I know, it sounds ridiculous. Luckily, because blockchain is defined by proofs (and because I wanted to document my progress), it's all publicly verifiable onchain. Here are some of the account's transactions. *It still feels very weird filtering for >$150k.
You might then wonder, how? I've been trading in some form all my life. I've traded physical ddakji, virtual Pokemon, and many other MMORPG-related resources. I started trading cryptocurrencies shortly after one of my ore refiners left our monopoly of fire staves for a TCG on Immutable. He'd told me he was earning actual money, albeit with an initial investment, and I knew I just had to try it out myself.
I had never spent money on a game, and I didn't start here. I dug around and found a community offering 1 SOL (or $100 at the time) in a meme-making competition and got to work. I ended up winning, not because my meme was very funny (well, maybe it was), but because I'd befriended the moderators of the competition. I really benefited from this humanity in crypto, I'm still grateful I had the opportunity to start.
I would spend the next few months of Year 10 (grade 9) turning my humble $100 portfolio into over $20K. I do regret not taking a more balanced approach (with health and studying), but admittedly, this simple-minded obsession felt easiest to me.
This time was fairly difficult, but I didn't really mind. I faced tribulation every other day and maintained killer schedules. I also probably had the worst possible timezone for all things crypto. I regularly woke up at 2-3 AM to catch drops, and I'd actually catch myself feeling happy when I got to wake up at 7. After wrecking my physical health and sanding down my dopamine receptors, I realized I wanted to do more in life.
All these NFT websites inspired me, and I learned web dev pretty quickly. I had a good programming foundation and already knew Python, so it only took me a few days to spin up a website in React. Every interaction with the blockchain is facilitated via RPCs. I wanted to learn more about these RPCs, so I ended up making a viral tweet about the no.1 RPC/API company on Solana in hopes of landing an internship. It helped that I didn't need or care about the money, so it almost felt like being paid $500 a month to learn.
Honestly though, I didn't really enjoy programming itself. Sure, I felt pleased writing an efficient function, but it was always about the impact. Weirdly enough, it was the opposite with crypto. I thought (and maybe think) money was no more than a number. I actually didn't really even spend any of it. I found joy in winning trades, and I just wanted to keep on winning. I didn't find any meaning in trading; I just wanted to win. I think that was a huge advantage.
Fast forward to the summer before grade 11, I'd concluded my gig at Helius and started anew at RevisionDojo. Crypto had a resurgence, and the Solana Summer I'd been waiting 2 years for had come. I started trading again. The trend this time around, airdrops, had already existed for ages (I'd actually received an airdrop a year before that would eventually be worth >$1m, I guess this was my second time losing $1m). I didn't really benefit directly from these airdrops, but I did benefit lots from the increase in ecosystem liquidity.
Trading felt pretty easy. I pretty casually grew ~$30k to $50k in a few days, then $50k to around $100k over the span of a few weeks. Then, I started obsessing over it.
This was around the time I created the wallet linked at the start of this post. I worked at Helius under the name Tidelaw, but I knew I wanted to own this journey regardless of its outcome. I made a lot of money really quickly. I had a pretty simple principle I'd adhere to in each trade, each bet was incredibly asymmetric.
Towards the end of this, I had tapped out the liquidity (around $2.5m) on leverage of the exchange I used. In hindsight, this would've been a good place to simmer. I was making almost $100k of profit on each trade, and I never really lost.
There are many more trades, but the gist of it is that I was making lots and losing little. It's easy to prop up this part of the journey, but the reality of it is deeply numbing. I very rarely got liquidated; I almost always doubled down. This meant I would spend tons in fees, often paying to keep on losing. This worked, largely thanks to the asymmetry of the bets, and in the process, I sort of farmed fees.
I couldn't really predict price action to a reasonable degree of accuracy, but I could squeeze out every drop of profit at each top. I actually asked Claude and ChatGPT to assess my trading strategy, and they agreed on this being the main strength.
Did I get lucky? Maybe, at times. Though, I'm sure if you gave the same starting conditions to any random sample group there'd be virtually no replicants. Most people in crypto are above this random sample in that they actually want to make money and have already gone out of their way to do so. Having personally been a part of these communities, I can tell you the vast majority don't get anywhere close, and the few that do almost always do so in a less than respectable way. In limiting it to purely ethical trading (e.g. I personally only traded SOL, but I really just mean no scams), I haven't met anyone else similar, especially in my age range.
So, what'd I do with all this money? Well, until the end of 2024, I didn't do anything. I wasn't sure about the tax implications and figured saving wasn't so bad. When I'd made hundreds of thousands of dollars though, I did some more research. I learned Vietnam didn't even consider crypto an asset, so there were no tax implications. I found a website (BitcoinVN) that transferred directly to my bank account, and it worked surprisingly smoothly.
I bought an iPad with all the accessories I'd have never gotten, a backpack I haven't really used, and three graphic tees I use constantly. All in all, I probably spent less than 3/1000 or 0.3% of what I'd made.
Then, it all went away. It started as one bad trade. I really didn't think I was wrong, so I doubled down on it. I didn't just double down though; I quadrupled down and lost spectacularly. Ok, so I was down to around $400k. My UC applications were a few days away, and I'd put crypto in there as an extracurricular. I had listed a portfolio of around $500k, so my next steps seemed obvious: Make back $100k.
Only, I'd never cared about the money before, and rather than only entering when I'd felt it was right, I don't remember the specifics, but as my portfolio kept shrinking, I cared less and less about just how much I was losing. I'd told a few friends and felt my self-worth was entangled with this number, so when it disappeared, I coped with it by doing as many other things as I could.
It was all over. To this day, I only have a few thousand in crypto, but it's not hopeless. The airdrops I mentioned before typically correlate to your interactivity with the platform, and in this case, how much in fees you gave to the platform. I've spent hundreds of thousands in fees, so I'd think I'd find a pretty penny if they do decide to keep on going with the airdrops.
In any case, I never really saw crypto (trading) as a means, let alone an end. I want to achieve and make a much bigger impact. I think I have a pretty unique disposition having navigated the constant fluctuation of life-changing sums of money. I'm confident I can do almost anything given time and effort, and any obstacle, however shocking, won't faze me. In time, this saga will just be a footnote.