Meteora LP Army Bootcamp Instructor
Active Meteora Community Member

I’ve been a technophile all my life. I messed around a very small bit in the very early days, back with MtGox, but I never put any significant sums of money into it. I was very skeptical of investing in crypto, because when it comes to investing, I need to see fundamentals.

If you own an asset like a stock, there is a company behind it generating revenue. Revenue, costs, margins, projected growth rates, and a multitude of other measures get priced into the stock. There are many ways to perform valuations on securities. Cryptocurrencies have none of these metrics, and there is rampant speculation behind many crypto projects out there.

That being said, I’m very bullish on blockchain technology, particularly smart contracts and DeFi. I would say my main crypto Journey in 2017, because Ethereum caught my eye with smart contracts. I bought a couple of GTX 1070 GPUs and started mining. I used my mining earnings to explore the world of DeFi on Ethereum, and I was smitten. It was amazing to experience a non-custodial platform where you could trade, lend, and borrow. My experimentation with DeFi afforded me airdrops in Uniswap, dydx, and 1inch. I sold enough of my airdrops to cover my taxes, and played with the rest.

When Ethereum mooned and gas prices went through the roof, I started seeking out a new blockchain to use as my playground. Ergo Solana. I started playing on Solana in early 2021. Not long after I started playing on Solana, I made this Reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/solana/comments/nc8oo3/solana_needs_an_amm_aggregatorrouter/

When Jupiter came along, it was literally a dream come true! My desire for a swap router came to fruition. Later in 2021, Jupiter posted their TypeScript/JavaScript SDK on npmjs, and I built an arbitrage bot with it. That afforded me a nice airdrop in JUP.

I’ve never put any of my own money into crypto, other than the money I spent to buy video cards over the years to mine Ethereum while it was still proof-of-work. I think it is fun and interesting to see what I can do to grow what I have by interacting with all the wonderful DeFi protocols on Solana.

I aspire to some day launch an encore career in crypto. That day may come very soon…