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 in crypto – that’s not a milestone, it’s a survival story. And the fact that you started with the Berkeley course three years before buying anything suggests you came in skeptical, which probably saved you from the 2017 peak carnage. Most people invert that sequence: buy first, learn later, regret forever.
That said, let me push back where it counts.
Principle 1 — Crypto is short-term. This is true for most tokens, but the absolutism is doing a lot of work here. BTC has rewarded long-term holders across every cycle. You can argue it’s the exception that proves the rule, but it’s a pretty significant exception when it’s the asset with the highest market cap and the clearest institutional adoption narrative. “HOLD doesn’t work for any token” is technically defensible if you cherry-pick the timeline, but it’s also the kind of statement that would have told someone to sell Bitcoin at $10k in 2020.
Principle 2 — Avoid fundamental analysis. Partially true, and directionally correct for the vast majority of projects. But “only trend and target matter” is a trader’s mantra, not a framework. It works until it doesn’t – and the people who got wrecked in Luna were often following the trend and momentum, right up until the depeg. The absence of fundamentals doesn’t mean fundamentals are useless; it means they’re harder to apply and more easily manipulated. That’s different.
Principle 5 — Memecoins over NFTs. Interesting reversal given your background with NFTs. The logic holds – liquidity is real on memecoins in a way it often wasn’t with JPEGs – but the framing of “fixed rules” for memecoins is almost poetic in its optimism. The rules get rewritten by insiders before you’ve even loaded the chart.
What I’d actually like to hear more about: you’ve settled on SOL as your one credible bet outside BTC/ETH. That’s a strong conviction. What’s the actual thesis – is it technical, ecosystem-based, or is it partly just familiarity bias after your NFT years on the chain?
Solana has become the go-to blockchain for smart contracts, outperforming Ethereum in transaction speed and cost, number of active users, volume, revenue, and more. How can Ethereum still be worth five times as much? My thesis has been that, sooner or later, the market would correct this inefficiency – though I am no longer quite so certain.
The uncertainty is the interesting part. “Better tech wins” has a long graveyard – Betamax, OS/2, early internet browsers. Ethereum’s premium is partly inertia, partly institutional entrenchment, partly regulatory familiarity.
The market isn’t blind to Solana’s metrics; it’s pricing a different risk stack. The real question isn’t if the gap closes – it’s what triggers it, and whether your position is sized for a specific catalyst or just a vague sense of inevitability.
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