Buidlbee’s Ask-Me-Anything interview with @ImNotTheWolf

The buidlbee team hosted our first “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) with crypto trader Wolf this week. The lively conversation contained insightful information for crypto novices and experts alike. These are a few of the insider tips shared by Wolf during the Twitter Space.

How are you feeling about the crypto market right now?

I’m extremely bearish, so I think that a lot of people are downplaying the seriousness. The risk that we’re in, in the cryptocurrency space. I think that the Luna collapse was the initial trigger of a major contagion.

Are you bear on the market right now?  

Yeah. So, my view on the market is I’m very bearish. I think that Luna first triggered a huge domino effect on the market, which I guess was caused by FTX, which is retarded because they took themselves out. Now that FTX has been taken out, I think it’s like another rock that drops in the pond and just caused a whole bunch of other ripples to form.

I would say, an even bigger contagion we don’t even know exactly the full scope of things yet. We start seeing companies go into bankruptcy and start falling out. It’ll just trigger other companies to sort of follow suit and have this cascade effect.

It’s better to play it safe than sorry, either stable coins or USDT, whatever your take is, or one x short the market on inverse perpetual. That’s my take on it. I think that we’re going down, possibly 9K to 6K on Bitcoin.

What indicator would indicate that it is time to re-enter the market?

Well, I do take risks. Like right now, I have a half-million dollar short open, but I’m shorting the market, right? What I’m looking for to close that short position, which a lot of people seem to be asking me, is that liquidity event. You’ll know when you see it.

For anybody that has been around since 2017 or anything, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s just like cascading of a bunch of liquidations, long liquidations, all of the one X’s get taken out or all the two x longs and, you know, one x on inverse perps gets taken out.

Then, basically, it’s like a clean slate. Like all of the leverage positions pretty much get wiped out, and then that’s the perfect opportunity to close your shorts and enter into longs for these, you know, generational long. So that’s what I’m looking for, the big giant red candlestick where you just see them. On the order books, just tons of liquidation start to pop up and everyone starts to panic and think that Bitcoin’s gonna die.

What do you think, is Binance going to claim control?

I think Binance is always gonna have monopoly control on the market.

I think that they’re kind of have their sh*t together. Like, they’re not gonna pull an FTX. I mean to be as belligerently, just crazy as FTX. Those guys were either really retarded or ballsy as hell, or probably a mix. But I don’t see Binance doing stuff like FTX did.

They’ll more than likely stay around probably for good. They’re a bit too big to fail at this point, but I do see as well, that they require KYC and all this stuff, right? I do see DeFi getting a huge bump from the FTX debacle because people got too complacent. People got way too comfortable leaving their coins on exchanges. A lot of these influencers that everyone follows that sort of, everyone puts up on a pedestal, even they left their coins on the exchange and trusted Uncle Sam to not f*ck them over.

That’s just pure complacency. Cause crypto’s not about that. Crypto’s all about owning your own money, right? This is pretty much a wake-up call to remind people exactly what crypto’s about, self-custodian. The good thing about a lot of these decentralized exchanges like Apex and there are a few others as well, still, they’re all starting to come out. The good thing about them is that now technology has progressed since the 2020 DeFi summer, where back then it was pretty much like UniSwap and UniSwap clones, like PancakeSwap and stuff.

Those were good at the time, but Ethereum is not scalable with it. At least not yet. It is a little bit better because the fees are lower, but it’s still just really annoying to have to deal with slippage and deal with transaction fees like you have to do on PancakeSwap and UniSwap. But now technology has progressed and there’s stuff like Stark wear or Stark X, and I think Polygon is making some polygon nets. A lot of these modular sort of blockchains are coming out, where it allows businesses to create their own Layer-2 networks. People will deposit onto those Layer-2 networks. There are still self-custodians of their own. Instead of having to do the transactions on Layer-1, like Ethereum or on Binance Smart Chain, it’s on a private Layer-2. And that also cuts out that helps with scalability because they don’t have to compete with other projects and stuff, with other businesses, and just transactions on the network itself.

It definitely helps with scalability, but also transaction-free trading. So, you connect through API, and basically, you don’t really do a transaction except for when you deposit and when you withdraw because everything’s kind of like a transaction list and on, on the back end.

I guess you could say paper transactions. It all sort of checks out once you withdraw. And that stuff is exactly what we need to have the backend systems of DeFi be able to compete with that. Centralized exchanges buy, bid, so stuff like [that] is just now starting to get out.

It’s kind of a coincidence that FTX collapsed, right? When the stuff starts to come out into the mainstream public. But I’m gonna, I see more ApeX, dYdX type of exchanges coming out in the future. Centralized exchanges, finance included over to decentralized exchanges.

I think only noobs are gonna use finance and stuff like that. Like people that don’t want to learn about centralized finance. People that like are okay with paying the 1.25 – or whatever it is – Coinbase exchange fees because they just buy bitcoin one time a year and they just want to leave it there.

After the FTX collapse, what do you say to people when you have to defend crypto as a technology?

FTX collapsing is exactly why blockchain is necessary and is the future because if [only] FTX was a DAO transparent, completely transparent with proof of reserve stuff.

But that’s not the case. FTX was a private closed entity bribing the shit out of a bunch of American politicians and Bahamian politicians and stuff that nobody could see. It was an unopen ledger. We didn’t see exactly how much they loaned out. We didn’t see how underwater they were. We didn’t see anything.

So, that’s my argument.

Do you think the market will still drop more, potentially even 50%?

That’s a good question, but I think it’s been happening since the collapse of FTX and what’s happening behind closed doors. Most people don’t really take into account that a lot of these companies that are at risk of being insolvent, they’re dumping the sh*t out of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and anything they got their hands on.

Yeah, they’re selling a lot of it.  I’m sure [there] are some exchanges, but they’re selling their coins as quickly as they can without really making that much of an impact on the market. It’s pretty much a race to the finish line.

To see if they can get out enough money to cover their reserves or what is supposed to be proper reserves. When will that stop the selling pressure? I’m not sure, but I think we’re gonna start seeing a lot more exchanges go down. Probably a lot of the smaller ones.

Once you start seeing that, I could be wrong as well, but once you start seeing that, we’ll be closer to the bottom.

Do you think Ronaldo’s partnership with Binance is going to reignite the hype around NFTs?

I’m not a big fan of NFTs. I’ve never been. I think NFT technology is useful and has a huge place in society in terms of utility. Like, I’m polished on stuff like NFT real.

But the useless JPEGs and collectibles and all that stuff, it’s not my vibe. It’s pretty much like the new Pokémon card craze. I think that’s gonna die eventually. We’ve already seen it fizzle out like crazy.

A lot of the NFT stuff that people [didn’t] really realize back in 2020 and 2021 was money laundering. So, the way that it works is, I have an NFT, I mint an NFT or whatever, or I buy a minted NFT collection and then on another wallet that I’ve been trading on an anonymous wallet, I mint a new NFT, and then on the main wallet that I’ve been trading that the IRS knows about and the government knows about, I pay taxes.

I would buy that NFT from my anonymous wallet for, you know, outrageous amounts of money, 500,000 or whatever, like, sh*t, that’s not worth it. Like [a] f*cking rock, like that NFT rock that somebody bought for millions of dollars. I’m pretty sure that was money laundering. But you just wash, trade it, just buy it off yourself for a bunch of money.

Then what happens is that you have this useless JPEG. You can put on as your assets as like a bunch of money for your portfolio. Then you can just sell it off to yourself again way later when the NFT CRA comes down and you can deduct that from your taxes as like a major loss, right?

Like a $500,000 loss or but let’s say you sold it for 30,000, right? So, like a $470,000 loss. But meanwhile, on your anonymous wallet, you still have your $400,000 or $500,000 or whatever, and you can just do whatever you want with it. You can cash it out etc. There are plenty of people that’ll cash that out OTC on a different bank or under someone else’s name, whatever the case is, right?

It’s just money laundering. That way you can avoid the crazy taxes. If you’re in the United States and you’re at the top tax bracket, you’re paying 45 minimum. 45%. If you do this, this thing, this little money laundering scheme, which by the way, I don’t advise, but if you do that, you’re paying 0,5% in taxes or something. I think Genesis in Thailand charges like 2.5%. So overall, you’d be paying in terms of taxation, 2-3% total versus 45%. I mean, it’s a pretty easy thing to see why people would do that.

But, people, the plebs, the normies think that NFTs are all organic, and people just really wanna spend a lot of money on these useless JPEGs. That’s not the case. I think the chain analysis or one of these big research firms came out. The majority of the volume for 2021 for NFTs was, in fact, money laundering.

The IRS can see this stuff. It’s not that difficult for these major research firms to track. So, that’s why I don’t advise doing that stuff because you’ll probably get in trouble three [or] four years down the road.

I don’t see a lot of utility with useless JPEGs aside from money laundering, and there’s a niche market of people that actually want to collect Ronaldo stuff. I’m personally not too bullish on it. I think that the craze, the bubble is popped and the next NFT sort of bubble that happens is not gonna be as crazy as the previous one.

That’s usually how the markets react. As far as Ronaldo making a partnership with Binance, more power to him. You know he’s retiring, and I’m not a big sports fan, but I don’t see any problem with it. He’s just trying to cash in on the hype and probably his stuff would sustain profits or grow over time, more so than a lot of useless JPEG from some unknown dev team. It’s his brand, and he even has trading cards that sell for thousands of dollars.

What are your thoughts on how brands should move forward in crypto?

Are you talking about big, sort of blue chip company brands, or are you talking about sort of more indie smaller companies?

I don’t know man. I’m not a big brand. I mean, I specialize in marketing, but I haven’t given that question thought. I think that they need to force the governments to give regulatory framework as to how they can react. I know that most crypto people wouldn’t like to hear that because regulation [is] bad, bad, [and] government is evil. But, for these big major companies that are gonna be tracked as soon as they step their foot in their door from the government and regulators, they don’t have, specifically in America, they don’t really have any regulatory guidance on what they can and can’t do. And then what happens is you have these, these big Deb, you know, these big sort of events like when Facebook tried to come out with their own coin and then they got shut down by the government. How are you gonna shut them down and then not put out guidance afterward, you know, as soon as they shut ’em down, they should have put out some sort of framework that, uh, these big blue-chip companies can work with. Otherwise, they’re just gonna spend a bunch of money, just trying to do as much as they can and try to get away with it, you know what I mean?

Instead of working with the government or the government working with these companies, they get the United States government’s just sitting back and saying nothing, which is really bad for innovation and growth within the cryptocurrency space. What do I think they should do with branding? I guess for them, probably get away with as much as they can, right? Push as much as they can in terms of development and R&D and all that stuff. But simultaneously, they should really sort of start knocking on the regulators’ doors and say, “Hey, you need to give us a framework to work with. Otherwise we’re gonna try to do as much as we can to get away with.”

It might be some, if they spend a bunch of money, it comes out later that it’s a regulated security and blah, blah, blah. That’s just not fair. It makes the governments look bad as well, specifically America. I really think that they should try to get the attention of regulators and say, “Hey, give us a framework”. Work with the framework that they can with regulators. And in terms of marketing and all that stuff, just be transparent, super transparent.

Especially with this whole FTX stuff, transparency is very crucial. I think the whole NFT craze of all of these, you know, Nike and everyone’s getting into this NFT, is gonna be a waste of money, to be honest. I think they just fell into the bubble trap and the bubbles burst.

So, just build out Web3 protocols that people can connect with easily. I think that these big brands need to make stuff more easily accessible for the boomers and stuff that don’t know how a freakin’ key works, a wallet works and how to copy and paste. But over time, we’ll get that. I don’t know who’s gonna do it and how, but over time I think it’s gonna be as easy.

I just don’t know. It’s a weird question to think about. Companies are gonna do [their] own different thing and have their different strategies in terms of marketing moving forward. But I think one thing is that they all need to work together in really trying to hammer down the regulators to give out a framework.

If you’re gonna start your own project on the blockchain, what project would you start right now?

Funny enough, I’m actually working with some friends that I trust like OG whale-type individuals and extremely talented developers.

It’s not released yet but you guys will hear about it eventually. But yeah, holding real estate assets that produce rent and then releasing that rent as yield farm rewards. My friend has a pretty good lawyer. So as long as they do everything right, the way that he has it all set up and everything, I guess it should be a-okay.

Yeah, so it’s like a REIT on the blockchain, it’s something that we haven’t seen lately. And for those of you that don’t know what REITs are, it’s pretty much like thinking of a fund that manages a bunch of real estate assets. They buy the property, rent out the property, manage the property, and then all the yields and that stuff go into the stakeholders.

It’s like being invested in real estate without having to manage any of their earn, like dividends and stuff, usually 3% [or] 4%, whatever. It’s not, it’s not crazy, crazy stuff. But we’re trying to do that and add in a twist of DeFi magic source. You buy property and then you mint a stable out, which produces leverage, but it’s a self-repaying loan using the yields.

How did you get into crypto?

So, I used to be a drug dealer and drug addict, to be honest with you.

Back 11 years ago, when I was a kid, I was like, what 19 [or] 20 years old? F*ck. Like 12 years ago, almost 13 years. Wow, I’m getting old. So I was involved with drugs and one of the best ways for nerds to get drugs back in the day was this cool thing that everyone had heard online called Silk Road.

Once you hear about Silk Road, then you start learning about Bitcoin, because Bitcoin was necessary to use. Whenever you hear people say that they are OGs or anything like that, like crypto OGs, they’ve been around since 2012 or like back in 2013, you can place bets that they were, unless they’re like some boomer programmer dude. You can place bets that they were probably involved in Silk Road or the dark net at some point because Silk Road was the first time that blockchain technology was utilized for the masses.

Even though it’s frowned upon now and it’s a very small amount of the utility now, back in the day, it’s what basically put Bitcoin on the map. So that’s how I got involved with it. I can openly talk about it and say all that stuff because I got in trouble. They can’t charge me for the same thing twice. Most of the people that have been around for that long have been involved with Silk Road at some point, whether they were just users or whatever. That’s how I first learned about Bitcoin and ever since then, I kept tabs on it.

Once I got out and got a regular job, I just started investing little by little into Bitcoin, into Ethereum. I think probably $200, $300 and $400 price range of Bitcoin. And then with Ethereum, I think it was like $20. And then, it came all the way down to like $8 and I was like, f*ck, I’m not gonna buy anymore.

Like, I’m losing all my money. I’m just putting every paycheck like $200 – $300 bucks into this. Then it took off, and then it pumped up to like $66. Then it dumped down to like $33 within a few days. And then it went back up to like $50. And I was like, f*ck. I looked at the trial, and I was like, if I would’ve sold at $66 and bought at $33 and then sold again at $50, I’d make so much money, right?

So, I was like, oh my God, I’m a genius. I found this magical way to make money. So then, uh, I tried, I Googled to see if that was a thing.  I found out that it is. Then I started to hear about this thing called technical analysis. And little by little I just taught myself technical analysis on Google. And you know, fast forward, six years or something, and here I am, a self-made millionaire. [It’s] just been a crazy, crazy, crazy rollercoaster!

*Disclaimer* This is not financial advice, and it is essential to do your research before investing in the crypto market!