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Not an alpha leak but more of a story

It's crazy to think just how much crypto has changed my life and @Daryllautk 's too. We both got in 2017 with a tiny amount (<$50) because back then we were broke at with no source of income and just starting our degree in university
Looking back, there were plenty of signs for us to dive in:
- saw Bitcoin as payment on Steam when it was first added
- watched the Social Network movie when it first came out and thought the Winklevoss twins were cool af
- had a friend that was mining ETH in 2016 🤯

#megablind
I guess the final sign was when I was interning at a local NGO and my boss at that time @mrstingy2014 started telling me about Bitcoin and how it could change the world. He wrote this cool article here: mr-stingy.com/love-affair-bi…

That's when we had a 💡moment
It's funny how at that time, @Daryllautk and I were just starting our degree in Financial Analysis and we were completely lost.

Traditional finance didn't make sense to us at all and the returns we were told about (S&P 500 returns on average ~8%) were too unattractive 🥺
So we decided to bite the bullet and just purchase our first few satoshis. Looking back, this was probably the only time we ever held bitcoin.

Anyway, numba kept going up and we thought we were geniuses and we'll retire before graduating from uni

But then, China banned ICOs
INSTANT FINANCIAL DOOM (This won't be the only time)

We looked at our ruined portfolio and thought now what?

Decided to go learn more on trading (h/t @CryptoCred and DataDash)

Joining communities on Facebook, r/crypto, telegram and of course 4chan and lurked around
Learning whatever we could, shit-posters always seemed to have the best alpha, but the best thing that could have happened to us was something that happened coincidentally, we were at a Malaysian Community meetup and it just so happened that @coingecko was presenting
Daryl and I decided to go up to them after and ask if they were hiring any interns and they were! They had just started ramping up development at that point and @bobbyong and @tmlee were finally working on it full-time.

This internship tho was definitely challenging!
We had to learn fast and do more than what a normal intern would have done, revamping the ICO section, creating a spreadsheet, writing some articles for the blog etc.

But the main role we did was mostly community management, reaching out to teams and helping with the site
All of this was happening in 2018 - 2019 where the market wasn't as crazy as it is right now, so I was also focusing on other life things like university 👨‍🎓 and dodgeball 🤾 but Daryl kept up the grind, going even deeper into the rabbit hole, being active in several crypto groups
I was still in the market tho, making degen trades along with him but of course with the market starting to turn bearish we did have more losses than wins.

Flipped some ICOs but not much, the market was already going more into private and presale deals rather than public
But when DeFi projects started coming out, that's when we had another 💡 moment.

Before this, we came across several ICOs that had no use cases. NOW there were actual projects that if succeeded, we can actually imagine hundreds of not thousands using them.
We did identify several projects early on that have gone up big, but most of which we sold them for small gains. Scarred by '18

"Always better to have a 1.5x rather than a 0.9x"

A nickname a friend gave us was "Mr. 10%" because that were the kind of flips we did
We were early farmers tho, providing liquidity for ETH-sETH and on Curve when it launched, but these were the "safer" plays that we did.

On the degen side, week before Black Thursday happened, I was supposed to go on holiday and the market looked bullish so I went all in on ETH
Here's the thing watching your entire portfolio bleed out, right before your eyes with red dildos after red dildos isn't always fun.

Especially if your funds are in a trezor, 11,000 km away from you....
Lucky for us, the money printer then decided to go brrrrrr and @UniswapProtocol + 4chan became our favourite place, scouring it daily looking for shitcoins to punt.

My portfolio slowly started recovering again especially thanks to @mervynchng89 and @ZoomerOracle and other degens
When the yield farming craze started tho with $COMP, that's when things started to get more fun 👨‍🌾

An entire agricultural revolution started and it was difficult to catch up especially since I was finishing up my last semester of university, finals and assignments were crazy
I was still figuring out how I wanted to continue life after graduation, to continue at @coingecko or to join somewhere else.

Working here was definitely the best, with @bobbyong always looking out for us and giving us advice but I felt like I wanted to learn more than this
Writing the DeFi book back in February- March was probably the most fun I had with a project in CoinGecko,

Likewise, helping the team ship other new products and pushing it out was fun too. The goal was ofc to flip CMC

But did I really want a life in product management 🤔
That's when I saw that @TheSpartanGroup was hiring and my next 💡 moment hit me.

Why not join a crypto investment fund and learn from one of the best?

After all, I needed to learn more fundamental analysis and have more convictions in my picks. (Kek $NXM)
In my first month alone, I've already learnt a crazy amount and as a bonus, helped @mrjasonchoi see the light of being a degen.

There's still much more work to be done though especially with DeFi going crazy everyday!
While @Daryllautk and I did start at @coingecko and crypto together, we decided that going to the same firm wouldn't be the best for our combined growth.

So he decided to go look else where and ultimately he did find the best fit for himself. Stay tuned for this announcement 👀
Wrapping up, if I were to look at my past few years in crypto, or even this past month, I'm insanely grateful for just how much the community/friends have helped me out. Thank you guys really.

I only hope to return the favour to you guys by "leaking alpha" 🤓
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Keep Current with Darren Lau

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