Varrock: Turning $10k into $750k with Crypto, Trading Advice and More | TG Podcast
Varrock turned a $10,000 side wallet into a peak of $750,000 in roughly three weeks by rotating through PUMP, ASTER, and XPL, although the portfolio had fallen to about $480,000 after XPL retraced. The run began after three years largely away from liquid trading and was driven less by formal valuation than by spotting neglected narratives, unusual price behavior, and shifts in market mood. His operating principle: “You’re supposed to be flat most of the time and then only long when opportunity pops up.”
His market-level call is that crypto nihilism is fading as traders rediscover protocols that operate real, revenue-producing businesses. PUMP and HYPE are the clearest examples: Bitcoin has attracted institutions that may still be coming, without producing a traditional alt season, but isolated tokens can still reprice violently when people realize “crypto protocols can actually, like, make money.” He expects successful businesses to pull capital further down the risk curve eventually, while describing pure nihilism as both “pico top of the bull and a pico bottom of the bear.”
For short-term trades, Varrock thinks perceived fundamentals matter more than precise valuation ratios. The question is whether traders are emotionally underestimating or exaggerating a protocol’s revenue; durable revenue-to-market-cap analysis matters more for a two-year investment. During the stream, Thread Guy cited PUMP buybacks equal to roughly 7.6% of circulating supply since July and $120 million in aggregate, with even the weakest recent day buying about $950,000: “People are discounting how much money Pump is still making as a business.”
The original PUMP trade came from approaching a hated asset with fresh eyes: the platform still dominated its category, revenue was “absolutely insane,” and persistent buybacks made the downside look limited. Varrock put the entire $10,000 wallet into a roughly 4-5x long, went backpacking for three days, returned to a huge gain, and sold because it simply looked “really expensive.” He is long again near a similar level and still thinks PUMP can make a new all-time high.
ASTER required Varrock to reverse himself after taking an early profit, then trust the tape more than the product. He bought around $0.10-something, sold near $0.15-$0.16, then re-entered around $0.60 with the entire post-PUMP portfolio and exited near $1.50 after noticing almost no downward wicks in ASTER/USDT spot. Thread Guy’s missed-trade lesson was sharper: “Crime is not a thesis” protected him from a weak rationale, but also stopped him from recognizing that CZ’s promotion and the market structure were themselves tradeable signals.
The initial XPL opportunity was an access asymmetry: crypto-native individuals could trade Plasma’s pre-TGE perpetual while many liquid funds might be unable to touch a derivative on a token that did not yet exist. Varrock presented the mandate constraint as plausible; Thread Guy explicitly said he had not verified or researched whether it was true. Varrock’s reason for continuing to hold changed after launch: Plasma began to look like a crypto-native neobank he might personally use, not merely another token launch or perp-DEX trade.
That Plasma conviction is rooted in Varrock’s experience of Chase abruptly closing an account containing roughly $600,000, sending the balance by check to an obsolete address, and making him wait three months for replacement funds. The episode convinced him that users need faster, censorship-resistant financial rails with consumer-grade interfaces. He nevertheless declined to manufacture a price target, while Thread Guy argued that a solo trader doing spreadsheet valuation is competing directly with funds that have “seven analysts poring over everything.” Varrock agreed that he would not beat Messari’s research team on valuation.
Varrock’s current edge depends as much on emotional distance as trade selection. After NFT success in 2021 left him euphoric, underslept, and convinced he was “a fucking genius,” he lost $1 million trying to lever his way to another 10x and stopped trading. Building Nebulae now gives him meaningful work and cash-flow potential away from the screen, letting him inspect a position, return to building, and avoid treating every trade as “the only way for me to make it ever.”
1. A technical trader returned from a three-year layoff and turned $10K into $750K
Varrock entered crypto through a technical class in 2017, decided “this is the future,” dropped out, and joined a crypto company that became “a shit show.” By roughly 2019-2020, he was coding pre-Flashbots MEV systems, reverse-engineering DEX math, arbitraging price gaps, and liquidating bad borrow positions.
Pre-Flashbots economics could be extraordinary: liquidating a $500,000 position with a 10% penalty could send the entire $50,000 fee to the liquidator. Varrock calls that period “the wild west” and says it produced life-changing money, even though others made much more.
He moved from MEV into Art Blocks, Punk projects, Meebits, and NFT trading, then exited almost everything near the end of 2021. After roughly three years of angel investing, he returned around late 2024 or early 2025 while building Nebulae, an on-chain trading app.
The comeback began almost casually: he funded a side wallet with $10,000, saw PUMP as cheap, levered the whole wallet, and left for a three-day backpacking trip. That account peaked at $750,000 before XPL’s decline and sat near $480,000 during the interview, with Varrock still long Plasma.
2. Crypto nihilism is giving way to selective belief in real businesses
Varrock does not claim a broad alt season has arrived. Bitcoin is rising and institutions “definitely did come after Bitcoin” and may still be coming, while the rest of the market has produced discrete opportunities—PUMP, ASTER, XPL and other launches—rather than the sector-wide markups traders remember from earlier cycles.
His explanation for meme-coin dominance is “some form of crypto nihilism”: if nothing in crypto matters, traders might as well buy assets with no underlying claim. That mood may now be weakening as PUMP and HYPE demonstrate that protocols can make real money, while stablecoin projects represent renewed interest in crypto technology.
Thread Guy’s extension is that many traders learned only the nihilist framework—“everything sucks, buy the stupidest shit”—and now struggle to price anything fundamental. Varrock still expects a second-order speculative effect: when legitimate businesses rise, return-chasers will eventually move into valueless memes further down the risk curve.
3. Revenue trades are about emotional mispricing before they are about spreadsheets
Varrock separates trading from investing. A short-term trade asks whether the market is emotionally underestimating a protocol’s revenue; a long-term investment asks whether that revenue can persist for two years while the token eventually converges toward a defensible multiple.
His cleanest negative setup would be a heavily praised protocol quietly earning “like $20 a day”; realization should hurt the token. PUMP offers the inverse: if most traders guess its revenue below reality, a change in perception can trigger repricing before anyone agrees on the correct revenue-to-market-cap ratio.
Thread Guy tried to anchor tokens through comparables—PUMP once traded near one-fifteenth of HYPE despite similar headline revenue, while Plasma invited comparisons with Circle, Ethena, and Tether’s discussed $500 billion valuation. Thread Guy said he could not out-model funds with seven analysts and $50 million to deploy. Varrock agreed, saying he would not beat Messari’s research team on price valuation.
4. PUMP remains the liquid proxy for the entire meme-coin economy
Varrock’s first PUMP thesis was built against universal pessimism. The token had been “absolutely brutal,” yet the platform still generated exceptional revenue and posted aggressive buybacks; coming in without the emotional scar tissue of the ICO made him ask, “Why is everybody so depressed about this?”
He put the full side wallet into a roughly 4-5x long. After two punishing hiking days—about 7,000 feet up to camp, then the same descent—he returned to a massive gain and sold near the local top because the token suddenly looked expensive.
The live data strengthened the continuing thesis: approximately 7.6% of circulating supply bought back since July, around $120 million spent in total, and roughly $950,000 purchased even on the weakest day since August 6. Varrock’s point was not that activity had fully recovered, but that “people say it’s dead” while the business still absorbs meaningful supply.
PUMP also offers category exposure without choosing the next winning meme. Younger users can enter crypto solely through Solana memes, never touch Ethereum or DeFi, and still interact with Pump.fun; Varrock’s argument is that investors can now buy “the business that makes meme coins” instead of guessing between Fartcoin, Pepe, or another nine-figure token.
5. ASTER rewarded tape-reading after the original thesis broke down
Varrock first entered ASTER around $0.10-something and sold near $0.15-$0.16 after a roughly 50% move, interpreting it as attention flowing toward CZ’s promotion. When Telegram chats kept reporting that it was “mooning,” he reconsidered rather than hiding from the chart.
He re-entered around $0.60 with essentially the entire portfolio accumulated from PUMP and rode the move to roughly $1.50. The decisive signal was microstructure: ASTER/USDT spot candles showed virtually no downward wicks, sellers could not push deeply into the book, and buyers repeatedly wicked price higher—“someone’s trying to pump this with a lot of money.”
Thread Guy’s pushback—worth keeping—was that relying on CZ’s promotion felt like naked dependence, not a thesis. His repeated line, “Crime is not a thesis,” helped him resist at $0.20, but he conceded that CZ posting a chart after a long silence should perhaps have overridden the discomfort.
Product quality did not explain the rally. Varrock encountered bugs, could not withdraw, missed some XPL upside, and faced position caps. Yet that ugliness may explain why others missed ASTER: it was neither funny nor emotionally attractive, so the trade required reasoning about incentives and capital rather than bonding with the product.
6. Plasma evolved from a pre-TGE access trade into a personal banking thesis
Varrock entered XPL after reading a joke that thousands of liquid crypto fund managers were waiting for lawyers to approve pre-TGE perpetuals. His inference: substantial capital wanted exposure to stablecoins but could not buy “this weird pre-TGE perp financial derivative thing” for a nonexistent token, whereas an individual without that mandate could simply long it on Hyperliquid.
The access asymmetry was Varrock’s thesis, but Thread Guy openly said he did not know whether the mandate constraint was true and had not researched it. The trade still made sense to Varrock, survived TGE, and produced gains; only afterward did he investigate Plasma deeply enough for the holding thesis to change.
The emotional core was Chase closing his account without warning after flagging transfers as unusual. The app showed no balance, history, or closure notice; Chase sent roughly $600,000 by check to an obsolete address and would not issue another until the first expired, leaving him without the funds for three months.
Plasma now represents something he could plausibly use: fast, censorship-resistant payments, a crypto-connected card, and an all-in-one consumer interface. He sees token incentives as an extension of the familiar neobank playbook—SoFi and Chime paid hundreds of dollars for deposits—but thinks crypto rails could make onboarding more powerful.
7. Plasma may be mispriced because traders put it in the wrong category
Thread Guy struggled to hold XPL without a numerical destination: Circle, Ethena, and Tether supplied possible comparables, but rapid stablecoin efforts from financial institutions also raised the question of dilution. Varrock used low size, later raised leverage while learning perpetuals, and ultimately lost that experimental position.
Varrock’s alternative is explicitly qualitative: Plasma still feels underappreciated because holders are depressed, even though XPL remained almost 2x its pre-TGE level. More importantly, traders kept grouping it with ASTER, Avantis, and Apex as part of a perp-DEX meta, which he considers a category error.
His position is a leveraged Plasma long with what he describes as a very safe liquidation level. The catalyst is not merely another exchange cycle; it is eventual recognition that Plasma belongs to the stablecoin and consumer-banking narrative, where its connections, capital-onboarding strategy, and product ambitions can be judged differently.
8. More perpetual markets magnify both specialist edge and self-destruction
Varrock sees pre-TGE perps as unusually fertile because larger players may be constrained by mandates, but he acknowledged that this was an unverified premise. The broader shift matters more: traders once had to express leverage mainly through majors, competing directly with professional firms. Now almost any sufficiently large token has perps or margin somewhere, allowing niche knowledge to become immediately tradeable.
The distributional effect cuts both ways: “People who are really good at trading are going to make a lot more money really, really fast. And people who are less good may make less money faster, also.” More instruments do not create universal opportunity; they accelerate differences in discipline.
Varrock learned that distinction after 2021. Coming off NFT success, severe stress, euphoria, and little sleep, he decided leverage could 10x his wealth; instead he lost $1 million, called the decision “so dumb,” and quit trading.
Thread Guy described a 54% tax burden in New York City. Varrock disputed that figure for his own situation, saying the burden gets high quickly. Both discussed 2021 cases where traders owed eight figures to the IRS after subsequently losing the cash on leverage—ending a spectacular cycle with a deeply negative net worth.
9. Digital economies supplied the training, but real products supply the renewed optimism
RuneScape, World of Warcraft, Warframe, and especially EVE Online taught Varrock that digital economies could be genuine economies. In EVE, he learned arbitrage by buying a low-liquidity Manticore for 32 million credits in one star system and selling near 64 million elsewhere; the game even had two economists who published extensive economic analysis.
NFTs then showed the opposite of nihilism. Thread Guy once refreshed OpenSea to snipe a rare Loot item with many “plus ones” and sold it for something like 100-200 ETH, while Varrock remembers the emotional culture more: holders were up enormous sums and still said, “I love the art.” Thread Guy called it an era of unusually unconstrained dreaming.
Current optimism rests on businesses rather than collectibles alone. Varrock is building Nebulae while selectively angel-investing; he highlighted Octra, a fully homomorphic-encryption blockchain where encrypted data can still be operated on, and praised its technically oriented community for adopting recognizable badges without paid quests or farming.
Varrock’s closing hot take was categorical: “Web3 gaming is not dead and it’s going to be absolutely insane.” Thread Guy, disclosing that he invested in both, cited Fantasy Top and Hambria as examples of strong communities paired with teams that understand games and crypto flywheels—an intersection he believes the industry still has not executed well.
Full transcript
Welcome to the stream. I'm so excited to have you on. We are live on stream. How are you, man?
I'm good. I'm doing great. It's been a good couple days.
Yeah, dude. I appreciate you joining. Honestly, I'm hyped you joined. Straight up. I didn't think you were going to come on.
I didn't think so, either, honestly.
Yeah, why did you agree to come on? Were you just like, “Fuck it, I'm down”?
I refused every podcast interview and everything pretty much ever, but I see Thread Guy get clipped a lot, and I was like, “I've been thinking about doing something more public.” This is the time. I feel like this is the best one to do it on, so here we are.
Let's go, man. I'm hyped you chose our stream. I think we found a pretty good balance with the stream. I want to bring on the best on-chain traders, and I want to bring on the coolest on-chain projects basically on TGE. I think we found a pretty interesting balance.
There are a lot of people who are interesting to talk to in crypto, but it's the traders—the ones who are actually participating in the markets, making the money, and moving the conversation forward—who are the most interesting. You've been on my radar for a while. We've interacted a little bit on Twitter, but you posted an insane screenshot of how you went from, I think, 400-something K in P&L from Pump to Astor to XPL Plasma.
That was the rotation, but it also speaks to the fact that there have been a couple of trades: Pump, the prediction-market stuff, and now Plasma. If you're hitting all of them, you're clearly in tune with everything happening in the market, and your opinion is obviously valuable because you are making money.
I'm hyped that you came on. You can keep this high-level if you want. I know it's a brutal question, but do you want to start with a quick intro into who you are and what you do, or what you spend your time doing?
For sure. I can give a little bit about my arc in crypto and how that got me to what I'm doing now. I got into crypto in 2017. I took a class on crypto in 2017, which was very early. It was before anybody thought it was legit. It was more of a technical class that happened to be related to cryptocurrencies, and I was like, “Holy shit, this is the future.”
I ended up dropping out and going to work for a crypto company, which was a shitshow. Then I left that and did a bunch of MEV. All my dates are messed up because it's been a blur, but it was around 2019 or 2020. A lot of it was pre-Flashbots, which was the Wild West, and it was absolutely crazy.
After that, I transitioned into NFTs. I did a lot of NFT trading. I had some pretty big sales. I bought into a bunch of Art Blocks, did some Punk stuff, and did some Meebits stuff, too. Then I kind of checked out at the end of 2021 and exited pretty much everything.
I chilled out for about 3 years and just did some angel investing. Then, I want to say at the end of 2024 or early 2025, I started getting back into this. I started doing a bit of trading again and a bit of NFT stuff. I started building Nebula, which I can't say too much about exactly, but it's an on-chain trading app that we're building. We have a waitlist out, and people can sign up for that.
I was like, “Maybe I should try trading liquid stuff again.” I put 10K in a little side wallet. I was like, “Pump seems cheap. Should I long this?” So I did. Then I went backpacking for 3 days. I came back and it was up massively. I was like, “It seems really expensive now. I should probably sell.” Then I sold, and that was the perfect top: me looking at it and being like, “Huh, that's really expensive.”
Then I was like, “Trading seems to be pretty good right now. Maybe I should do more of it.” I just kind of locked in, and now we're here.
The title on this overlay is “10K to 750K in 3 weeks.” Is that true? Did I clickbait that?
The all-time high for that little 10K side wallet was 750K pre-XPL dump, either yesterday or 2 days ago or something. Then XPL came down, and I'm still long, but I'm still up like—I think 480K—or my portfolio is around 480K or something right now.
First of all, congratulations. That's insane. Well done. Maybe we can do the backstory stuff later, but I don't know anything about the MEV or Flashbots era. What were you doing?
Pretty much, there were a bunch of DEXes. If someone buys something on one DEX, it gets expensive there but not on the other DEX, then you sell into the expensive one and buy from the other one. So it was mostly arbitrage stuff.
Then there was liquidating people if they had bad borrow positions on lending markets and that kind of stuff.
And were you really profitable? Were you making a lot of money doing that?
Yes, it was super profitable at the time. There were definitely other people who made way more money, but it was life-changing money at the time.
Pre-Flashbots, you didn't pay anyone. If you liquidated someone for 500K and there was a 10% liquidation fee, that 50K went straight to you. That's not the case anymore because you pay Flashbots to get your transaction included or whatever. But back in the day, if you hit a big arbitrage play, it was all yours.
Whoa. That's crazy. How deep is your technical knowledge in crypto?
I would say pretty deep because that's how I entered this whole space: doing technical MEV stuff. There was a lot of coding and a lot of reverse engineering of DEX math and stuff like that. That's how I got started going deep into crypto.
Damn, that's awesome. That's a fucking movie. We'll work back to some of it. First of all, congrats on the trade and the sequence there. It's one of the better runs, percentage-wise, that I've seen in a while.
I want to start with your take on the general market right now. At least from my perspective, it feels like we're in this spot where people are pretty complacent on majors, but Bitcoin is doing pretty well and grinding higher, at least right now. It looks pretty decent.
Everyone's been screaming for alt season or a repeat of on-chain meme season, like what we saw in fall 2024, where everything sector-wide—AI, everything—marked up every day, X over X over X. That's not happening, but basically every 3 days, starting with Pump, then Cards, then—I mean, a HYPE ATH, then Aster, then Apex, then Plasma—there's been a new alt-type play every couple days, or every week maybe.
The people who have been really tapped in, have some more size, and can sit into stuff with a thesis have been absolutely cooking. At a higher level first, before we go into some specific stuff, what's your general read or take on where the market is right now, and how are you thinking about trading it?
I think we haven't had an alt season. Bitcoin's pumping, so institutions definitely did come after Bitcoin and may still be coming after Bitcoin.
I think a lot of the meme-coin stuff was some form of crypto nihilism. Everybody was like, “Nothing in crypto matters. Crypto is so dumb. We should just trade meme coins. They don't need anything underlying them.” I think that's fading a bit because of the revenue meta. With the earlier person you were talking about, I think people are saying, “Wait, crypto protocols can actually make money? Maybe we should buy some of that.”
I don't know if we'll get an alt season, but I think the world in general is waking up to the idea that maybe crypto isn't just meme coins and unpegged assets that could go up crazy or down crazy. Maybe there is some real value here. Maybe stuff can go up.
I think Pump and Hype are the 2 clearest examples of that.
I think that's a really good take. There's also this whole class of people, and part of the reason CT's new era is struggling to adjust, who only made money on nihilism. Now that the pendulum is shifting in the other direction, it's really hard to adjust your framework from “everything sucks, buy the stupidest shit” to “maybe everything doesn't suck, and we have to attribute some semblance of fundamentals or value to the things that are going up.”
For sure. I also think there will be side effects where, if a bunch of stuff that's actually decent businesses goes up, people move further down the risk curve into valueless meme coins as they try to chase the returns of real business tokens.
It feels like pure nihilism is the pico top of the bull and the pico bottom of the bear.
Yeah, that would make a lot of sense.
It's like the guy looking out of the train window. It's like, “Everything's a scam.” Everything's a scam when you're happy and when you're sad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the top and bottom. I feel like we got there. That's when it kind of went—I don't know when the Solana meme-coin stuff happened. It was the pico bottom of 2023, and Bonk and Pepe came out. Then Pump.fun launches, and you're like, “Meme coins are awesome,” to start the run.
But it kind of has to pop a little bit.
And so, I don’t know. I got stuck in this rabbit hole yesterday, or earlier on stream with Joe, who was on before, and then I’ve been stuck in it over this whole weekend: how much weight do you attribute to revenue numbers when thinking through price comps and valuation frameworks for these tokens? How important is the revenue in a revenue meta, if you will?
I think it’s different if you’re trying to trade it or invest in it.
Okay. I think if you’re trading it, it’s more about whether people are taking the protocol’s revenue into account, vibe-wise, when they buy it. If a protocol is making more revenue than people think, it’s probably going to go up if people realize it’s actually making good revenue. The same thing works the other way. If a bunch of people think a protocol is doing super well and you’re like, “This is making $20 a day,” it’s probably not going to do well when people realize that.
I don’t know if, at least for me personally—and I just started trading this stuff recently—the actual revenue-to-market-cap ratio matters much for shorter-term repricing moves. It’s more about whether people are emotionally discounting this thing or emotionally thinking it’s way better than it actually is.
If you’re investing in it, obviously those things actually matter. But then you have to think: Will this revenue be able to last 2 years? Can I just sit and let this thing go up and down as people trade it until it eventually reprices to some normal revenue-to-market-cap ratio or something?
That’s a good take. Or, at least, that’s an interesting take. It’s about how people value the revenue being more important than the revenue itself.
If you asked a lot of people how much money Pump is making right now, I think a lot of people would guess lower than it actually is. If that’s the case, then when people start thinking the other way, it might do really well price-wise.
You know what’s crazy about the Pump buybacks? This is fees that pumped that fund. Pretty sick website. It shows how much they’ve bought back. They’ve bought back basically 7.6% of the circulating supply since July.
That’s insane, right? Yesterday was their lowest buyback day since early August—August 6. They bought back $950,000 of the token. That’s still a lot. Who’s trading on-chain memes? People say it’s dead. People say the Solana trenches are super dead, and Pump bought back almost $1 million in tokens.
I think people are discounting how much money Pump is still making as a business. Dude, they’ve bought back $120 million of the token total. That’s insane. That’s 609,000 sold.
And I know chat’s saying Thread Guy’s too biased on Pump. I do have a bag of Pump. I have a large bag of Pump. I’m not in love with it like I was 2 times ago.
What was your thesis when you first entered that first long on Pump?
It’s interesting, because the whole thing about trading is that you’re supposed to be flat most of the time and only go long when an opportunity pops up. But this was different. This was me putting Pancake into a wallet and saying, “I should start trading. What looks good here?”
I had seen people shit on Pump for so long, and the token was absolutely brutal—not pumping at all, completely on the floor. I was like, “It’s still crushing. The revenue is absolutely insane, and they’re posting crazy stuff constantly.”
I thought, “This actually seems like a really good long. I don’t really see a lot of downside here.” I think it was a 4x or 5x long, and I put the whole thing into it. Then I logged off to go backpacking.
How was the backpacking?
It was sick, actually. It was the 2 physically hardest days of my life. I went up about 7,000 feet of elevation one day, camped, and then went down about the same amount the other day.
Oh, Jesus. You know what’s funny about logging on, starting to make some trades again, hitting one, and then rotating to the next one? You have less of a set framework for how things should work based on prior metas or how the market has been trading. Coming at it with fresh eyes, it’s like, “Yeah, Pump is a fucking free one here.”
It’s difficult to do that if you got cooked trading the ICO. It’s difficult to come at it completely from a distance, like a completely passive observer who, at the time, had absolutely no stake in the market whatsoever.
That’s one thing I struggle with. I feel like we got there with Pump. You look at it and think, “Why is everybody so depressed about this? They’re doing insane buybacks, everybody’s still using the platform, and it was at 0.005 or something. It was at 0.003 before, so it was up more than 50% already, and everybody was still super depressed.”
So you hit Pump, sold it for a pretty ridiculous multiple, and then you went right in and hit Aster. How did you hit it? This is what I’m pissed about, too. I did hit Pump with size, which was nice, and I made money on XPL until I got stupid and leveraged too hard and ended up losing money. But I faded Aster because I was on here at $0.20.
I was live on stream, coping about, “Crime is not a thesis.” I kept saying, “Crime is not a thesis. Fuck you. CZ doesn’t have to—” Everyone was doing the whole, “A lot has to pump Bagwork or streamer coins are dead,” thing. It’s like, “No, a lot doesn’t have to pump Bagwork, the same way CZ doesn’t have to pump Aster. But, yeah, he is.”
I kind of missed it the whole way. I feel like a lot of the sharp people hit Aster because they were able to put their preconceived frameworks aside. Where did you hit it, and how did you hit Aster?
I had the same thought as you. I got in—I don’t remember the exact numbers—but it was around 0.1-something. It pumped 50%, and I was like, “Okay, that’s just attention coming into Aster. People are waking up to the CZ-pumping narrative.” I thought that was a pretty good trade, so I sold it at around 0.15 or 0.16.
I felt really good about it. I know you’re not supposed to look at something again after you sell it, but in some Telegram chats, people were like, “Holy shit, it’s mooning. It keeps going up.” I was like, “Fuck.”
So I bought back in with my whole portfolio from the Pump trade at around 0.6, and then rode that up to about 1.5. The move from 0.15 to 0.6 was clearly people coming in. It seemed like someone wanted to pump this.
I looked at the spot chart for Aster’s USDT market, and there were no down wicks on any candle. Literally nobody could dump it. It’s very left-curve, but it felt like the market makers weren’t letting anybody go deep into the market when they sold. Then buyers would just wick the price up every single time.
I thought, “Okay, it literally looks like someone’s trying to pump this with a lot of money and slowly bring it up.” So I rode it all the way up to around 1.5 and then exited.
So you basically sold the top.
Locally, somewhat.
What did you use for Pump? Were you on Hyperliquid when you traded?
Yeah, I was just on Hyperliquid. A lot of people were complaining, saying, “If I didn’t use the product, Aster, I would have bid it and held it.”
Are you talking about Aster?
Yeah, yeah. I definitely had some bugs on Aster. It was pretty rough, and I couldn’t withdraw. I missed out on some XPL gains because some of my money was stuck in Aster. I also couldn’t long enough XPL because they had position caps on it.
That was insane, by the way. The $4 wick—are you talking about that? The liquidation was crazy.
There were the caps, and then they pulled it off and it wicked to $4.
I know people who actually managed to get in and sell up there, near $4. That’s crazy. Wow, that’s insane.
Why do you think some people missed Aster? Why was that a difficult trade for a lot of people to put on?
I think it may go back to this crypto-nihilism thing. There’s no attention on it. It’s not funny, there’s no attention, and it’s not cool. It’s not a good experience, so you don’t look at it and think, “Oh, this is fun.” You don’t emotionally connect with Aster on any level.
You have to think about it and say, “Okay, CZ is not happy about Hyperliquid. He probably wants a competitor—not necessarily to kill them, but he probably wants some competitor in the arena. Aster looks like there’s someone with a lot of money pumping it, so maybe I should get into this.”
That’s very different from thinking, “This meme coin’s funny, and these key whales are in it, so maybe I should buy some of this and ride it up.”
Yeah. I guess I should have just taken the trade. It was hard to tell how involved CZ was with this thing at the beginning.
Like I guess I should have just taken it.
For sure. Okay, cool. He hasn't posted a chart in I don't know how long. That should have been my sign to just shut up and bid. But I don't know. I hate relying on the one bull poster as the thesis. Obviously, I was wrong here.
Yeah. For me, it was like, is CZ just going to bull-post this twice and that's it, or is he committed and the same entity that's pumping it? That is hard to do because, like you said, if you rely on CZ and then he just stops after 1 day, it's over. And you feel extra bad about that.
I put my life savings into this 1 guy's token that he was bull-posting. He was responsible for making me money, and he didn't do it.
Yeah, I feel naked. This is maybe a mental thing, because there are spots where you just have to shut up and take it. But I hate feeling like the thesis depends entirely on someone else. Obviously, I was incorrect about it. It rarely works.
But then I don't know. You look at the Tron chart and you're like, yeah, maybe it does work sometimes. It's a tough one.
But okay, the Aster thing is interesting. There's some more there, but I've been reading your tweets and I feel like you have a real thesis on Plasma—a real, well-thought-out framework for how you think about Plasma—and you really like the token. Can you give me the playbook?
I'll say 2 things here first. People have really tried to push this narrative that Crypto Twitter is all noise and no signal, which can be true, especially if you're raw-dogging a blank FYP. But CZ's been pretty hot, dude, the last couple of weeks. There were public trades that you could just follow and do super well, and this was 1 of them.
CT, I think, was publicly really right about Plasma. It wasn't the craziest trade of all time, but there was a lot of axes to be had here. And I still don't even really get it that much, to be honest. I did bridge to it because there are a couple of things I'm farming that—I don't know, I'm scared. I don't want to say it on the stream because I don't want to get diluted. Maybe we'll talk about it after I hopefully make money from it.
I did bridge to it and use it a little bit. It was fine. Definitely not a yield farmer. You know, I'm not Taiki, the humble farmer.
The reason I got into it originally and the reason I'm still holding are actually different. The reason I got into it originally is I saw someone tweet—and this goes back to your Twitter point. Someone tweeted, kind of as a joke, “There are thousands of liquid crypto fund managers who are waiting for their lawyers to tell them if they can buy pre-TGE perps or not.”
I was like, that is such a good take. There's probably so much liquid capital that wants exposure to the idea of stablecoins, and they just can't do it. They're legally not allowed to put their money into this weird pre-TGE perp financial derivative thing that has absolutely nothing underlying it, for a token that doesn't exist.
I was like, that's a great idea. If you're not a fund and you don't care about your mandate to invest in liquid tokens, you can go on Hyperliquid and long the pre-TGE perp with no issue. So I did. Then TGE happened, and it went up a lot.
Then I started digging into what Plasma is, and I became convinced that they would build something I would personally use. I'm a big fan of neobank stuff. I'm a big fan of making the banking user experience better and faster.
It started in 2022, when Chase deplatformed me with no notice. I woke up 1 morning, logged into my Chase app, and my account wasn't there. Not a zero balance—it just didn't exist. There was no history and nothing to look into.
I was like, what the fuck just happened? I thought it must be a glitch. I refreshed my app—nothing. I went on my desktop, logged into Chase, and there was absolutely nothing. I was like, where is my money? Where did it go?
So I called Chase, and they're like, “We don't see anything weird in your account.” I said, “Can you look deeper? I had money in my checking account.” They looked deeper and said, “Your account was flagged, so we shut it down.”
I found out 3 things. First, they didn't have to send me notice. Second, they never had to tell me why. Third, they sent a check with my entire checking-account balance to the old address on my account, which was incorrect.
It was $600,000 in a random check going to a random address somewhere. I had to wait, and they said they couldn't send it back until the check expired. So I had to wait 3 months for them to resend me a check. Then I took it to Capital One, and they were really nice.
But I was like, wow, that sucks. I got debanked. I thought that was a political thing, and I hadn't done anything wrong. They just thought my transfers were weird, so they shut me down.
That's when I was like, okay, we need new rails. We need a better banking system so this stuff doesn't happen, because they could do this to anybody they want for any reason, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Then I started using SoFi and stuff, and it's just a much better experience with neobanks. When I see Plasma, I have some confidence from what I've seen so far that they could build something I would feel confident using as someone who was actually debanked and just wants fast, easy, censorship-resistant payment rails—a credit card that works with all my crypto stuff, all in 1 place, with a good user experience.
Now I'm like, okay, these guys seem good. They seem to have the connections to do it. They're using tokens to onboard capital, which is how all neobanks have grown. SoFi and Chime were giving hundreds of dollars to people for deposits into their accounts and stuff like that.
They're just following the normal playbook, but I think they could do it even better by using crypto technology for once, with a better UX. So that's my current thesis: they're building something that I could actually use.
Dude, that's fucking insane. Is that a—I mean, yeah, okay, obviously a true story. What happens if they send it to the wrong address and somebody lives there? Could they cash the check?
I don't know. That's what I asked them. I was like, are you serious? Someone's going to take my whole checking-account balance?
Dude, $600,000? Is it $600,000 in a fucking check?
My parents were also at my house, and we were ready to go out and visit places. I was like, “1 second. I need to deal with this right now.” This is crazy.
When my check got there after a couple of months, I had to walk to a bank with that check in my hand, and I was freaking out. I was like, if anybody knew I had this, they would just kill me and take it.
It's insane walking through New York City streets with $600,000 in my pocket.
Yeah. It's basically cash. You could just cash that anywhere, right? If you got robbed, you could just—
They would need my name, but I feel like if you're the kind of guy to steal a $600,000 check, you may be able to find someone who would let you do it or something like that.
That is insane. They don't have to give you notice or anything. They can just do it.
Literally nothing.
Wow.
Not even a letter. Not even a thing in your account that's like, “Hey, your account was shut down.” You log in, and it's just gone. There's not even any history. You can't see deposits or anything. It's as if it never existed.
Wow. I thought that only happened to Alex Jones and shit, dude.
That's what I thought. I was like, this isn't a political thing. This isn't like, if you're on the far right and say something really, really crazy, they take you off.
I don't do anything publicly under my real name. It was literally, “You did some transfers we thought were suspicious, so we didn't even ask you. We just shut down your account.”
Wow. I thought that was an Andrew Tate thing exclusively. That is fucked up.
Okay, this is going to be a really dumb question, but because it's the thesis now, can you explain what a neobank is?
I don't actually know if I'm using this term correctly, but to me, a neobank is just something that's not an old bank.
Okay.
Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America are definitely not neobanks. Then you have all the newcomers like SoFi, Chime, and such, which I would consider neobanks. They're super-sick apps where everything is in 1 place. You can trade stocks, send money to people, whatever—all in 1 place. They're just newer, more new-generation-type banks.
Got it. First, yeah, insane story. It makes sense that you're bullish on it. I said this in the last stream, too. I'm mid-curving this one because I struggled with it—
Okay, it just means they don't have physical locations. They're online-only.
Got it. So they have to be a sick app. I struggled with this one because, 1, I was a little late to it. I wasn't paying attention to pre-TGE perps, which I want to ask you about after, but we'll cover that next.
It’s hard for me to trade stuff when I feel like I missed some information. You want to feel the vibe with the whole trade; it feels easier to trade.
Mhm.
And secondly, I struggled—I feel like I’m mid-curving it with this valuation—but I struggled to think, “Okay, when I was buying Pump at the bottom, I had a decent framework. Pump makes X amount. Hyperliquid isn’t the best comp, but it’s being treated as a revenue coin, and they basically make the same amount of money. Pump is 1/15 the price of Hyperliquid. That doesn’t sound right. Let’s hold it for that ratio to narrow.”
With Plasma, I struggled to figure out what my target was. I was like, “Okay, Circle traded at this. There’s Ethena at this. Tether just raised or is raising at $500 billion. I guess I should have just used that, closed my eyes, and bid.” It’s a 250×.
Yeah, 250×. But the stablecoin thing is hard, and I mid-curved it as well, because this would be a trade, not something I’m holding for 6 months. Every financial institution in the world is accelerating their stablecoin timeline and trying to get something out as fast as humanly possible.
So it’s like, “Fuck, do you get diluted? Do you get this and that?” I could never really figure out a thesis or a target for what I’m holding for and why. I kind of longed it with low size on Hyperliquid, made a little bit, and then jacked up the leverage because I’m trying to get familiar with perps—and I lost it all.
It wasn’t a big trade, anyway. It was just me messing around. But I don’t know, that’s why I mid-curved it, I think: I struggled to figure out a price thesis, which maybe is just a personal problem on that one.
Mhm. Yeah, I don’t really do that kind of valuation stuff. I don’t think I’m smart enough to do that kind of valuation stuff. If you’re doing trades purely based on a valuation thesis or whatever, you kind of end up competing with the smart guys trading this stuff.
Facts.
You’re competing with the hedge fund and liquid crypto fund people who are way smarter than me for this kind of research. I don’t think I could come up with a better valuation model for Pump, Hype, Plasma, or something than some guy who has 7 analysts poring over all the data. They’re like, “Okay, we’re going to put $50 million into this because it’s undervalued for how big it can get,” or whatever.
So I don’t think I do those same analyses, because I just don’t think I can.
That’s actually a sick take that you just gave.
Thanks.
I’m not going to beat Messari’s research team on a price valuation. That’s what you’re saying when you’re doing that research: “I think I can do this better than the other people trying to do this trade. I can get a better valuation idea than they can.”
So, then what are you thinking about when you’re holding it or entering it?
Honestly, I don’t know. I think it’s just a vibe kind of thing right now. I feel like it’s undervalued because everybody’s depressed about it again, but it’s still up almost 2× from the pre-TGE stuff.
I think, in a really weird way, it’s been lumped into the perp DEX meta.
Ooh.
A lot of people are talking about it in the same sentence as Avantis, ApeX, or Aster, which to me is so weird.
Yeah.
It makes absolutely no sense, but a lot of people in a lot of chats just lump it into that whole meta. I think that’s incorrect, and I think as that meta evolves, and as the idea of stablecoins as a meta evolves, it’ll do a lot better.
That’s an interesting take as well. It is kind of being lumped in as if they’re all the same. I don’t think that many people really know what it is or have taken the time to know what it is.
I also like the vibe-trading thing. That’s when I make the most money: just vibe trading. You’re in crypto, and you’ve been in crypto a long time. You could confidently say that you would be better than a hedge fund guy at looking at something and being like, “Ah, I think this should be higher,” just based on vibes.
One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard on the stream was when Deez came on. I was asking him—I forget what the trade was—how he sells, and he was like, “You know, I’ve looked at enough charts in my day that I know what good buys and good sells look like when you go back on an old chart. Generally, when the chart looks like, ‘Yeah, this would be a good spot for a big red S at the top,’ I usually click sell.”
Nice.
That’s what I did on my second Pump sell. I was like, “Yeah, it’s probably not going to look bad when it comes down to it. It’s not going to be a bad sell. I’ll just click a little right here.” And it worked out.
Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s vibe selling.
Here’s a question for you. I’ve kind of completely ignored pre-TGE perps. How do you think about those?
Mhm. My first experience with it was XPL, and my first thesis for going into it was that one tweet I was talking about, where it’s like, “Normally, a lot of liquid funds can’t touch this.”
I think pre-TGE perps are super cool. For now, a lot of Crypto Twitter may have an edge in being able to trade these while bigger players may be mandated not to, because a lot of funds only really trade liquid tokens.
Yeah.
Pre-TGE perps are definitely not liquid tokens, so I think for now there’s a lot of opportunity there. I also tweeted about this earlier: the expansion of the amount of assets that are on perps is absolutely insane.
Mhm.
I think it’ll accelerate some people trading very well, because a couple of years back, you could only trade majors on perps. That was kind of it.
Yep.
You were competing against Wall Street hedge funds, Jump Street, and whatever kind of guys. But now you can trade anything. Pretty much any token that’s decently big has perps or margin for it somewhere.
I think it’s accelerating the people who are really good at trading making a lot more money really, really fast. People who are less good may make less money faster, also.
I hadn’t really thought about the limitations on who can trade them at all. I don’t actually know if that’s true, either. I haven’t researched it.
Sounds true.
But it makes sense to me. I know a lot of funds have mandates like, “This is specifically what we’re going to trade.” There are so many of them that never conceived of the idea that sometimes the only way to trade an asset is actually through derivatives.
I’ve kind of completely ignored that, because it’s another one where I mid-curved a little bit. I’m like, “Fuck, I don’t know how to think about valuing these things.”
Yeah, nice trade, though. Well done. I’m curious: of the three—Astra, Plasma, and Pump—what are you still in? I want to go back to Pump in a minute, because I know you tweeted about it a decent amount. Are you still holding a bunch of Plasma spot? Are you long? What are you still in?
I’m leveraged long Plasma with a very safe liquidation level, so I’m not worried about getting liquidated. That’s kind of it. I also long some Pump.
It’s funny, because this is a similar level to where my original Pump long was as well. It pretty much pumped, I sold, and then it retraced. I was like, “Okay, I think it’s a good time to buy back in.” That’s pretty much it.
You’ve been tweeting a bunch about Pump. I have a couple of tweets on my computer. Everyone says Solana traders were dead. Pump looks good here. What’s your thesis on it right now?
I honestly still have a lot of it, and I think Pump makes a new ATH. I don’t have $100 billion price targets on this thing, but I still think it’s one of the best coins on the market.
If you don’t know meme coins and you want exposure to the idea of meme coins, what do you buy? The only token out there that you can really use to bet on the idea of meme coins is Pump. Otherwise, you have to research which meme coins would pump if meme coins came back, and stuff like that, which is really hard.
I think Pump is good for that. Like we talked about, it’s still making a pretty crazy amount of money, and the buybacks are consistent, so that’s probably going to be very good at absorbing a lot of selling as well.
The product-market fit is crazy. The fact that meme coins are becoming part of daily life for a lot of younger people is pretty crazy. That part of crypto actually did escape a lot of crypto, and there are people who get onboarded just by trading meme coins.
Yes.
That’s their entire crypto exposure. They don’t know anything. They don’t know that DeFi exists. They’ve never touched Ethereum. They’re literally just trading Solana meme coins, which is pretty much through Pump, and Pump has killed every competitor that’s come for it.
Yeah, one of the biggest onboarding events ever was the 2024 meme-coin cycle. It has to be.
Um.
Yep. I also think Pump.fun killed Fartcoin and these other legacy meme coins because it’s hard to justify why you would buy Fartcoin or any of these other nine-figure market-cap memes when Pump.fun has the same upside with less downside, and you can justify—
Oh, you mean the token?
The token. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with that. Before, if you wanted to long meme coins, you would buy the top-market-cap meme coins. You would buy Fartcoin or Pepe or stuff like that. But now you can buy the business that makes meme coins, which is crazy, and it makes money.
And it makes money, yeah. What’s your lore with Hyperliquid? Are you a massive Hype bull?
So it’s kind of ironic. My name’s been hyped.eth since 2020 or 2021.
No way.
I didn’t touch Hyperliquid until 3½ weeks ago. I never touched it. So I was coping the entire way up because people were like, “Yo, are you in Hyperliquid? You must have so many points because your name is Hype.” And I was like, “No, I didn’t touch this at all.” Then I watched it go to billions and billions of dollars. So that’s my Hyperliquid lore.
Was it a Hype NFT with your PFP?
It is, but as of 4 days ago.
What was it before?
It was a MemeNote [?].
What is that?
It’s somewhat malady [?]. Someone draws these little figures on a notebook and mints them every few days. Pretty cool.
That’s awesome. Okay, this is totally off topic, but I’m super interested. Someone tagged you and me in a tweet and said, “Tell that guy you learned trading stuff from flipping and trimming armor in World 2.” Was it VarrockBank? That’s your name on Twitter, I guess.
I just read this book called Play Money. The stream chat’s tired of hearing me talk about it, but it’s so good. It’s about a journalist who used to work for Wired. He got a story across his desk about a Chinese sweatshop that allegedly had people gold farming full-time in Utopia Online, and he was told to go figure out if this thing was real.
He never figured out if it was real or not, but he basically started playing the game to see what was up. By the end of the book, he quits his job to farm gold full-time. It was in 2003. I was born in 2002, so this was the earliest days.
I got pretty obsessed with all these MMO economies and whatnot because I kind of missed it. I was born in a weird era where I missed the glory days of RuneScape and WoW and all this stuff. Obviously, I get crypto, which is like the better version, but what’s the lore there?
I used to play RuneScape a bit. I did some botting and stuff like that for a while. I played a lot of MMORPGs growing up. I played EVE Online, World of Warcraft, RuneScape, and I guess Warframe counts, too.
EVE Online was one of the first digital economies that was actually an economy. To me, it was the first eye-opening realization that you could actually have economic activity digitally. If anybody wants to look into digital economies, I think EVE Online is one of the coolest things.
They had economists posting about MMORPG economies. They had 2 economists on their team doing MMORPG economy analysis and putting out huge weekly spreadsheets and charts about these things. That was a very eye-opening game for me to play at the time.
That’s crazy. I’ve never really looked into EVE. I have a friend who’s always telling me there’s this apparently 5-hour-long YouTube video about the story of EVE Online. He’s always like, “Dude, you have to watch this fucking video.” I’ve never watched it. I was going to watch it on the flight the other day, and I just got lazy.
That’s crazy. They had economists on the fucking thing. That’s insane.
Yep. Minecraft Factions was that for me.
Yeah, it was Minecraft. We had Minecraft.
Nice.
You know, people always talk about it. They post the marketplace or whatever in RuneScape and say, “I learned how to trade here.” How one-to-one do you think those skills translate to crypto?
I think it depends. I don’t know if it’s actually one-to-one because I think it’s easier to flip on the Grand Exchange than it is to trade liquid tokens. But I think people who got really, really good at that stuff and were doing it in larger size definitely translated into crypto.
Some of those skills definitely carried over. EVE Online taught me about arbitrage back in the day. I was like, there’s a star system where a Manticore is going for 32 million digital credits or whatever, and it’s going for 64 in another one. It’s low liquidity, but I should just buy one, take it over there, and sell it. So there was definitely some form of financial knowledge learning in that game.
That’s awesome. The in-game economy stuff makes me so fired up. I think it’s so fucking sick.
Yeah.
Did you really sell this crypto for a million dollars? Is that tweet real?
Yeah, I had a couple of big sales back in 2021 for NFT stuff. I sold some Loot. Loot was insane.
I was sniping Loot listings, and then I saw one and thought, “This one looks really rare. It has a lot of plus-ones.” So I bought it, and then I don’t remember how much I sold it for. It was like 100 or 200 ETH or something, which at the time was insane. It was a very short flip, and it was literally just me constantly refreshing OpenSea to snipe these things.
NFTs were an awesome time. I think it was more fun. I don’t know if there will be another cycle or era where it will be as fun as NFTs were.
It’s a weird one because I know everyone thinks their era was the best because it’s the most nostalgic. NFTs were a particularly special one, though, because it was so unsolved and there was so much optimism around it. The level of dreaming was on a different scale with NFTs. It was the opposite of nihilism.
Yes.
Everybody was like, “This is the future. Everything’s going to billions of dollars. I love my community. The art is amazing. We’re all going to make it.” It was just that for a whole year. Everything just went up.
I don’t know if we’re going to get that again. Even with meme coins, there’s more profit motivation. With NFTs, people were up gazillions of dollars and they weren’t even talking about it. They’d just be like, “I love the art.”
I know. My forever ape. My forever ape.
Yeah, it was crazy. Now there are so many people, even people who watch the stream and are in my Twitch chat, who weren’t here for 2021. They showed up for meme coins in 2024.
Yep. It’s wild. NFTs were a crazy fucking time.
What are you excited about now? Moving forward, maybe verticals in crypto? Maybe you’re excited about perp DEXs? What are you excited about now?
I’m excited about the fact that it seems like the nihilism is reversing and people are excited about crypto tech again. Pump.fun, Hyperliquid, stablecoin stuff. I was checked out for a while because meme coins didn’t feel soulful to me. It was just money trading back and forth.
Even people who were like, “Oh, I’m never selling this,” were only doing it because they thought the market cap was going back up. That wasn’t like NFTs, when people were like, “I love this. I’m just going to hold it forever because I like the way it looks.”
I’m excited for that to flip. I’m excited for people to be like, crypto can make real businesses. We can actually do good for the world, bank the unbanked, and all that stuff. It feels like we’re at the start of a trend of people waking up to crypto.
We have the most crypto-friendly US government ever. It’s aggressively pro-crypto, which has absolutely never happened. So I’m excited about the future and legitimate stuff.
It does feel like we just got drained. It feels like we hit this inflection point where universal talent realized that you can make a successful product in crypto, make $2 million a day, and get a billion-dollar valuation, low-key forever.
I think the great venture-tech talent rotation from AI and every other vertical into crypto is just going to happen. It’s going to be up only forever. It’s a slow grind, and the legitimacy layer has happened.
I just think we’re going to have cool products launching in crypto forever. We can do the whole “Is it the top? Is the cycle going on?” thing, but there’s just enough money here, even in the schmiko-pico bottom of a bear market, to make $1 million a day on a good financial product.
The launches are just going to accelerate, in my opinion. I also think TradFi has been wanting some form of crypto returns for so long, and I think DATs were one of the ways they can do this. The demand has been absolutely insane. There are random DATs for tokens you haven’t heard of in 6 months that had $500 million come in. It’s insane.
As the financial rails between TradFi and crypto get stronger, faster, more compliant, and whatever else, there will just be more money coming in. Everything is going to get better as money flows into crypto much more easily.
Yeah, even if I think the vehicle sucks, I’ll still take the money.
That’s just so uninteresting to me. It’s so boring. I like the idea of being locked in.
No, and they’re all—I don’t know—200 of them are being investigated for insider trading and shit. It’s a mess. But at least it shows that there’s an appetite for putting money into this stuff.
It does show that, which is good. We’ll take it where we can get it. At this point, bro, we’ll take it where we can get it.
For sure. We’ll fucking take it where we can get it.
The headline of this—$10,000 to $750,000 in 3 weeks—is so ridiculous, by the way. So, what’s your plan? You’re building a product. Are you just going to be hyper-locked-in trading? You kind of have to be locked in trading for the next couple of months at least, right?
I think building something makes it easier for me to trade.
Great.
My problem after 2021 was that I did very well, and I thought, “I’m a fucking genius. I’m so smart. I should do leverage trading and 10x my money.” I lost $1 million, and I thought, “This was so dumb. Why did I do this?” I stopped and said, “I’m never trading again.”
That was coming off the stress and the euphoria. I was barely sleeping for a year, and I was super emotional. But now that I’m building something that’s more meaningful to me and takes up more of my mind share, I can look at these things with a little more perspective.
I’m not locked in 24/7 on these trades, watching Twitter, refreshing Discord, and refreshing Telegram. I can look at the chart, check in, see what people are saying, and think about whether or not I should do something. Then I can say, “Okay,” go back to building, and not be locked into this stuff for another 8 hours. I come back into it and look at it again.
I think that’s been really nice. In a weird way, doing the stream and building a media company in crypto has made the trading side a lot easier as well, because there are other things to focus on.
Hypothetically, you could lose it all and still have cash flow, a business, and something to show for it.
For sure. If you just get liquidated for everything, there’s nothing there. It’s gone.
Yeah, it’s like dying on hardcore mode. If you personally get liquidated, you’re still there, guy. You still have your stream. You’re not going into every trade thinking, “This is the only way for me to make it ever. I need this to go right.”
Getting liquidated with nothing else is like dying in Minecraft hardcore. It’s over. You have nothing to show for it. It’s just the worst part.
At least if you get clout and stuff, you can come back. You can do some deals, use that to distribute a product you’re working on, or something like that. But if you really get liquidated and didn’t get anything else from it, there’s no way you can trade rationally after that.
That’s what I was going to ask you. Where is it in the chat? Zoomer Finds is in here asking about Octra. Octra—what is that?
Octra is a fully homomorphic encryption blockchain that I invested in a long time ago.
Did you say “homomorphic”?
Yeah, it sounds funny.
When you said it, I thought you said “homophobic” or something.
It’s not a homophobic blockchain. Fully homomorphic encryption pretty much means that stuff is encrypted, but you can still operate on it.
The idea is: what if there were a smart contract that was trustless but could still do things? What if you had a DEX that nobody knew what was going on inside of, but it was mathematically provable?
They’ve been building for a while. They’re a very, very smart team. Their branding is sick. I think the blue circle on white, or white circle on blue, is super recognizable.
Oh, I’ve seen that shit. I know what that is. Everybody had their badge for a bit. It was super sick.
Their community building is insane. They went the complete opposite direction of what people normally do for Layer 1 project community building. They went deep crypto—actual crypto people. They didn’t do farming or anything like that. They have a super-strong community and vibe, and they’ve done so well there.
Do you know who the founder is?
Yes. I know their Twitter handles. I believe it’s Lambda0xE, and I forget the other one.
Oh, here it is. Cool, thank you.
They’re a very smart team. They’ve been grinding for a while. They’re really, really cool.
Interesting. I’m going to look at it. I’ve seen that badge thing everywhere, dude.
Right, and you didn’t even know it. It’s not even a paid thing. It’s not like a quest thing or anything. People just did it because they wanted to.
That’s awesome. Are you super active as an angel?
I was super active when I was chilling a bit more. I’m actually really happy I did, because some of the projects I invested in are doing great, and it’s awesome to be part of those communities.
I’m a bit less active now because I think it does take some mind share, and I want to be able to provide value to the companies I invest in.
Yeah, if you’re building something, trading, and having a life, it’s hard to be like, “Yes, let me invest, and I’ll be talking to you all the time.” It’s fucking hard to do both. I kind of stopped angeling for that reason, because I’m like, “I can’t even get on calls with these teams.” I’m like, “Ah, yeah, that’s not great.”
Sometimes I may technically have the time for it, but if I start angeling again a bunch, I’m going to have zero time to myself. I need some mental disconnect from all this at some point.
Yeah. Yeah, you fucking do.
Dude, this was sick, man. I appreciate you coming on. You also made some nice tweets about me, and I appreciate those too.
I’ve watched you come up from being that mutant ape “here’s how to write Twitter threads for engagement” guy that literally everybody was clowning on. They were saying, “This is never going to work. This isn’t going to go anywhere.”
Then, over the years, everybody in crypto came to know Thread Guy, which is crazy. I remember thinking, “Who’s this guy tweeting about engagement?” Then you just did it for 4 years straight, and now you’re the top engagement person in crypto or whatever. It’s insane.
I respect it a lot, and I was so wrong at the start.
Thanks, man. I appreciate that, dude.
For sure. It means a lot.
Yeah, it’s been sick. This is the coolest market in the world, by far. There’s nowhere else—
—you get to talk to really cool people.
Yeah, I just DM people like you, who have the sickest feed of all time, and you’re like, “Yeah, I’ll come on.” I’m like, “Bet. Let’s go.”
You’ll say, “Cool, I’ll do it tomorrow,” and I’m like, “All right, let’s fucking go.” The slot is filled. It’s the coolest job ever, actually.
Yeah, thanks, man. This was sick, dude. I really appreciate it. I know you haven’t done one of these in a while, so I hope you got most of what you wanted out of it. Is there anything you really want to talk about before I kick you off?
Not necessarily. You tweeted out the waiting list, which is awesome. I saw you got a couple of sign-ups there, so we’re going to be reaching out to people as we open up the closed beta.
I don’t know if you personally signed up, but—
I haven’t, but I will after.
I will reach out to you. I think that’s kind of it.
Cool. Have you ever had a crash-out about having to pay 54% taxes? I don’t know where you live, but in 2021 it was brutal. I was in New York City, so there were state, city, and federal taxes all stacked together. I was paying more than half.
54%? No. I was in Utah at the time, and then New York City after that. But anyway, half of the gains is insane.
54%.
Like, what? They make more on the trades than I do.
Because when you have a job, it’s taken away, so when you get your paycheck, it’s after taxes and you don’t get mad. It’s so much worse when it’s from trading, because you have that money and then you have to send it to the U.S. government. That hurts so much physically. Brother, 54% is insane.
Gavin Newsom made more on my Trump trade than I did. Your first 6 months of the year weren’t yours. You were working to make money for the government.
Dude, stop.
Essentially, 12 hours of each day aren’t actually yours. Take profit—
No, it’s more than 12 hours. It’s like 12 and a half.
Yeah, it’s like 12.5 or something.
It’s more than 12 hours. I can’t believe this. And everyone’s like, “Oh, Thread Guy, is this your first year paying taxes?” It’s like, no, it’s my first year making enough money that a crash-out is justified. If you make, I don’t know, $200,000 and you have a sick year, you’re paying like 30%, which is heinous.
Yep. But it’s not 54%. It gets up there pretty quickly, and it hurts. They try to get you with, “Oh, well, you get taxed at the equivalent rate on the way up.” So if you make $12,000, you pay nothing, but you basically get a hard cut after 150, and then you’re just cooked the whole way up.
It’s brutal, and there’s nothing to do about it. I’m sitting here trying to—after you get off the stream, we’re going to read about the Boston Tea Party because I didn’t understand it when I learned about it in ninth grade. But I now understand that they [ __ ].
Taxes were way lower. Brother, they started a new country at 3% tax. Yeah, 3%! We’re up like 15× from that.
“15×?”
More. It’s the craziest thing ever. And then people are like, “Oh, just make more money.” I’m like, “Yeah, of course I’m down to make more money,” but I’m like, “Man, how?” Basically, the only way to get rich in the United States is to sell a company for 9 figures. That’s it. Or you have to hit the god of trade.
It’s also hard because, if you get really lucky—I mean, you can’t time this—but if you get really lucky, it’s better to do it all in 1 year and then pay taxes, because you can compound it in that year. If you make 2× every year, pay taxes on it, then make 2× the next year and pay taxes on it, that kind of hurts.
Facts. I was also doing some mental math on this. 2024 was a crazy year. If you sell a ton at the top, which was in January, before Trump, lock in crazy gains, stay fairly risk-on, and then draw down like crazy in 2025, you’re in the red. You could be negative.
There were people I remember in 2021 who had that issue. So many people owed the IRS 8 figures but were completely broke. They had a $20 million tax bill, then lost it all on leverage. They ended the cycle with a net worth of negative $20 million or something.
And you had, like, the best cycle ever. I’m sitting here, dude. I thought I was—I had the best 2 trading years of my life. I thought I was—I’m not going to lie, I’ve been walking around like I’m [?] up.
I got my bill yesterday. I’m in LA, so we had an extension because of the fires and shit, and it’s due October 15th. I haven’t paid my 2024 taxes yet. I didn’t even have a concept of what it was. I’m sitting here thinking, “Dude, I might be in debt. I might be in the red.” How is that even possible? It’s insane. Who knew that it was this bad?
Everyone’s like, “Dude, just make an LLC.” I’m like, “Fuck you, man. That’s not how it works.” I’ll just make an LLC. It’s like, if you’re the single owner of an LLC, the taxes just get passed through to you. It doesn’t actually change anything.
It didn’t do anything. It’s just, Thread, you know, you’re a Thread Guy. You have an LLC. I’m like, “Dude, shut the fuck up.” I’ve got to get married for tax purposes, man.
Actually, I don’t know how much that helps. I feel like, with the high-end tax brackets, there’s a certain point where it doesn’t matter if you’re married or not. I don’t know if that’s true, but I feel like after a certain point, you’re just going to hit that 54%, and that’s it.
Also, shouldn’t it be better if you’re single? Shouldn’t you be paying less taxes if you’re single? No, because when you get married, you put both your incomes together, so you would get hurt if the tax brackets didn’t also increase at the same time. Oh, I see.
Yeah, so you need to marry someone with no income. That’s insane. You need to marry someone who makes $0 a year so you can mooch off their tax brackets, essentially. I’m honestly down. If I wasn’t in debt, dude—fuck. If you had asked me that 2 days ago, I’d have been like, “Hell yeah.”
Nice. Yeah, brutal. There’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to fucking eat it.
It shocked me that so few people tweet about this. Now I’m like, half of you guys aren’t fucking paying it. I know it. I just know it. I think some people don’t pay it. I also think a lot of people don’t make much. A lot of the people prolifically posting on Twitter don’t make that much money, either.
And the rest don’t live in the US.
Yeah, crazy. Dude, you’re awesome. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Do you have anything you want to sign off on? A hot take, something else to shill, a cold take—something you want to end on? Anything you want to sign off on?
I think you should be excited for Nebulae, which is coming out. We’re working on it, and I’m pretty excited. Thank you to everybody who signed up for the waitlist.
My hot take is that Web3 gaming is not dead, and it’s going to be absolutely insane.
Whoa, that’s awesome. I think everybody thought it died in 2021 or 2022. I think it’s coming back. I think Fantasy Top, for which you’re one of the top heroes—
Fantasy Top.
—and Hambria are having a very good rise. Both of which I invested in, full disclosure. I think strong communities and people making actually good games have not been done yet in crypto, especially with people who know what they’re doing with crypto flywheels and stuff like that. I’m excited for those 2 crypto gaming projects.
Wow. For crypto gaming stuff.
Hot take: I fucking love that, dude. Fantasy Top is awesome.
Thanks. Hell yeah, man. I’m going to fire a ton of clips. I’m going to post a video on YouTube, and this is honestly an absolute pleasure. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had a lot of fun. Dude, I appreciate you coming on. Thank you. I was kind of nervous going in, honestly. How do you feel now?
It was really fun. I enjoyed it. You feel good now?
I feel somewhat euphoric, in a way. Really?
Pretty good.
That’s awesome. Why do you feel— that’s incredible. That’s like the best thing anyone’s ever said. Nice. You should do it more, by the way. You have a lot to share. I’m sure you have a lot more sick lore. We went for an hour and 10 minutes, and we didn’t even get into a lot of it.
Yeah, this was really fun, actually. That’s fucking dope. Maybe we’ll do a part 2 at some point. Sick. Sick, dude. Well, cool. We’ll talk offline. I’ll send you some clips, the video, whatever, but have a great rest of your day, man.