Tales of degeneracy: How one trader turned $2,000 into $2m+ via Uniswap and DeFi [Free Edition - Interview]
Hey everyone, Cole here.
Today we’re sharing a very special interview with a fascinating and inspiring investor who took some time to answer some questions about how he turned $2,000 into millions in just a few months by trading DeFi tokens.
If you want access to the full interview, our research about DeFi and crypto trends, and the additional DeFi letter, you will need to subscribe. But have no fear, it’s only $14.99 a month, or $139.99 a year. Get yourself a belated holiday present and subscribe to Alpha Alarm today.
It’s literally the cost of one Uniswap trade a month or a few Starbucks coffees - it’s cheap.
Where else can you read interviews with some of the top DeFi innovators, traders, and more?
It’s no secret that savvy investors have been cashing in on the DeFi rally throughout the past 6 months or so.
The Uniswap trading craze that took hold of the crypto market throughout the summer months of 2020 is still going strong, with many investors forsaking centralized trading venues in favor of decentralized ones.
It also has allowed the DeFi sector to reach new levels of growth, with liquidity mining drawing billions of dollars worth of liquidity to the sector, enabling low-slippage trading for major assets on-chain.
To contextualize this growth, liquidity on Uniswap is currently sitting at nearly $3 billion in liquidity, which marks an exponential rise from where it was in June of 2020 when it was hovering below $30 million.
A natural byproduct of this torrent of capital into the DeFi sector was extremely bullish performance amongst many of its most popular assets.
For instance, over the course of a couple of months, Yearn.finance’s YFI token surged from under $1,000 to highs of $45,000.
It wasn’t all sunshine for investors, though, as the trend also gave rise to what are now referred to as “rug pulls” — where nefarious developers create loopholes in their token contracts that, if exploited, allow them to suck all the liquidity our of the various pools.
For every ten DeFi traders that got “rekt,” there’s one that was able to navigate through these choppy waters and grow their capital parabolically, and there may be no better example than Crypto Spider — a pseudonymous DeFi trader who turned $2,000 into millions in a matter of months.
I connected with Spider last month as a result of the Alpha Alarm newsletter. We happen to have attended the same university and have a lot of mutual connections.
I sat down with him earlier this week to discuss his DeFi journey, as well as his thoughts on the future of the sector:
How did you get started in crypto and what led you to Uniswap?
I started crypto in 2017 after my brothers and I were watching altcoins like ethereum express more volatility than bitcoin. I’ve always been enticed by fast-moving markets and similarly was attracted to Uniswap when I saw the craziness going on.
Tell us more about your Uniswap journey, how did you turn $2,000 into $2m+? What was your biggest winner?
When I started trading on Uniswap, I knew immediately that my goal was to catch projects before influencers did. For the first month, I was able to analyze smart contracts as they launched on Ethereum’s mainnet and catch wind of projects before they launched on Uniswap. This has become easier as developers have created tools now to analyze these contracts as they launch on the mainnet.
This strategy coupled with becoming a researcher for influencers helped me get a huge edge over others and quickly helped me grow my capital base.
Using that same strategy, I stumbled upon Cvault.finance ($Core) which was my biggest winner after realizing that whales wanted high liquidity in order to make high profits. The LGE (Liquidity Generation Event) was a huge success and attracted over $3m in liquidity before its launch. Additionally, the project had a unique narrative of being compared to $YFI and from there the rest was history.…..
Again, if you want access to the full interview, our research about DeFi and crypto trends, and the additional DeFi letter, you will need to subscribe. It’s the cost of two Uniswap trades per month!