Amsterdam, November 2023
I’m sitting with 20 of my closest friends in crypto at a high-end restaurant in Amsterdam for the Solana Breakpoint conference. Outside it’s dark. Winds howling, rain hammering the pavement. Inside, everyone’s drinking, laughing, checking charts.
Just two years earlier we had all been celebrating Solana hitting an all-time high of $260.
This time around Solana was breaking resistance at $37.
We were euphoric.
Queenstown, September 2021
Two and a half years earlier, I was locked down in a tiny Airbnb with no kitchen in Queenstown, New Zealand, with my wife, Sam. The Prime Minister had just announced a crippling lockdown that would prevent us from returning to Auckland for several months. It was during that forced isolation that I fell properly into crypto. A world that despite everything that has tried to pull me out since, I’ve never really managed to leave.
Up until this point I had been living the life most people’s parents could only dream of for their kids. Four years into a stable career at Ernst & Young, I was steadily climbing the ladder. My wife and I had even participated in the great NZ pastime of becoming exit liquidity for boomers.
We bought a quaint two-bedroom flat back in 2020, it hasn’t appreciated in over six years.
Yes life was stable. Life was good. But I was restless.
I’ve always been this way. Looking for the next big thing, thinking five or ten years ahead, wondering what life would look like once I’d finally made it. I’ve always loved the ideals of crypto, but I’d be lying if I said the pull of fast money wasn’t what initially attracted me.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, like everyone else, I had been dabbling in stocks while markets staged a violent recovery from their lows.
I also noticed that the $2,000 I’d put into Ethereum at the height of the 2017–2018 bull market had finally made it back to breakeven after a gentle 94% drawdown from its peak.
So I did two things: withdrew the two grand to pay for my wife’s dental surgery, and started researching crypto properly.
I wanted to understand why this coin I had forgotten existed was suddenly up 20x, and how I could find the next one.
In the months leading up to Queenstown, I spent a few hours here and there going down the crypto YouTube rabbit hole.
I set up an account on Easy Crypto (basically New Zealand’s most beginner-friendly brokerage) and bought a tiny fraction of Bitcoin, a handful of SOL, and a few DOT, (the last time I ever touched Polkadot.)
I sent everything to their respective wallets and kept learning in the background while still mostly focused on my day job at EY.
During this period, one of my early crypto contacts (my father) sent me a link to an NFT mint.
It was potentially the scammiest thing I had ever seen, a link to an early-2000s-looking website selling a collection of 10,000 pixellated monkey JPEGs on the Solana blockchain.
Each monkey cost 2 SOL, roughly $50 at the time. The mint was at six or seven in the morning and I decided fuck it, I’ll buy a few, why not?
So I bought the first couple, the SOL disappeared from my wallet and I received nothing in return.
I thought it was a glitch, so I bought a few more. Before I knew it I’d essentially blown my weekly paycheque for a bunch of monkey pictures, none of which I could even see in my wallet.
Because the infrastructure on Solana was so nascent at the time, the team had to send each NFT manually to the right wallet.
Finally, after four hours I received my monkey JPEGs. They then sat idle in my wallet for months as there wasn’t even a marketplace to sell them.
For several months while locked away in our kitchenless Airbnb, I sat with these JPEGs as the price action did nothing.
Suddenly these things started to move.
2 SOL became 4. Then 10. Then 50. Then 250. At the same time, the price of SOL ripped from $20 to $260 in the span of a few months.
While this was happening, I became more and more obsessed with crypto. After four years at EY I had developed a knack for estimating just how much time I needed to meet client deadlines.
I used that skill to claw back as much time as possible.
Any spare hour was spent finding alpha, scouring Crypto Twitter, poring over whitepapers and chatting with my new internet friends in Discord.
Isolated from the physical world, I spent all waking hours entrenching myself in a digital one.
It’s hard to describe how 2021 crypto felt if you weren’t there.
Each day I woke up richer. I’d go to the gym listening to rap that hit at a completely different level. Those monkey JPEGs I bought for $50 – each one was now worth $50,000. Some shitty cartoon birds I’d bought? They were worth $15,000.
Somehow I saw no issue with any of this.
Why would I? Bored Apes had just hit $500,000 a pop. In my mind, the monkeys had at least another 10x to go before I’d even contemplate selling.
2021 was a hell of a time, man.
Naturally, it all came to an abrupt end.
At 25, I had successfully turned $10,000 into $1 million, then back into $25,000, all in the course of 12 months.
A 2.5x. Not bad.
For many, this would probably have ushered an end to a thrilling yet temporary period of their life.
But by then, the promise of a decentralised world had me hooked. These values held immense importance to me, and still do.
The days of waking up richer each day were well and truly over, but crypto’s mission remained incomplete and I wanted to do my part in pushing it forward.
So in January 2022, I left EY to join Smith and Crown, a crypto economics advisory firm founded in 2013. The team was made up of some of the sharpest minds I had met in the industry — OGs who had weathered multiple crypto winters and approached token design with real intellectual rigour, not just lofty promises and undisclosed shilling.
The year I spent there was an incredible introduction to the industry. We helped guide clients through blockchain selection, fundraising strategy, and sound cryptoeconomic token design. While much of the market was busy launching useless governance tokens, we were designing tokens that actually fit the products they were meant to support.
Unfortunately, we were doing this just as the excesses of the previous bull market started coming home to roost.
Rising rates exposed over-levered funds. Bad actors started blowing up. Exchanges started to look vulnerable.
Then, in November 2022, the unthinkable happened: FTX imploded.
$8 billion of customer funds, gone. I didn’t have any money on the exchange at the time, but that didn’t really matter. My net worth was heavily exposed to Solana, a token that had fallen from $260 to $8.
Sam and I were in Santiago, Chile when it happened. For the first time since my crypto journey began, I cried.
It truly felt over.
The next few months weren’t any easier. In the aftermath of FTX, the SEC came down hard, liquidity vanished, and for a while it felt almost impossible to operate as a company in crypto.
Dubai, March 2023
Eventually, it all came to a head. In March 2023, after ten years in business, Smith and Crown wound down operations.
One week earlier, I had moved to Dubai for Sam’s work.
Suddenly, I was in a new city on the other side of the world with no job, a decimated portfolio, and an industry whose prospects looked bleak at best. If it weren’t for Sam’s support, I’m not sure how things would have played out, but thankfully she gave me the time and space to figure it out.
Over the next six months, I tried a bit of everything. I thought about setting up my own token advisory firm, but the same conditions that had forced Smith and Crown to wind down were hardly tailwinds. I tried learning how to day trade, but with prices chopping in a 3% range for months at a time, profitability was a challenge. I even tried building a healthcare platform with a nascent ChatGPT – vibe coding is definitely a lot easier today, that’s for sure.
None of it really gained traction.
But through all of it, I stayed tapped into crypto – discussing developments with my network, trading whatever scraps came along, and investing what little capital I had left.
By the end of that period, I was right on the cusp of returning to EY as a contractor and putting all of this to the side.
The only thing standing between me and corporate life was indemnity insurance. No one in the UAE would give it to me, and so I never returned.
This small, inconvenient piece of life admin was ultimately what kept me in the game.
And within a few weeks, crypto finally woke up again.
Amsterdam, November 2023
Which brings me back to Amsterdam.
SOL had hit $37, nearly two years after its all-time high, roughly a year after it had traded down to $8.
An ecosystem that had been pronounced dead by most of the industry, in an industry that had been pronounced dead by most of the world, was finally beginning to show signs of life. Here we were, nearly 5x off the lows – people were starting to believe again.
It takes a special kind of conviction to sit through that type of a drawdown, especially given everything that unfolded over those two years. Many at that table were instrumental in Solana’s eventual run back up to all-time highs. Builders who kept shipping, angels who helped keep them afloat, community members who refused to let it all die.
Everyone at that table was finally being rewarded for their conviction.
As for me, a project I’d founded with others present that night had started to gain serious momentum. After a grueling two years where I’d moved across the world, been made redundant, and lost 98% of my net worth – things were starting to look up.
Naturally, after all I had been through, I remained skeptical.
This rally will fail like the others…
But to my surprise, momentum continued to compound, capital continued to grow, opportunities I couldn’t imagine six months earlier began to appear.
The next two years would change our lives entirely.
Dubai, Present
It’s been nearly five years now since I started my crypto journey, but it feels like twenty. As an industry, crypto is unmatched in its ability to compress a lifetime of lessons into a single four-year cycle.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without Sam. She kept us afloat during the worst of times, kept me grounded (mainly) during the highs, and all the while thrived in her own career. Since arriving in the UAE, she’s carved out a serious position in Abu Dhabi’s institutional world through her time at ADQ.
Together, we recently launched J2 Capital.
It’s funded entirely with our own money. Our own capital behind founders we have real conviction in. Founders willing to ditch the proven path in the relentless pursuit of a world they set out to create.
We know what that journey feels like. We know how long it can feel pointless before it doesn’t.
Originally published on Substack. Subscribe there for new writing from J2 Capital.