Sokio：在加密市场生存、熊市与牛市、ZCash及更多 | TG Podcast

I've been a longtime fan of the Twitter account.

Really?

I am a fan, bro. Do you want to start by giving us an intro—who you are, what you do, what you focus on—and then we can get into some fun stuff?

Okay. My name is Sokio8D. I work for Insilico Terminal, representing the merch here. I guess my official or unofficial title is chief intern. Basically, I run a podcast and make content: vlogs, tutorials, and video content on our stuff. I also do a bit of marketing and tweeting. That's me.

Let's go. What is Insilico? Flood, right? I feel like I should really know what it is, and I don't really know what it is.

It is not Flood. Not anymore. Flood is no longer with the company.

Oh, as of how long?

I guess about a month.

Oh, no way.

At this point, maybe two months—something like that.

Okay.

Yeah. He was one of the co-founders, but he's focusing on his own project now and has gone his own way.

Got it. What is Insilico?

Insilico Terminal is basically the number-one order-management system for trading perps. If you're trading perps on a centralized exchange, and also on Hyperliquid as of now, you can use the terminal to have all of your accounts in one place. You have advanced order types, a bunch of different customization options, and that kind of stuff. If you're a professional or more-or-less professional perp trader, it's pretty much a tool for you to use for your trading.

Okay, word. I've never used it. Maybe I should try it. I'm a—

You should. You should.

I'm a newfound perp trader ever since Zcash.

Are you?

I'm a newfound perp trader.

Did it save your life?

Yeah, it's the title of the stream: “Zcash Saved My Life.” Honestly, I'm excited to have you on. I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about. We can talk about current market stuff, but the tweet that I initially brought you on for was—you tweeted, what did you tweet? I have it right here. You tweeted, “How mentally ill do you need to be to think Zcash is better than Monero?”

Can you shit on Zcash?

Okay. The thing is, I haven't been too involved in the markets in the last couple of weeks. I've seen that Zcash has gone up a bunch, but I'm not talking about price. Price is whatever.

It doesn't really matter. I don't really understand the point of Zcash. It's been around forever, and it's supposedly this privacy thing, but if you're actually trying to use private money, then you would just use Monero. Everyone who wants to use private money is using Monero. So what is the Zcash thesis? I don't really get it.

What happened? Why do you think all of these people—Mert and all these people—are into it? I don't know much about the privacy thing. What happened?

I don't really know that much about Monero, to be honest.

I don't really know that much about Zcash. You tell me it saved your life. Why did you buy it?

The chart saved my life. The choice—

The irony of the whole thing is that the narrative is privacy, and I like the privacy narrative. Some of the privacy doom-posting, I'm genuinely here for it. But the irony is that I hold it on Hyperliquid perps.

Which is—

Yeah, I don't have shielded Zcash. I hold it on Hyperliquid in a doxxed wallet that everybody knows, so there's a bit of irony to the whole situation. The concept of Zcash is compelling to me: you could have private, anonymous money that is untraceable once it's shielded. Nobody can track it. Nobody can find it. Are you a Monero holder?

I lost all of it in a boating accident.

Okay, so you were like—I hold some there.

Yeah.

Why has that happened? I'm getting into some of the privacy stuff now because I'm looking at what Zcash is doing from a price perspective. I'm looking at it and thinking, “Okay, people are probably going to chase betas after this.” I saw Dash go crazy, which was interesting. I don't know that much about it. What's the current state of Monero, and why aren't there vocal KOLs, if you will, talking about it?

I guess because it's a real project. It's a real thing, basically. Monero is kind of what you would want when you first looked at Bitcoin, in my opinion. Bitcoin is decentralized money, but it's all public, and Monero is very similar in the way that it works. I think it's also proof-of-work, but everything is private. It's not optionally private like Zcash; every single transaction is private. No one knows how much Monero you have, and no one knows what you send to anyone. It's completely private.

Is the token just cursed? I don't really look at the chart or the price that much, and I don't think it matters that much. The argument for why Monero is better than Zcash is—

If you look at the first use case of cryptocurrencies, it was dark markets like Silk Road and all the others. Initially, they all used Bitcoin, but since Bitcoin is public and traceable, they all moved to using Monero. There's not a single darknet market today that uses Zcash. I think that tells you everything you need to know, because if you want privacy, look at the people who actually need privacy, which are criminals, which you can maybe make a case against or whatever. Why would the people who actually need privacy use the inferior option?

Interesting. The craziest thing, whether it's Zcash or Monero aside, is that I never really paid attention to privacy in crypto until fairly recently. It was price that got me excited, like most people, I would imagine. There was a Naval blog post, and Naval posting is crazy, by the way.

Yeah.

It was something along the lines of, “Satoshi can never spend his Bitcoin,” which is crazy.

Yeah.

That got me thinking, “Whoa.” How much bigger do you think the TAM is for private money? Do you think this is something we'll be even more excited about a year from now?

I would like to hope so, but I think it's been a narrative—or could have been a narrative—for a long time already, and it hasn't really caught on. Even Monero, as good as it is, isn't really pumping or anything. Zcash pumping is almost always a sign of the end times in the market.

Why is that, by the way? Where does that come from? The market's over when Zcash pumps?

It's not just Zcash. I don't really know that much, but it's the same if you look at Litecoin or, as you said, Dash. Every time all of these dinosaur coins pump, it pretty much means there's nothing else left. The narratives are exhausted, and people jump into random stuff.

Yeah.

It becomes this self-propelling thing.

So you work at a trading company, basically. What is your—

Go ahead.

It's not a trading company. We don't trade. We offer a service for traders.

Centralizing?

Yeah, for traders. What is your general sentiment and read—your own take, and the take of the traders you interact with—on where we are right now in the market?

To be honest, I'm very low-time-frame-oriented. I try not to think too much about where we're going in the next couple of weeks or months, or a year from now. I don't really have that much of a read on it. Many people think the market has topped because of the four-year cycle and all of that, while other people think we haven't topped and are still going to keep going. I prefer to look at the order flow day to day and get a read on sentiment from that.

I don't really believe in cycles, to be honest. I'm not a huge fan of that idea, even though it has worked a lot in the past. I feel like the market is so different now because we have ETFs, TradFi flows, and all of that. Even during all the tariff stuff, when the TradFi markets went down 25% or something, Bitcoin only went down—I don't even know how much, 40% or 50% or something like that—which isn't that much compared to the past. You would expect it to go down 80%.

I feel like, because of all the TradFi stuff, we have a higher floor now. It will be much more similar to traditional markets, in my opinion. Unless a big macro event happens where everything goes down, like the COVID crash or whatever, it will just slowly keep grinding up the same way the S&P, the Nasdaq, and all of these things do.

When you're watching low-time-frame order flow, what are you paying attention to? I feel like I'm at least a little bit blind on this. What are you watching for? What are you looking for?

It's not that easy to explain because it takes a lot of screen time to get to a point where you kind of understand what's going on. You can look at many different things: the price action, the tape, an aggregator website where you can see all the orders coming in per second, the liquidations, and all of that stuff.

You can use a website like Aggr.trade to aggregate all the market orders from all the exchanges. It's been quite popular in the past, and you can see all the market orders coming in and observe the reaction. For example, if you see a bunch of huge buy orders coming in but the price doesn't really move, that tells you something about the market.

In the same way, if it happens the other way around, those are the kinds of things you can use to gauge which direction the market is likely to go in at that moment. I've actually used that to figure out if we're at the bottom for today or if we're probably still going down. But it's also a lot of experience.

I've actually seen this. Hashov showed me this platform before.

Aggr.trade.

Yeah. Who owns it? Do they have a token or anything?

No, there's no token. I don't know who owns it, but it's very interesting if you just leave it on with the sound on and listen to it for a day or a couple of hours.

So—

Because there's a sound every time an order comes in.

Okay. I'm newly exposed to this cohort of people who spend all day watching the order books. It's a different, special archetype of person. Not that many people are doing this.

What do you do all day? How do you spend your time in the market?

I don't have Twitter. At this point, my trading has become very much spot Bitcoin, and then I sit here and do nothing until I find a really high-conviction, higher-time-frame trade. The last one was Pump. I was really excited about Pump at the bottom, sized in, built a position, held it for multiple months, and scaled out.

The more recent one was Zcash. Everyone was talking about privacy, and I was like, “Dude, I don't get this.” So, I did 7 different streams where people came on and shilled me on Zcash, showed me Monero, showed me Zcash—Zcash, Zcash, Zcash—

Made a position.

And you still don't get it.

I generally get it, but I can't fight with you on the technicals of Zcash versus Monero. I understand private money, right? With shielded ZEC, you can send it, and no one can decrypt it. No one can see how much you sent, and no one can see where it came from. You're basically off the grid.

I can't fight with you on the technicals of Zcash versus Monero, though. That was another one that we took. So, I'm super active, but I'm not taking that many positions right now. Before that, I was on-chain trading memes all day. I was doing this on Dexscreener and had no idea what I was looking at other than sizing a little bit on some positions. So, how many positions are you taking in a week?

In a week, I couldn't even tell you. It's a lot—probably a couple hundred. In a day, it's like 30 or 50, something like that. It really depends on what kind of day it is.

What time zone are you in? Are you East Coast? It's like 5:00 p.m. for you.

No, it's 11:30. I'm in Europe.

At night or morning?

P.m.

How many trades have you taken today?

I guess something like 30.

Whoa. And what are you trading? Are you just trading Bitcoin on the five-minute chart? What are you?

Yeah, I trade Bitcoin on the 1-minute chart.

Already? High leverage?

That's what I said. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, pretty much.

Whoa. How much leverage?

Right now, I do a lot of my scalping on low time frames on Lighter because of zero fees and farming points. I think I use max leverage, 50x or whatever, but my account size is very small, so it's not that huge of a total one.

And so you're just staring at Aggr.trade, looking at the full order flow, and taking high-leverage positions on the 1-minute chart?

Yeah, pretty much.

Whoa. Did you start trading like this? Why is this your approach? When you're making money, how are you making money?

The reason I started this approach is because of inSilico, the founder of Insilico Terminal—or one of the founders. He's called inSilico. He's always shared a lot of knowledge on Twitter and Telegram and whatever in the past on trading, and I learned almost everything I know about markets from him. He always suggested scalping because it's a very good way to learn how to trade: you trade so much, and it's way easier to find out when you're doing something wrong than if you're only doing higher-time-frame stuff because the sample size is so much lower.

Interesting. So, you're getting rep after rep—this was good, this is a good setup, this is a bad setup, this is a good setup, this is a bad setup—way more often?

Yeah. Exactly. And the way that you make money is pretty much not by making one big trade and winning hugely, but by compounding small gains again and again and again. He has a saying: the next trade won't change your life, but the next 1,000 trades will change your life.

What's the lore on inSilico? Is it crazy to say I don't really know? I know who it is because I see people post old screenshots, but I don't really know who it is.

The lore on inSilico is—I don't even know what to say. I guess he's an OG, one of the very early people into Bitcoin, crypto, and trading. He used to be on all the Discords and has done a lot of educational stuff.

He's a bit schizo, in a good way and in a bad way. I really respect him. I've not really interacted with him that much, but he dropped a lot of knowledge that many people who are good traders now learned from back in the day.

Interesting.

He's a very good trader and a very smart person. He had the idea for creating the terminal to make execution easier for traders.

How much of your trading is dependent on what type of market it is? On low-volume range days, are you still trading 30 or 40 times a day, or does it really depend on where the market is?

No. If it's just chopping and not really doing anything, I take fewer trades. But if it's very active and very volatile, then I do more because there's just more stuff going on. If there's less going on, I trade less as well.

So it is market-dependent. Who's the target user for inSilico? What type of user are the power users?

If you're trading perps regularly, then you should trade through the terminal. It ranges from people who trade a lot of size to people who trade very little size. You don't necessarily have to trade lower time frames like I do. You can make higher-time-frame trades using the terminal as well.

For example, my favorite tool is Limit Chase. It basically places a limit order on top of the book until you get filled. Limit orders have lower fees than market orders, so you save on fees by doing that. It's basically the same way of executing, and especially if you trade a lot, fees stack up. It's a very good way to save money and get better execution.

I wouldn't say it's for a complete beginner who has never really understood perps and that stuff. You could still use it, but I think you need to understand the basics of the market first before you use software like that. If you're regularly trading perps, you should definitely use the terminal.

Are you ever buying spot?

Yes. I pretty much just DCA into Bitcoin every month.

So you're buying spot?

I also do spot trading.

Say it again.

I also do spot trading.

Okay. So you're mostly DCAing into Bitcoin, and then you're trading the 1-minute chart on Hyperliquid?

Yes.

Damn. It's kind of electric. I've never really traded a low time frame like that.

Let me ask you this: how many hours a day are you trading? How often are you staring at this perp trade?

Pretty much the whole day. Like, 12 hours plus.

I don’t, except when I’m traveling, then my lifestyle is a bit different. But when I’m home, I’m just here. I have my 3 screens in front of me, and I wake up in the morning, turn on my PC, and go to the gym. That’s the only other real thing that I do. Apart from that, I just stare at my screen the whole day.

I’m not trading the whole day because most of the time, nothing is really going on in the market. I’m just on Twitter, watching videos, working, producing stuff, or whatever. But if opportunities arise, then I’m here and ready to take advantage of them.

Wow. This is like going Cubsy mode on an unc. This is like Cubsy mode. [laughter] What? What does that mean? What is Cubsy mode?

Do you know who Cubsy is?

I don’t.

Okay, okay. Watch. This is great: Cubsy.

Explain it to me. Explain the lore.

You’re like the unc-Cubsy. Cubsy is the GOAT of Solana memecoins. He’s probably—his public wallet is up, I don’t know, $20 million in the last 18 months, something like that.

The way Cubsy trades is that he takes hundreds of trades a day. He’ll buy 1% or 2% of a coin at around $15,000, brand-new on Solana, pre-bonded, and then he’s out at around $100,000 for a 4x. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat, trading every single—he’s probably trading thousands of coins today. Honestly, he’s trading every single coin that launches at around $20,000. He clicks all day, every day, for 14 hours. I don’t think anyone has traded for longer or clicked more coins since the inception of Solana memecoins.

That’s crazy.

But yeah, I guess it’s pretty similar to what I do.

He’s kind of the GOAT of this shit. But you’re in Cubsy mode on purpose. How many people are trading this style among CT traders? I feel like I haven’t had many traders come on the stream and say, “I take 50 trades a day on the 1-minute chart.”

Yeah, how many is that? It’s very hard to tell because I feel like my perspective is a bit skewed. I follow a lot of the people who do stuff like that, and a lot of them are smaller accounts and whatever.

Overall, if you’re including everyone, it’s probably not that many people who trade that way because many people don’t want to invest that much time.

Yeah.

It is a huge time investment. But I think there are many people who have done it at some point or another and, as they’re getting bigger or changing their style, switch away from it.

I would recommend it. If you’re doing perp trading, I would recommend doing it. You don’t have to do it forever, but do it for a certain amount of time. It’s very good for learning. As I said, it’s about getting a feel for the market and figuring out what your hit rate is on these trades to be profitable.

It depends on what kind of trades you take because you could also do what I do, which is mostly mean reversion. If something is very dislocated, I trade it going back to a mean, like a moving average or something. But you could also do trend trading if you want to trade that style.

My hit rate is very high. It’s around 80% or something like that. But the risk-reward is also roughly 1:1. You make or lose the same amount on a trade, but you have a very high hit rate. That’s the reason it’s profitable.

80% feels crazy. That’s high.

I don’t really have the stats, but it’s something like 70% to 80%.

So usually when you enter a trade, you’re winning. You’re not losing a lot of trades.

Yeah.

Wow.

That’s basically what you do. That’s why you’re compounding in the way that you do. But the thing that can also happen, especially if you trade with a high amount of leverage, is that you win most of your trades and then have one losing trade where you lose half of your account or something like that.

Yeah.

That has definitely happened to me in the past, but it’s something that you learn as you go along—how to manage your risk and stuff.

I like to leave much smaller amounts in my account, so if I ever get into that position—and everyone still gets greedy and gets psychologically fucked or whatever—I don’t lose as much as I would if I had more in the account. I only use that amount in the account, and then I can move on and keep going.

Why do you take the money out as it grows? That makes total sense. Why do you just do it in crypto? Can you do this with options on stocks? Are there any other markets that you’re interested in trading?

I guess you could. I don’t really understand options.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone does.

I think there are some people who do, but I’ve read all the basics and the Greeks and whatever. I haven’t messed around with options that much yet.

I think crypto is, for me personally, just the most accessible market. I’ve tried to set up an Interactive Brokers account before, and it’s asking 10,000 questions that I don’t really want to answer.

I also think crypto has very good data availability. A lot of the trading and market data is very public and accessible. It’s also what I’m most familiar with. I’m in crypto 24/7; it’s basically my whole life.

I don’t really understand stocks. I don’t really know what’s going on in stocks. I heard that it’s like trading pigs, dude.

80% at 1:1 sounds crazy. That feels—are you one of the GOATs? Who’s the GOAT at your trading style?

Probably inSilico. [laughter]

Really?

Or someone like Jim Talbot is also very good, I think.

Jim—I know Jim. Yeah, I’m really not that good of a trader. I’m not that good. Does he do interviews? I want to listen to him.

No.

Never?

No, no, no, never. He’s never done one. He won’t come on your podcast. Nothing.

Maybe someday. But he’s a very private person. He’s very obscure. He has never done any sort of interview or whatever.

Wow, Migmus[?] is in the chat. There’s one person who’s ever heard his voice. It’s like that.

I think so. Yeah, pretty much.

Whoa. Have you never heard his voice?

You have to get the knowledge from his schizo-ranting tweets about buying—what’s it called? He’s buying a bunch of SSDs and doing cable management or whatever right now. There are 10,000 tweets about that, and one tweet about market wisdom. That’s what you have to farm to get the knowledge.

Wow. That is crazy. I didn’t even know. Is that crazy? I didn’t know.

Huh?

Not really. If you’re not into that side of Twitter, then I guess it’s not really that well known. If you’re not trading perps regularly, then—

Jim does interviews and stuff, right?

Yeah, I think maybe not that much now.

I heard some old stuff from him.

Yeah. He doesn’t really trade that much anymore, as far as I know, but he’s been on UpOnly and stuff.

He has been on UpOnly.

Yeah.

Someone said inSilico.

And inSilico is Cubsy on-chain. That’s awesome.

Damn, this was actually—I want to talk to you offline. This is sick. Is there anything, before we wrap, that you’re particularly excited about right now in the market?

What am I excited about? [laughter] I guess I have to shill my own bags, or try to shill my bags or potential bags, because I invested in the MegaETH sale—the public one.

But since the reveal is tomorrow, I think, you don’t really know if you got in.

I should be in because my wallet has a lot of multipliers or whatever. I also got the NFT and shit.

I hope that whenever Monad and MegaETH launch, the prices will still be at a point where it’s worth something. I don’t really like Monad that much, but for MegaETH, I feel like it could have potential. It’s interesting. I hope it does something or whatever. It saves Ethereum.

It brings back decentralization and all of that stuff.

Apart from that, I don't know. So I guess prediction markets are the huge thing right now. I think that's very interesting. That has a lot of potential. I like using Polymarket. Yeah.

I'm a fan.

Are you trading on Polymarket?

Yeah. Yeah. I like betting on the meeting outcome or football. I like football betting, so I do that on there.

It's just fun to play around a bit. I like that.

This is honestly sick, bro. I feel like I have a rabbit hole to go down after this.

You do. You do.

You're kind of nuts.

I'm not. I'm really not.

No, you're kind of nuts, in a good way. It kind of fired me up, actually. I've just been staring at this Aggr.trade since we've been on.

Dude, you should put the sound on as well. It's really, really—

Why is that automated, though?

You're going to go insane if you put the sound on. I have some friends that I keep mentioning all the time who just listen to this all day.

Yeah, it makes you—

You just listen to this all day.

I guess you can't hear it.

No, I have the sound off. I only have it on for liquidations, so it only pops off once in a while. But the normal sound, I can't listen to because it's too much. I dream of it.

You hear it in your sleep and—

Crazy.

If I leave the normal sound on, yes. So that's why—

So how does it work? Is it a different sound for green versus red? Then a bigger position is different—bigger on both sides?

Yeah, pretty much.

Every time a hash sends a voice message, you can hear it in the background. Yeah, this is a movie, bro. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, this is brutal.

No, thanks for having me.

Is there anything you want to show before you leave? Anything else you want to sign off with? I guess the terminal. Use the terminal. There is no second best. Listen to the podcast. I'm the podcast host. Yeah, pretty much.

Go—

Follow me.

Read my tweets.

Go get inSilico [?] on so we can listen.

Don't kill yourself. I can tell the story that happened to me today. A woman almost killed herself in front of me. She jumped off a [?], and I kind of saved her. So never kill yourself.

How did you save her? It was very crazy. I just wanted to go to the gym, and she was climbing off the thing. I was like, “Yo, you good?” She didn't react at all, and I held her. Then another woman came. I called the police, and then she got off again. It was very crazy. I was kind of shook for a moment. It was crazy.

Damn. W man, though.

Never kill yourself in GTA.

Yeah. Never kill yourself in GTA. What's the card, by the way?

Which one?

Pokémon card. Flip it.

I have a bunch here. I just play with them. I think some of them are Chinese as well, actually.

I bought some in China.

I got this one.

Oh, that's awesome.

Wait, let me show you. This is, I guess, the best one.

Oh, hell yeah. You're a movie, dude, and a hero. Thanks for coming on, man. It was sick to meet you, bro.

Thank you.

I got a rabbit hole now, so maybe I'll text you some questions. Thanks again, dude.

Yeah, let me know. Let me know.

All right, bro. Have a good one. Peace. See you.