction cannot be bought, borrowed or outsourced, only earned. Developing strong conviction to hold during drawdowns starts with developing a strong, objective thesis and telling yourself that your thesis is the only thing that matters regardless of short-term price action.

• Learn the distinction between emotional attachment and conviction. You buy because you want to sell at some point, not become somebody else’s exit liquidity.

• Allocate the same amount into each of your homeruns. Don’t oversize for no reason to avoid mental pressure.

• Do not size in or DCA more when the price and your conviction go up, and your thesis turns out to be a correct one. If you’re allocated into a coin early, that should be it. Do not mess up your good entry with emotions. At the same time, do not DCA on the way down, catching a falling knife is never a good idea.

A few examples of a clearly written thesis for a good home run / high conviction bet:

• DeFi Renaissance thesis by Artur
• Social Currencies thesis by Luka Netz
• Bobo thesis by Crash
• Toshi thesis by Daniel

On NFTs

NFTs are probably one of the most confusing assets in crypto. They are typically associated with art, collectibles, tickets, or memberships.

I love NFTs but I can’t recommend them to everyone because of how illiquid they are.

The main function of NFTs is to flex your wealth or status. Usually NFTs become big at the end of bull runs because that’s when people tend to park their money into something flashy. They become rich on paper first and then put that wealth into NFTs to prove that they’ve made it.

It’s good in theory. The problem becomes when you’re trying to sell your JPEGs and nobody wants them because they aren’t desirable or valuable enough to pay a premium price 24/7.

NFTs usually operate in very short time pockets where they have a big surge of volume and interest. That’s usually a good and the only time to sell. I got over 6 figs stuck in countless gaming assets that went to 0 because I didn’t understand how illiquid this asset class is. Therefore, be very careful.

My favorite way of using NFTs is to approach them as home runs and accumulate a chunk of supply when nobody wants them. Then sell by the end bull run. I love this method, it’s boring and fun at the same time.

Lastly, here are a few interesting use cases for NFTs that you could explore:

• Build a substantial portfolio of high-end art and historic NFTs (Beeple, Xcopy, Cryptopunks, etc) to catch one of the biggest wealth transfer opportunities in the history: $3T -> $100T over the next 5-10 years.

• Join high-level networks to get access to certain people or opportunities.

• Become an expert in flipping NFTs on new chains: SUI, Abstract, Monad, etc.

• Hold airdroppable NFTs to get various airdrops for free: Pudgy Penguins, Milady, etc.

On Memecoins

Memecoins is the purest asset that exists out there. Some people love it, others hate it. Regardless of your opinion about this sector, memes are here to stay and will continue to expand their market share.

The best resource to understand memecoins is Murad’s keynote during token 2049.

You can watch it later but the main idea is that oversupply and lack of interest in VC tokens created a big demand for fairly-launched coins that you can buy at ground zero. People are tired of being dumped on and they want to participate early in something that is more fun, yet has the same 100x potential.

Memecoins offer all that.

The problem with the memecoins space is that it becomes oversaturated too fast so you need to be extremely careful on which memes you’re betting on.

There are a few categories that look particularly interesting:

• Mascots of new chains. Many new chains have no tokens and the only way to bet on their growth is by investing in the corresponding face or mascot that represents a given chain. Examples: Shib or Pepe on ETH, Floki on BSC, Toshi or Brett on Base, Abster or Noot on Abstract. Buying the #1 meme of a chain is a timeless strategy because it’s not even memecoin investing. It’s a call option on the probability of the mass adoption for particular chain. If the chain is growing, those inflows will inevitably enter the main memes on that chain.

• Classic memes with high cultural impact. Those are the memes that existed for over a decade outside of crypto and became a big part of the internet culture. They are more likely to become multi-cycle memes due to a large mindshare and cult-like community they’ve built over the years. Newly launched forced memes are unlikely to stick around. Hence, bet on the culture. Examples: Pepe, Bobo, Joe, etc.

• Brands. Those are the coins that build a proper media presence and understand the attention economy well. They know how to tell good stories and as a result they attract a decent audience. Their focus is to build something that will last long-term and become a part of your daily lifestyle or entertainment routine.

• Movements. GME-style coins that empower people to do something big.

All other coins are not worth holding imo. Short-term speculation - maybe, long-term hold - hard pass.

The biggest danger of memecoins is their extreme volatility. It is normal for memecoins to have occasional 80-90% pullbacks and long accumulation periods that exhaust holders. That’s why a good entry is everything here. If you enter too late during the euphoria phase, you’re guaranteed to lose money.

On Starting From Scratch

• Airdrops are one of the best forms of building your capital if done correctly. Play games, test new chains and protocols, complete tasks and eventually you’ll get rewarded. Be very picky with what you test tho. Many projects will use your time to boost their metrics and give you nothing in return. Focus on projects with cultish communities, superior products, and some form of novelty.

• Apply to become a streamer on Abstract and play Abstract games in your free time. This is the next big opportunity imo.

• Contribute to projects for free, get a part time gig as a moderator or ambassador. Work your way towards a full-time job. Build your portfolio from there.

• Get early into new chains. There are many interesting opportunities when the chain is fresh, such as its mascot/face/main meme or the main liquidity protocol. You will also build your participation score that might be useful in the long-term.

• Use onchain trading in the uptrend to catch a big win. Be careful tho, it’s the riskiest way of making money there is.

• In your early days, accumulate lessons, not capital. Fail more, try more, acquire more knowledge from people who have made and lost a lot. That will allow you to prevent the same mistakes when it’s your turn to deal with larger sums of money.

• Never give up. Crypto is a very generious market. You can lose everything multiple times before your biggest comeback. All you need is one big opporunity and you’re set for life.

On Basics

• Everyone pays their tuition fee in this market. Your goal is to make as many mistakes as possible with the least cost per mistake and somehow find a way to never repeat those mistakes.

• Build your foundation during bear markets, rip the rewards during bull markets. You need to know which season of life and which season of market you’re currently in. Preparation is one of the most important seasons that most people miss and thus remain empty handed despite a glorios bull run.

• The market is a mirror and will show you who you truly are. All your problems will reveal themselves sooner or later. Fix them first. Then go make some money.

• Tokens are not the most important thing, process is. You can lose a lot of money by purchasing a great token at the wrong time. Focus on building a network, improving your mindset and strategy, learning fundamentals, building systems, acquiring skills. Once you have that, the right coins will come to you.

• Make fewer decisions. The more decisions you make, the lower the chances of making money because you’re doing something that is more difficult. Over trading, over holding, over sizing, over minting, over farming, and over rotating are the byproducts of doing more. Be very selective and raise your standards for what a quality project looks like.

• Be flexible. This industry changes too fast. If you can’t maintain the same rythm, expect to be eliminated. A lot of people and liquid funds missed out on many big opportunities because their mindset, approach and actions are fixed. Being stubborn and slow are the reasons many are underperforming.

• You will not get fulfilled by making a lot of money from crypto. You’d be surprised how many people lose their purpose and turn into drugs and alcohol after they make it. If you were blessed with a fortune, focus on other aspects of life: health, relationships, skills, business, etc.

• In bull runs, mcap is a meme. Things can go from $5B to $50B in a few days. Low supply on exchanges and high demand from the general public are the only things that matter in up-only environment. Big unlocks in bull runs are fugazi as well. High demand will eat your unlocks like a pack of candies.

• Stay humble. The market will find a way to punish you at some point. Nobody can get it right forever. One day you will be wrong. That day will remind you that nobody is invincible and arrogance is one of the worst human qualities. Be respectful to others. Don’t be a dick but don’t let naysayers stop you.

On Strategy

• If you find a new 0→1 primitive or a new token distribution model and you have a chance to participate, do it but join the first wave of euthanasia rollercoaster only. That’s where most money is made. First movers set trends, copycats oversaturate them. Examples: ICOs, play-to-earn, tap-to-earn, airdrops, presidential memes.

• Learn and accept normies’ psychology. Unit bias and price targets are both important and go hand in hand. A coin should either be cheap enough to buy millions with $50 ($0.0000123) or it needs to have ambitious targets for people to believe in ($10, $100, $1000).

• Focus on coins that show strength and perform well in a tough market. Favor performance over fundamentals. Always account for the opportunity cost of not selling garbage or slow-movers earlier.

• Follow the trend until the end. Your ability to sense the beginning of a new trend and the end of the current trend will separate you from the rest.

• Spend 80% of your time focusing on high-leverage activities. Do not neglect your sleep and your overall health. Staring at charts longer will not make your coins go up more.

• Cut losers fast. Add to winners. Let your winners run. Do not rotate your winners.

• Follow liquidity and big money. Track volume and interest across new chains. Find the outliers. They are likely to be the winners of this particular cycle.

On Early Stage Investing

• Invest in presales late in a bear market or early bull to get the lowest valuations. Avoid investing at the peak of the bull.

• Active contribution is one of the most overlooked strategies when it comes to investing in crypto. Early-stage crypto projects need support across various disciplines including technical work, marketing, business development, community management, and more. By offering your skills, no matter how niche or broad, you position yourself not just as a passive investor but as an integral part of a project’s growth. Advising or contributing at the ground level, particularly for projects yet to secure funding, often allows you to negotiate higher token equity. Gaining early access and actively supporting projects you genuinely believe in can lead to substantial, life-changing outcomes. That said, there’s way more upside than just looking at charts all day, especially when capital is limited.

• If you have access to good deals within your network, use it. But be very selective. Remember, 99% of projects don’t need a token. Also, the project itself doesn’t make the deal perfect. Bad terms, wrong timing or weak thesis can turn a good deal into a terrible one.

• Bet on teams, not projects. Prioritize folks who put user experience and execution quality above all.

• Avoid projects with red flags. VCs don’t want to call out bad actors because there’s no upside or incentive for them. Having a toxic reputation for talking bad stuff about projects all the time can cut off VCs from future deal flow, so they stay silent. That’s why scams can be very big.

• Look for products that create fanatical experience. If someone tells you I cannot live without this, you’re into something. Study that, engage with that. Invest if possible.

On Buying

• Buy BTC during bear market bottoms or mass liquidation events only. This is the simplest strategy that anyone can use to compound their wealth over many years with little or no stress. Note, bottoms take multiple weeks or months to form so you will always have enough time to accumulate at good prices.

• Low volume and low volatility are usually good times for accumulating. Pumps are for selling.

• It is impossible to buy the exact bottom or sell the exact top. Stick to DCA within a key range.

• Buy alts and memes at the bottom of a multi-month range only. Considering it’s a good asset, you’re buying at the best time possible as most sellers have left, capitulated, liquidated or given up already.

• Allocate your funds when there’s an asymmetric upside, not when you feel comfortable. There needs to be enough gap in the profit between entry and exit so that it justifies the risk that it carries if the position goes lower.

• Be active when it’s needed the most. Buy peak mindshare projects when there’s blood, fear, fud. You can’t go back in time to ask for a better entry. Deploy money first, do less important things later. Their stop loss or panic sell should be your entry.

• Get early in coins that aren’t listed on many exchanges and don’t have a positive consensus on social media yet. The interest in buying should decrease as the coin goes up and more people are talking about it. Not the other way around.

• Shitty conference locations and lack of attendies are good bottoming signals and buying opportunities.

• People typically discuss revenue during bear markets or local bottoms. You will never hear about revenue in real bull markets and massive altseasons. Act accordingly.

On Selling / Taking Profits

• Taking a profit means selling into stables or bank acc, not rotating into another coin.

• Sell into pumps and massive volume only.

• Have a clear exit strategy and a decent tax setup that is close to 0. Take profits regularly. Pain of less profit is always better than pain of losing everything.

• Take profits more often. Cash out 10% every time you feel like your position is getting too big. Move it off crypto and see how real money feels. Do something good for people you care about.

• Reduce your risk and do not allocate more money into the market at the later stages of the bull. There’s a lot of downside risk at this point and almost no upside.

• Understand that you will never be able to buy the exact top or bottom. The key to making money consistently over a long time horizon is to capture 6/8th of the trend.

• Automate and schedule your cash-out process, if possible. Develop good relationships with banks in advance. It takes more time than you think.

• Cycle tops happen when people forget there are bear markets and they cannot see a bear case no matter what data you feed to them. When you see this kind of behavior, start taking profits aggressively.

On Preserving Your Capital

• Every time you make money, raise the minimum you fall back on. You make $10k, set aside $2k. You make $50k, buy a car for $15k. You make $400k, get an apartment for $100k. This strategy will prevent you from getting zeroed out and allow you to fall back on something. Always raise your minimum.

• Make your wins count. If you make $300k, set aside $280k and trade with $20k. Instead of what most people do, they start trading bigger and give their gains back and more.

• Know your replacement rate. If you were to lose everything today and it takes you a year to get it back, then avoid making mistakes you cannot come back from. Lower your risk and do not put your life savings into one trade or new unestablished projects, aka memes.

• Distance yourself from money when you have a big win, just in case you have the urge to spend it all. Make it hard to move that money back into the market. This is your insurance to never start from zero ever again.

• Half of getting rich is staying rich. Don’t upgrade your lifestyle to match your paper wealth after a historic bull market. You will become a big target very fast by doing that anyways, so keep your wealth to yourself.

• Never stop learning. You have to grow alongside your bag, otherwise that money will go back to someone who can handle it better.

• Have good security measures both online and IRL. Protect your coins because there’s always someone who wants to take them from you. Do not blindly tell anyone about your involvement in crypto. Stay low key. Death threats are a real thing.

On holding vs trading

Crypto is a market that encourages people to trade frequently. The only issue is that trading is hard and only 1% of traders make any money long-term.

Most traders have not outperformed buying and holding the S&P 500. Even fewer traders have outperformed buying and holding BTC. The general crowd tend to lose everything or end up in debt if they pick trader’s route, a sad reality most influencers will never mention to you.

That’s why I will never endorse day trading. I will always favor long-term thesis-based investments aka home runs above anything else.

Besides, people who do TA will never be able to catch 100x-1000x in size. They get lost in the sauce and don’t see the Big Picture. The key to wealth is to hold top coins within top themes for 12+ months.

The reason why a multi-month hold is important is that crypto assets typically pump in three explosive waves with substantial pullbacks/cooldowns in between. Examples from the previous cycle:

SOL

Cryptopunks

Every bull run top themes and coins are different. That is normal, get used to it and allocate your capital accordingly. Examples:

• 2017: Alts, ETH, ICOs
• 2021: DeFi, GameFi, Alt L1s, Metaverse, NFTs
• 2025: Memecoins, AI, RWA

Your job is to identify the top themes of this bull run early enough, buy the corresponding best coins one time, and hold until the third pump is finished.

You can and should take profits consistently but the main point is that big money is made by being a little bit more patient and understanding all upcoming catalysts that will drive second and third waves of pumps.

Traders will never understand this and might even find this unreasonable. And that’s ok. They favor playing a short-term 24/7 staring contest against sharks and bots. Tough choice but the human need to feel something is too strong so I can’t blame them.

By the way, I believe the future of trading is moving towards AI vs AI. Trying to compete in that environment will be not only impossible but also naive and ROI-negative.

That’s why I think the only way to succeed in the coming years is to learn how to build a proper thesis around top themes and let the market do its job. Not everyone is willing to pick this path, which explains why there are so few winners here.

On Roundtrips

There are many misleading terms in crypto but I find “roundtrip” as one of the most controversial ones. Roundtrip refers to an event where you didn’t take any profits on a coin that went up a lot and then went down back to the same/lower entry. While this is technically correct, it requires a bit more context to be fully accurate.

A true roundtrip works as follows:

1. You buy a token early
2. You see a token making crazy multiples
3. You don’t take any profits
4. You see a token going back down to 0 or staying at the same price without ever coming back again
5. You get stuck in a bear market or harsh QT environment and experience a 99% drawdown

However, if a token makes a comeback and you make even higher returns, this is not considered a roundtrip imo. I view this as a part of a required cleanse/reset that every coin goes through consistently.

See, new coins and sectors with high demand tend to have the highest volatility. BTC had multiple 80-90% corrections in its early years, so did ETH, Doge and every successful asset in its first iteration.

As assets mature and progress, volatility slows down, pullbacks become smaller, and accumulation periods become longer. That is normal and you should be ok with the fact that pretty much all big important coins behave this way.

Study bonkguy and why he’s been holding bonk from $10M mcap to billions. He knows what’s coming next for this coin and he’s willing to withstand those insane pullbacks no matter what noise the market feeds to him.

Those kind of people are not interested in quick 2x or even 20x in a series of mediocre trades. They aim for 8-9 figure profit on a single god-like trade. And so they need to hold longer and be willing to go through more pain than anyone else:

Here are a few mental and practical things you can do to deal with such insane volatility:

• Focus on quality only. Develop a habit of never buying anything you aren’t sure of. It’s either a fuck yes or hell no. That will help you eliminate 99% of trash and improve your chances of finding rare gems. The only concern is that you never know if your specific coin or sector will ever come back. The truth is, the markets are cyclical and your sector is likely to come back eventually if it’s a part of a major theme this bull run. Old coins, super niche one-time apps/trends or obvious scams are unlikely to come back of course.

• Study both micro and macro. One of the ways to strengthen your holding ability is being aware of the upcoming catalysts and increase of a global money supply that will help create subsequent pumps. If you’re in the middle of a bear market, then you’re probably fucked unless that’s a revenue-based project. If you’re in the corrective stage of a bull run, I’d say simply chill and wait for the next leg up. Again, this applies only to quality projects in the top themes of this bull run.

• Use the home run trifecta approach to each trade: good entry, high conviction, size. Good entry will protect you from selling too early and go through 6-7 figure swings mentally easier. High conviction and a strong thesis will remind you why you hold things in the first place. Size will allow you to think bigger and encourage you to help your coin succeed long-term.

• Take at least 10-20% profits after each breakout. Most coins tend to have multiple months accumulation periods between breakouts. They launch, run up, die, build a base, run up, correct, build a new base, run up again. If you buy tokens at the bottom of their base and manage to hold the entire breakout, I recommend taking some profits. That will allow you to hold a position longer without having a roundtrip or regret scenario. Keep taking profits with each breakout and you’ll see how much easier it is to approach this market. Alternatively, you can sell everything after the first major breakout and look for other coins that didn’t have a breakout yet.

See, a roundtrip is only a roundtrip if you buy crap, mismanage your risks and forget to take profits regularly. If you stick to common sense and build systems against human stupidity, you’ll change your perspective on the entire thing and become significantly better at this game.

On Things to Avoid

• Greed comes with a cost. Don’t take unnecessary risk to make money you don’t need. Never risk money you need for money you don’t need.

• Don’t mix your strategies. Don’t buy as a long-term investor and trade every move like a momentum trader. Don’t enter as a day trader and then hold like an investor. Know who you are, be clear of your edge, and stick to it.

• Don’t buy coins or invest in projects without an edge.

• Never use leverage. Leverage is the most tempting instrument to make big money but also the fastest way to lose everything. Avoid it at all costs. Even the best traders in the world get liquidated at some point. The market will typically punish you when you think you’re the smartest. Stick to spot only.

• Don’t get stuck in trenches for too long. The goal is to accumulate more BTC long-term and invest with size in high-conviction projects. If you don’t upgrade your game, it will eat you up and you will stay in the trenches forever. Catch a few good runners and get out. Go focus on things that actually matter and stop doing fake work.

• Stay away from the chop. The reason why most people don’t make it is because they over rotated their capital to $0 right before the actual bull run started.

• Don’t lose control over your emotions and stop throwing money into everything that you see. If you catch yourself doing that, take a pause. Remind yourself why you do things in the first place. You’re not here to become a gambler and participate in every project. You are here to make a certain amount to live a better life, not give it all back to 11 y.o. punk sitting on a toilet.

• Don’t try to force a trade or a good opportunity out of thin air. Sometimes you just need to wait it out. In many cases, the best trade is no trade at all.

• Never sell a winner to buy back lower because in crypto most gains are made in less than two or three weeks. You miss that move, you fuck up the trade.

• As a long-term investor, do not take initials at 2x. If a coin doubles, it has a chance of being a winner. So you give someone else a big % of tokens that are going to outperform the market too early and you cut your potential profits by half. You will also need to put that money somewhere else, and the chances of finding a winner at a good price are very low.

• Stay away from celebrity coins. Even if they go up, you’re making somebody else richer. In most cases, they do it for fun out of boredom so they won’t take it seriously.

• As a trader, never trade within a range. Only accumulate spot within a range. Only long at the bottom of the range and never within it.

• Never rebid a token you’ve already sold. If you’re out of the trade, you’re out for good. Find the next new token.

• Don’t get attached to coins emotionally. If you feel like your relationship with a coin becomes unhealthy, sell it. Mental focus above all.

• Avoid rage or revenge trades. They almost always end up at a loss.

• Never bid a memecoin over $1b mcap. Dilution makes it extremely unlikely buying a meme above $1B profitable. Prefer to buy memes within $2M-$20M range. Higher upside, same downside.

On KOLs

• Don’t listen to KOLs and folks who are not experts in their domain field. They rarely share alpha but they are always looking for exit liquidity. Always remember, a big following is no indication of ability to make money. Building a following is a popularity contest. Making money by investing is a contrarian sport. The two are often diametrically opposed.

• Unfollow most KOLs with big following. They will promote whatever coin or project pays or sponsors them. Also, when they advise you to buy the dip publicly, they are likely in a massive loss privately. I’ve seen several KOL chats, it’s scary.

• Most KOLs and CT folks are reactive, not predictive. They will try to come up with reasons why certain things happened, which means absolutely nothing and won’t help anyone in the grand scheme of things. You’re better off following people with less followers who have been consistently correct about where the markets are headed next.

• Every major influencer has made their name by sharing one or several coins early and made a decent number of people rich. However, they always stick to one coin as their main play for the rest of the cycle. I call it The Biggest Shill. Examples: BONK by bonk guy, BRETT by Crash, SPX by Murad, etc. They shill it the most because they have the best entry and the market seems to prefer this coin over the other ones.

• The biggest KOLs make their money from referral fees. They are incentivized to teach you certain behavior that benefit them the most. KOLs push towards using leverage, taking more trades, buying more coins and trading more frequently. The more action you take, the more money they make. One of the examples below:

On Network

• Find your edge, double down, then scale yourself. Hire people/ join a team with people who are good at things you are not, then only do the things you are good at.

• Bet on winning teams that know how to execute fast, think long-term, build great products and capture attention. Your ability to filter, read and work with the right people is the best skill to master in this industry.

• Have a very curated CT and IRL feed. Listen to people who have made over 7 figs repeatedly, kept it and remained a good person in the process. Block negative, broke and fake rich people from your life.

• Use networking to connect with key players that have their own edge in respective domains of expertise: majors, memes, nfts, etc. Become an expert at one thing, collab with other experts. Avoid being a generalist.

• Aim for lifelong trust. Protect your reputation. Don’t get involved in scams and don’t launch them. Don’t chase quick cash. Help others build something worthwhile instead. This will allow you to play longer games with higher quality people.

• Choose your partner carefully. Do not let them know your true net worth in crypto. Safer that way.

On Career

• The best way to build a career in web3 is by experimenting publicly. No matter what your core skill set is, you can always find a way to show to the world that you’re interested in a given tech, product, service, company. Making content on X or YouTube and coding open source apps are the most obvious examples here. Be creative, one day you might land your dream job.

• Favor companies that have a few years worth of cash to sustain their operations during both bull and bear markets. Those are hard to find but it isn’t impossible. Crypto startups are startups first, crypto second. The same business rules apply and it’s better to stick to long-term legitimate teams who can manage finances well.

• A good number of millionaires in crypto were made from token allocations in well-established crypto startups. If you can get into the right company early and prove your value over the years, you will be in a very good position when the token is launched. It might take a while but worth it imo.

• Join high-level networks and masterminds. Many times people have great connections that might speed up your career search. Networking is the number one hack to bypass a big line. You still have to be good, but it’s faster.

On Market Making

• Liquidations are a forced transfer of wealth from impoverished traders who need leverage to wealthy spot buyers.

• Binance perps listing almost always creates a local top for a given coin or sector. Then rotation happens to something fresh or forgotten. Act accordingly.

• Delivered products end major speculation and typically mark the top. Examples: Cardano launching smart contracts, Hyperliquid launching HyperEVM, Pudgy Penguins launching Pengu, Trump team launching Trump coin.

• If you missed the first big move in a given coin ($10M-$200M), don’t fomo. Wait for a price to chill out. Many times you get stuck in a multi-weeks/months accumulation zone. If your conviction is low, that timeless range will force you to sell at a loss or small profit right before making its next big move.

• One winning sector outperforming doesn’t mean that the other one is dead. Rotations are inevitable.

• The best coins tend to stay boring for months and are reserved for delusional holders. When they wake up, they pump fast and rarely give a good entry.

• The longer a coin accumulates, the harder and faster it pumps. It’s calm before the storm. Applies for quality alts and memes only.

• Time capitulation is a real thing. You will almost always want to give up right before big fat green candles. If you have a strong thesis, hold.

• Beware of exit liquidity listings. They tend to happen during range highs with a prior big volume push by the market maker.

• Don’t sell your bags after big liquidation events. If the market broke an important support level, you can always sell on the dead cat bounce.

• Test pumps and chops are the ultimate form of manipulation. The goal is to wear you out and grab as much liquidity as possible. Avoid trading in those market conditions and don’t touch leverage.

On Charts and Patterns

• Liquidation Heatmap is one of the most important indicators you can use to understand what’s going to happen to price short-term. Big players and market makers will always try to grab the most amount of liquidity possible. That’s one of the reasons why short squeezes and mass capitulations happen.

• Funding data is arguably the most accurate indicator to catch tops and bottoms in crypto. Negative funding rates have always represented the best buying opportunities for btc. You can watch this video to understand how it works in detail.

• Peak fud, cope and hate on CT are usually the signs of bottoms. SOL was fudded the most after FTX collapse and was destined to 0 right before its massive comeback. ETH was fudded the most because of its long weak price performance. If an asset isn’t needed or desired by anyone, people wouldn’t talk about it in any shape or form. Thus, focus on mindshare as a core metric, ignore the rest. Remember, any publicity is good publicity.

• Lack of btc and eth reserves on exchanges typically form bottoms and hint to upcoming supply shock.

• Forbes cover is the ultimate topping indicator, usually happens before a major crash.

We’ve had 5 signals so far:

1. Feb 7th, 2018: CZ → Beginning of a bear market
2. Oct 6th, 2021: SBF → FTX collapse
3. Jan 30th, 2024: Saylor → local BTC top
4. March 27th, 2025: Justin Sun → ?

• Beware of Binance manipulations. All coins typically move in unison and tend to dump 90-95% after listing. They all have a similar chart pattern - overvalued launch, then a slow multi-month bleed.

• VCs and liquid funds are not as good as you think. They spent almost two years buying OTC deals at discounted prices and shorting those tokens on Binance. Everything is orchestrated so that they make money in any market conditions and you lose all the time.

• You know markets are manipulated when retail panics while smart money and institutions (Coinbase, Binance) max bid BTC.

• Max greed forms bottoms, not tops. Media and CT will tell you otherwise.

• Never trust the weekend pump. If weekend rips, sell the Monday open. If weekend dumps, buy Monday open.

• Every massive pump on good news tends to be retraced on a second day. Then a few days later comes a healthy pump.

• As long as human greed exists, there will always an alt season. You know you’re getting close to an altseason when people say it’s a Bitcoin only cycle.

• February often marks a local bottom in the OTHERS/BTC ratio during the last year of the 4-year cycle.

• Altseasons start when Bitcoin dominance tops.

• Big losses on Enitity-Adjusted Reliezed Loss on BTC tend to form bottoms.

• Major L1 casinos tend to have a months long speculation demand with the final blow-off top extraction event - Justin Bieber buying BAYC for $1.3M, Trump launching a coin, etc. Those big event usually create tops against BTC pair for major L1 casinos. ETH topped when NFTs topped. SOL topped when SOL memes topped.

• Follow Bull Market Peak Indicators to identify tops and bottoms. 100% hold means you should hold, not sell.

• Absolute bottoms tend to form in the 4th day of each month. Could be a bigger pattern worth exploring.

Thank you for going through all of this.

Hope to see you on the top!