How I ended up in crypto full time a short story.
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While I’ve been in crypto since 2012 , i wasn’t really profitable until 2020. In November 2020 my boss at the time asked myself and my coworkers to write a short paragraph about the activities we do outside of work.
November 2020 was an interesting time in crypto , it was only 2 months before when uniswap airdropped me a month’s salary worth of uni tokens .And defi summer 2020 was a wild time. Towards the end of October I had actually started programming in solidity and built my first dapp.
In this paragraph that I shared with my coworkers I left out a lot of these details (they wouldn’t get it) but I did write about how I spend a lot of time researching defi and that I think the future is promising for crypto .
I remember talking about some of the p2p lending markets as that is usually an easy topic to explain to normies. My boss jokingly responded with “someone report this guy” I expected his skeptism.
Most of my profits come from trading but I rarely speculate on price.
In December of 2020 I started noticing glaring inefficacies in the defi markets it started with indexed.finance a balancer fork that aimed to create indexes that contained various crypto tokens with a common theme.
The arbitrage opportunity presented itself because the index tokens could be traded on the market and the underlying assets could be used to mint the indexes. So whenever there was a large price movement of the underlying assets an arbitrage opportunity presented itself.
Towards the end of December I also discovered mirror protocol , as mirror has a presence on Terra and on Ethereum and Terra was relatively new at the time this also presented a plethora of arb opportunities where there was spread between mAssets on Ethereum and Terra.
Around the same time there was also some insane spreads on Luna between terraswap and other exchanges. These are just a few examples. By the end of January I had 10x’d my uniswap airdrop simply by arbitrage trading.
Once you have money it starts to get easier to make money. it took about 3 weeks to double my money from there and a week later I had put my notice in with my employer where I ended up working 2 weeks full time and 6 weeks 2 days a week.
They tried to offer me 10k to stay on for two months, but by this point I knew the opportunity cost was worth a hell of a lot more than 10k.
Up until this point my strategies were all semi automated, I wrote tools that generated alerts based on price spreads and all of my arbs were manually executed . While I was still working I’d work till 6pm , then work till 4am trading crypto , and start the day over at 9am.
As soon as I went part time I focused all of my time on learning whatever skills were necessary to automate my trading.
It took about 3 weeks to build my first bot , it was a massive success but despite this it was hardly competitive , the only reason why it was profitable is because there was very little competition on terra.
At this point I held mostly stables , some mAssets , and a little bit of luna and mirror token. 2 months after quitting my job we had the blackswan event in May.
I took full advantage of this deploying luna/bluna bots(min profit margin of 20%) and building 3 way arb bots that took advantage of the UST depeg event . I’ve held on to most of the luna that I made during this time.
While I was down bad on my UST stables at the time I was still making money. And this ultimately paid off immensely .
Since my first bot I’ve been constantly iterating and experimenting and have gotten my bots to the point where the only competitive factor is profit margin(and maybe backdoor deals with validators).
The competition in the terra ecosystem nowadays is much better than the early days and while I still do some market making in terra I have since expanded to many different chains and markets .
In retrospect I probably would have made more money this year if I just bought and held luna.
But as this is what I do for a living I wouldn’t have made it through the may crash by simply holding luna and the experience and knowledge that I’ve gained throughout this year is invaluable . I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Quitting your job and going fulltime crypto is not for everyone. But in my case it has been truly life changing. If your on the fence and you feel like your day job is holding you back take the leap. Or else you'll never know what could have been.
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