Market Wizards: Navigating Crypto Volatility - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

All right. Hi everybody. I'm Jordi and this is Dimi. Uh are both crypto traders for a long time. We hope to give you guys some of our thoughts, experiences.

Hopefully, it's useful for you. And the topic is navigating the volatility. But there's a lot of volatility. Um, how many of you have had your crypto portfolio go down more than 50%.

Not that many.

Everybody else has not had a 50% draw down.

Wow.

How about like 80%. Okay. So even even the professionals you know we have to ride the waves obviously over time each cycle we're trying to make less and less mistakes have less volatility dim what's been like some of the biggest mistakes and lessons that you've learned

so I started trading uh back in high school so that's you know 2017 for me and uh

so the other kids were playing Xbox and you're like playing the B

charts. Okay.

Basic.

Um, and the first experience trading in crypto was on BitMX with a 100x leverage. Thankfully, my bankroll was tiny back then, so I was just like depositing 50 bucks, 100x leverage, just blowing it up, going again and again and again until at some point it kind of stuck to me that, you know, there's this thing called risk management and you need to understand uh how that works. I think as um as I matured as a trader uh I keep making mistakes but just different ones. I think uh I guess the most recent one that you know I'm still kind of trying to fix is oversizing just getting a ton of confidence in a thesis or or um a position and then mismanaging that actual position because I've oversized it. Yeah, I mean psychology I would say is half the battle when it comes to trading, especially crypto trading because of the huge swings.

If you oversize and you're on the wrong side of it, the volatility is so reflexive that your loss is much bigger than you you imagined. And it's uh it's that saying like, you know, you think you have a plan until you get punched in the face.

Correct. And we get punched in the face a lot in in crypto markets. Um so sizing um does it matter if you're long or short? I mean obviously if you're short even worse you can lose unlimited money and we've seen things just with no value go up so much. So how do you think about sizing longs versus shorts?

I think um and you've made a great post about this that shorting is an art. There are so many things that you have to be careful about when you're shorting. You don't know, you know, who your counterparty is, what information they have. You know, the, you know, you can literally lose everything shorting. So, sizing is always naturally uh smaller on the shorting side than than I would ever have on a long.

Um, on on the long side, I think the criteria for a short and long are the same. Like, the way that I'm thinking about trades usually is uh you know, I need to have a catalyst. So every kind of trade I have needs to be defined uh on a specific time scale. Um and and I need to feel like I'm very early in positioning for that specific catalyst. If I feel like there has been significant front running, um I will I will definitely try to bring size down or just no opposition at all and look at the next trade.

Yeah, I I I really, you know, when you look at entries and exits, I think the most of the most of the the edge comes from entries.

Yes, 100%.

So, if you get the entry right, the exit doesn't really matter as much. Getting the entry perfect makes the whole trading experience uh significantly better.

Yeah. I think one of the easiest lessons we can tell everybody is basically there's always another trade. Don't feel like just because everyone's talking about a certain coin that you need to take a position. You do not. There is another trade.

You can wait for the right setup. And the question that I always ask myself, am I early or not early? There's a funnel. And you know there's a a timing to which different market participants enter a trade.

Yes.

There's the really smart money going in first and then you have like a retail funnel. Obviously sometimes the trade is so big, the funnel is so big. like the Trump trade. The Trump trade I would say is probably like the easiest trade this year where even if you weren't that early, as long as you were in the first, you know, hours, yeah, could do well. But that's a very rare situation.

Usually the funnel is small and especially as the markets get more choppy and most of the retail gets washed away. You might think you're early, but it's literally just you and like GCR and a couple people. So, you're not even before anybody else in line. You're just still at the back of the line. You need people to queue up behind you.

Unfortunately, this is like the reality of uh you know these metas, the shifting metas. And specifically, let's say for Trump and a more recent example is Aster, right? There was a specific amount of friction to get to be able to buy that coin, right? You had complete normies buying CROM. They still had to deposit.

So, you know, figure out how to buy onchain. And that's why the the opportunity was so extended. Um, and the same with Aster, right? Because you had to bridge the BSC and do that. Um, so I think

it's pretty it's pretty crazy though that there is still so much opportunity in crypto where what you're saying is that literally all you need to do to have an edge in the market is just know how to bridge some USDT, you know, in the right place and that's already enough to make you profitable. So

yeah,

we're still not in efficient markets at all. There's a ton of edge.

Yes. Um I would say you know bottom line like think how early you are get the entry right size appropriately where you don't stress out that your position is too big. I've seen otherwise intelligent people make really bad decisions once they see like a really bad P&L number. Either they just want to cut their position at the worst possible time because usually it's sort of, you know, it's the euphoria uh either or the or the fear and you're cutting at the worst possible time. Um so going in with a plan is always important.

How do you think about uh metas? So, we have, you know, every month or so or two months. Sometimes the metas last a while. We had like an AI meta in Q4 last year. That was

my favorite my favorite meta.

Hey, my that was your favorite meta. Why is that?

Um, so I think AI is clearly obviously the the main innovation of our maybe generation. So naturally what you're going to have uh is is technological cycles where every year something's going to come um you know last year or most recently agents right there there will always be some new technological innovation that will be able to really link well with crypto and and that will bring a new liquidity uh event and and create a uh a a a ripup on on the sub sector of cryptoni. Yeah,

we've seen that, right? We had ionet a all you know this infrastructure products first ripped crazy then you had you know the bit tensors of the world um you had goat uh and then you had agents you know I don't know what the next meta is going to be because it will depend on this like technological breakthrough that will happen but I want to be positioned um because I'm sure it's going to come back.

I mean most things in crypto are not real. So

yeah,

we have a new meta.

I'm usually skeptical. It's It's served me well to be skeptical because usually the stuff is zero. And the good thing with AI at least is that your imagination can kind of run wild and a lot of people can get mass delusion and they can survive for a while. I think a lot of the other metas, there's always a moment at which the emperor has no clothes. And when the emperor has no clothes, everybody rushes for the exit because they kind of realize that whatever the thesis was is not going to work.

We've had a ton of metas, even ones that looked promising like uh web 3 gaming.

Yeah.

You know, that was such a huge I believed in that for a while.

NFTTS, I mean, there's still a role for NFTTS. Um, obviously we had these hyperlquid NFTs drop. I saw some of them go for half a million dollars. So, still still people like these things, but it feels like the NFTs these days, they're they need to have some utility. It's not about the art or some speculation about utility.

How do you think about utility? Is that a meme? You know, we obviously went through a memecoin cycle, but now we're in a revenue cycle. Where are we on the utility? I think you know as you're seeing more institutional participants come on coming in they're asking that question and so naturally the real institutional capital will only bid things that they feel like have revenue potential at least down the line.

Thankfully we've had some of these opportunities lately. You know obviously Hyperlid is a a great example. there are more um you know I think it isn't where you're going to make like multiples right the the the returns will compress naturally most returns will be made during times of extreme euphoria on things that are completely away from this idea of revenue. Um but uh uh we we're definitely we're definitely on the side of a cycle uh for sure. Um,

we had a many many months of meme coins. I remember I did the the memecoin panels in previous tokens. They were fully packed. Everyone wanted to know what's what Ansom's going to say, what coin is he going to talk about on stage so they can buy it. Even Morad's talk, I think, was like the most watched token talk ever.

So there is like such a speculation still that people require as like more professional you know liquid traders.

Yeah.

Do do we look at meme coins like as a a real kind of um I don't want to say investable asset but a trading like is is is it still tradable or is it something that you think is very insidery? Obviously, most of the the Salana kind of meta died once the insiders got a bit too greedy.

Yeah. I I think you know memecoins represent a general social force which is I mean we're in the generation moonshot like people that are trading these things and I'm I'm included like I I love trading meme coins on Salan and other chains. We do this because we expect a crazy potential return with a pretty like asymmetric kind of downside. And uh I think that's really what memecoins kind of reflect. And when you're in a world where everything is being financialized uh and you can tokenize everything um this this uh you know even attention is being tokenized and and financialized.

This will just keep going that it will just change forms. It might not be, you know, a completely pure meme like whiff or doge, uh, but it will have the same kind of ingredients.

Yeah, let's I mean, let's talk about the apps a little bit. You know, last cycle there was a lot of complaints that it's just a bunch of L1s and block space and there's no apps this cycle. So, we've had Pump Fun launch. Yes. It went down, it went back up, went back down.

You know, it feels like that whole kind of launching coins always has some demand. There's some fundamental demand, but it really fluctuates. It It's as simple as uh you know, all the trench people try to go to buy CZ Dexcoin and they just ditch. It's like people just move out of the city, go to the suburbs, and then there's no one in the city and it's really quiet until they eventually come back. Um, and then we have Poly Market.

You know, it's a very institutional excitement around prediction markets right now. Um, where are the opportunities right now? You think on the app side

on the prediction market space?

You think prediction market? I mean, we don't we don't really have a coin for a prediction market yet. We don't I mean Poly Market is probably launching one. I don't know. Is it?

I don't know. I mean, I'm sure they're thinking about it. So, every person that I'm talking to on the VC side in crypto is finding exceptionally hard to invest in anything other than prediction markets right now. So, yeah, I guess that goes back to just financialize everything and uh you know, just invest in betting. So, we've we're having a DEX meta right now, which is funny because Dexes have been around for forever, but you know, it's the flavor of the month.

Um, maybe at some point we get a prediction market meta, but there's not enough coins yet to kind of get that rotation. How do you know that a new meta is forming? Like, is a couple days enough? Is it just that everyone's talking about it? Is that too late?

when it, you know, you've seen so many new metas form. When do you know that you're still at that sweet spot?

It it really depends on the meta itself and structural components of that meta, right? So, you had, for example, I mean, on the AI meta, you had goat launching and then it was AI 16Z and and a few other Zerbro. So, there were just actually a few launches that took advantage of different parts of the narrative that all made sense. So that's why it lasted for quite a long time on the Dexert meta. Maybe you know you have uh you have better thoughts on this but uh it feels like this is already kind of ending um because you always have to make a sacrifice of you know KPIs for token price and so that brings the meta to a pretty difficult spot early on.

Right.

Yeah. That's a very good point. It kind of brings me to another thing I wanted to discuss which is there's a new meta every month as individuals. We all have different backgrounds. Some of us stratfi, some of us memecoins, you know, there's different backgrounds.

Sometimes the meta really fits the stuff that you already know about and sometimes it really doesn't. Like for me personally, this perp dex meta arguably you know I have as much experience as anybody in this meta for many years. I really understand the mechanics of it. However, if I go three months ago and it it was a that meta and it was about treasury companies raising and doing pipes and I had to learn what's a pipe and a spec and all this stuff. I was I knew I was out of my water, which is why, you know, I had to rely on you a little bit.

But it's so important to know if you have enough sophistication. It's so easy to be overconfident and think that you know enough about the new meta. It's like, you know, when I used to trade macro, every month macro traders were experts at something else. you know, one month they're experts at Russian Ukrainian weapon systems, the next month they're biotech virus experts and what's the the spreading and we do have to kind of do that as crypto traders. We have to be quite broad in our understanding.

But the difference between, you know, this is your home turf and now the meta is something that I really know versus I'm learning on the fly. How do you how do you how do you think about that? I mean, which uh I remember NFTTS I was like totally out of my system because I I wasn't a collecting, you know, as a kid, I wasn't collecting stamps or Pokemon cards and it felt like it was those people that were really believing in it and maybe they overb believed in it. I mean, obviously like they believed in it so much probably they didn't sell.

Um but yeah, like knowing your meta, are you at the smart side of the meta or are you just figuring out?

I I think that, you know, you don't have to catch them all. This is not Pokemon. This is like trading. It's okay if you miss a meta. If you miss a trade, it's it's hard to do.

Like the FOMO is so strong at times, especially when you see friends being up like 100, a thousand makes it. I just made 5 million. I just made 10 million. You're like, "Dude, I was just like at the beach. I didn't even see this happening."

It's fine missing those things. It's even more important not losing money while this is all happening. So yeah, there's always an X trade. There's always an X meta. And uh you need to have this belief of abundance in trading.

And if you do have that, it unlocks a completely different side of you. So

yeah, I mean I guess that's the most actionable thing is there's a lot of FOMO. Everyone's always FOMOing into whatever they're hearing about, but the reality is, you know, the professional traders, the one saying that, you know, it came from Crypto Twitter, I think it was the MGNR account. They just had this saying that all the traders loved, we loved this saying, and it just says, you know, all you need to do, five times a year there's free money on the floor, do nothing and just pick it up those five times and you and you outperform

100%. And so that should kind of give you a baseline of how often you really need to do something. Look, when there's free money, you do have to size appropriately, right?

And have conviction. A lot of the skill is figuring out, you know, is this one of those situations like where the the riskreward is very asymmetric, but you really don't need to be trading all the time. And um yeah, like FOMO is the is the portfolio killer. And I'd say that, you know, and the best traders in the world are going to admit this in every single market that most of the time, like maybe 90% of the time, people don't even know what's going to happen. They don't have, it's just impossible for them to have enough conviction to size materially into a position.

So even these traders, they try to not trade. It just picking when to trade is an is an art in itself. And that's usually like 10% of the time where you as you're saying going deep and taking these positions. Um so yeah, fully agree.

You know the final things of course are um structural like understanding the markets. This is kind of where a lot of education comes in. We have things like perpetual markets which I often talk about are you know this weird crypto thing doesn't exist in traditional finance. you have things like funding rates, you have a lot of weird situations going on with uh perpetual. So, anyone that really wants to take trading seriously, I think it needs to um understand especially for alt markets.

Otherwise, you know, sticking to top five coins like the majors, BTC, E, so these kind of things um you know is a lot safer. I think going down the risk curve is usually where where things go wrong. The other thing is trading fees. People surprise me that they don't think about trading fees at all, but if you're paying, you know, 30 bips every time you do a swap or in some cases, you know, if you're doing onchain trading, sometimes you're paying 2 3% slippage,

it really adds up. So, if you're doing this anything more than recreationally, trying to optimize trading fees, as boring as it is, it really like adds so much money. And I think, you know, exchanges like lighter that we're seeing now offering zero trading fees. Incredible.

It's such a natural evolution because retail should not be tra trading fees and you feel like a tradefi it's all payment for order flow. You're already giving a service to the exchange by trading. So that's toxic. Like what do you think about that? Is it like is it a problem that we're moving towards that kind of setup in crypto?

I think retail volume is so valuable that it makes sense to try to give them zero trading fees. The problem with crypto is it's all onchain. No one really knows if someone's retail or not. I mean,

I can spin up a 100 accounts and make them look like a sheep, but it's just Jordy the Wolf behind wearing the sheep thing on top, right? and and so there's a bit of cat and mouse game, but that's we've always had that in crypto, you know, we've had the civil, you know, Cisphus sibling every chain, Copus Airlines,

we've we've had these things happen. I think now with AI as well, it gets easier and easier to uh spin up 100 versions of yourself. You know, I've talked about the need for things like, you know, verifiable identity on chain zk where, you know, something like worldcoin where uh you're using these tools to say, you know, I'm an individual human. This is not a civil and I'm not going to tell you anything about myself. You're not going to get my passport number, but you will be able to at least, you know, give me zero fees cuz you know that I'm a human, this kind of thing.

So, I think the market's going in this direction.

Who's building this? That's actually a great idea.

I think I think we're going to have to build it ourselves.

I'd have to. Wow. It's good.

Yeah. Um, all right. Let's Let's go a little bit personal. What's the worst loss you've ever had? Can you remember something where it just felt like it did it take you days to recover?

Because crypto sometimes it really surprises you. Did you have something where you couldn't sleep?

Yeah, I think it was just like, do you remember like the avalanche um onchain season that was 2020?

This everything was like um the theme was everything about like ice.

Yes. Snow bank, snow dog.

Okay.

Okay. So, I think I'm I had made a lot of money on snowbank. So back then, you know, we had a great chat with uh Anom, Sad Start, like really big personalities from the previous cycle and um anyway, we had all made a decent amount of money on there. Snowbank specifically was a strong one. And then Snow Dog comes live, which is like a meme related to Snowbank.

And I had I I was like, "This is it. I'm putting everything I've made over the past 3 months. You have all in."

All in.

Okay. Snow dog. Snow dog is basically what's going to take me to

Snow Dog.

Snow dog taking you to Valhalla.

Exactly. And basically 3 months of work, zero in like 12 hours. This thing completely rug. Uh and it just was exactly what we're what we were talking about earlier, which is like you need to think probabilistically and avoid risk of ruin.

Yeah. Something I often talk about is like, you know, having your a healthy ego is kind of so important, not just in life, but especially, you know, in trading because you need to have confidence. You know, you're putting a trade, you got to be confident. I'm sizing. You know, I have conviction.

I'm going to hold it. I'm not going to be shaken out. But then if you're overconfident and maybe you're delusional in your confidence, you're like, "Oh, you know, I'm always right. I'm going to be right." you sometimes make the biggest mistakes ever.

Yeah.

And you know, working on yourself and your emotions is such a big part of

Yeah.

navigating volatility. It really is um is the most important thing that I've I've always worked on myself.

It's a it's it's so weird. Maybe people it doesn't resonate with people, but it's a it's a way to meditate, right? It's a it's a deep intellectual exercise. It it really is a mental game. Uh and that's actually what drives me more than you know the money itself.

Um and what makes me passionate about trading in these markets.

Yeah, having a good process always involves not being resultsoriented because you might buy the wrong thing for the wrong reason and it goes up massively and you might have the right trade and something happens. So thinking probabilistically kind of grounds you. Yeah. And you know

I play a lot of poker. It really kind of always reminds you that you can make the right decision, you can have the right odds and you can still lose. And so this is like why I encourage a lot of our traders and other people to at least, you know, play some poker and and just keep that mindset in mind. Um, okay, two more minutes. Last thing.

Obviously, crypto is still driven by a lot of influencers, Koss. We had, you know, some of them on stage earlier today. We'll have some more later. as professionals, do we listen to these people? Do we ignore them?

Do we have to know who's good and who's not good? Are they all bad? Like, how do you think about Yeah, that, you know, it's not black or white. There are some people that have been able to establish large followings because they're actually very sharp, competent, uh, understand narratives, trade well, and there are some people that are just doing it because they're able to farm attention. I think everyone is kind of able to understand the difference between those two things and just pick the ones that um, actually provide value.

And um I think the good test is like is this person making me think harder or is he selling me a you know a pipe dream?

Yeah.

Because he has an ulterior he or she has an ulterior motive.

I think the only people that I've consistently actually listened to are the ones that they are on the public leaderboards.

Yeah. So you know back in the FTX days you have like high stakes cap you have those people and then by bit you know you have D5 squared you have

is an incredible one and a good GCR um you know flood incredible trader as well you know Cephus is an incredible trader even though he doesn't share too much on the on the timeline.

Well some of them you have to be careful because they're usually trying to scops the narrative into happening.

Yeah. But at least um you know having a public display that you are good at your craft right already eliminates 99% of of the larars. So yeah basically the the the message is you know be careful who you listen to because if you're surrounded by the wrong ideas you you're already dead in the water. So cool. All right.

Thanks everybody. Hope you enjoyed the chat.

Thank you guys.