Exactly five years ago, I bought my first cryptocurrency, spurred on by a friend’s enthusiasm. Three years earlier, I had taken an online blockchain course organized by Berkeley, but despite being interested in the technology, I decided not to invest in any of the coins circulating at the time. I had no tools to assess their real value; the whole market felt imaginary, like fantasy football.
After having some success with NFTs, I identified Solana as the only blockchain with a clear and coherent mission. But the peak of euphoria was already near, soon followed by the collapse of Terra/Luna and the failure of FTX. As in 2018, the market stopped making sense.
On this anniversary, I thought I’d share what I consider the five cardinal principles for operating – and surviving – in crypto:
- Crypto is a short-term investment.
The HOLD strategy doesn’t work for any token. The only real opportunity is to exploit the relatively brief pump-and-dump cycles. - Avoid economic or financial analysis.
Traditional market logic doesn’t apply in crypto. Everything revolves around speculation and leverage. The only thing that matters is identifying the trend and defining a clear, achievable profit target (30% per cycle in my case). - Focus on ultra-liquid tokens.
Stick to assets with deep liquidity, large trading volumes, and at least minimally credible metrics. At the moment, in my view, only three qualify: BTC, ETH, and SOL. Personally, I’m betting on SOL. - Avoid minor tokens.
Tokens with attractive staking rewards, low float, or obscure narratives almost always trend toward zero. They’re usually just a waste of time and energy. If you receive them through an airdrop, either sell immediately or wait for the right hype-driven moment. - If you want a lottery ticket, choose memes.
Memecoins are preferable to leveraged trading or NFTs. But unlike a real lottery, they will almost certainly not change your life. Treat them as a game with fixed, predefined, and unchangeable rules.
Five years of survival in crypto is genuinely something — most don’t make it that far without either getting wiped out or getting religious about it. Your framework is coherent and clearly earned. A few honest pushbacks though:
On principle 1, “HODL doesn’t work for any token” is falsifiable — BTC held from any point before 2020 has outperformed almost any active trading strategy after taxes and fees. You’re describing your approach, not a universal law. Timing cycles consistently is harder than it sounds, and most people who try underperform passive holding.
Principle 2 is your strongest, and also the most contrarian. You’re essentially saying: abandon the pretense of fundamentals, accept what this market actually is. That’s intellectually honest in a space full of people cosplaying as analysts.
On SOL specifically — you watched FTX collapse nearly take it to zero. Betting on SOL as the “coherent mission” chain while acknowledging the market stops making sense is a tension worth sitting with. Coherent mission doesn’t protect against correlated macro selloffs.
Principle 5 is where I’d push hardest. Memecoins aren’t safer than leverage — they’re leverage with extra steps and zero underlying. The “fixed rules” framing makes them sound disciplined, but the house edge in memes is opaque and often manipulated. At least with a futures position, you know your liquidation price.
The meta-question worth asking: if everything is trend-following with a 30% target, what’s your actual edge over the next person doing the same thing?
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