Special Edition: Interview With @OnChainWizard
A Conversation With One Of Defi's Biggest On-Chain Gigabrains...
Greetings fellow degens!
Today we have an extremely interesting interview with the incredible @OnChainWizard!
@OnChainWizard is one of the most successful investors in the space as of late, leveraging extremely impressive on-chain gigabrainery to take advantage of all the crazy opportunities within defi…
Check out the interview below!
Interview
Q: Excited to talk with you ser! Could you tell us a little bit about your background, and how you got into crypto?
A: I have a decade of TradFi experience in equities. So come from a research and trading background in hedge funds.
I came to crypto in the spring of 2021 because my friends were making millions on Safemoon and other BSC season tokens.
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Q: What was your path like once getting into crypto?
A: After like 10 rugs, I caught a 30x because I watched dextools every night. Found a $500k market cap token and bought 1%, and it went crazy over the next week.
From there I learned that not everything goes up (LINK and SUSHI were heavily shilled and I got rinsed on both).
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Q: How did you go from beginner to one of the foremost on-chain sleuths in the space?
A: I wouldn’t say I’m even a good onchain sleuth. But watching wallets & block explorers is how I’ve done well.
I spent a lot of time building a database of wallets I liked, putting together alerts, and building a framework around how I should size, trade and farm things.
Best advice I can give is go and start doing degen stuff. You will start to recognize when you are dealing with straight scams, semi-ponzis and what to look out for + when to get out.
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Q: What do you think 2023 will bring for the markets? And are there any emerging narratives in defi you are bullish on?
A: After being in this space for 18 months, I am more of a speculation maxi than a crypto application maxi.
Permissionless finance stuff is very cool, and will eventually have more broader use cases, but for now it’s a casino and I treat it as such.
The only narrative I am bullish on: consumers are taking on record levels of debt, savings rates are plummeting and inflation is biting everyone. Crypto is a way to speculate with potentially way higher rewards than sports gambling or casino card games, and it has more of a community.
DeFi themes are hard. I always thought options would take off, but crypto natives don’t really use them. NFT lending also seemed promising, and never got that much traction.
In terms of 2023, I think we bounce back quicker than people anticipate, due to my speculation thesis + institutions are not going anywhere. Big media & gaming companies are filing NFT trademarks. JP Morgan filed for its own crypto wallet. The space is not going anywhere, and with inflation easing + macro improving, I actually think 2023 will be a decent year for crypto.
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Q: For the folks reading this who are already neck-deep in CT and defi and etc, but might be neophytes at on-chain analysis and want to build up to your level of knowledge, what path would you recommend? What should they study, and do, and in what order?
A: Get familiar with Nansen, block explorers. Onchain analysis isn’t as helpful in bear markets, but in bull markets watching team or insider wallets can help a lot.
Also building a list of people you like to follow (or using chainEDGE) will help you find smaller cap ideas that have more upside than buying ETH.
I think you should approach onchain analysis with what you want from it. I watch wallets to find early trades, or emerging narratives. I don’t care as much about what Jump and Alameda were doing.
Also, you need to set an expectation of how closely you are going to watch things. I watched Avi Eisenberg’s wallet all night / all morning last Tuesday, waiting for the breaking point when he abandoned the onchain short position, to go levered long CRV.
It also helps to have a strong sense of markets to help inform what the onchain data is telling you.
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Q: For total beginners to crypto or defi who desperately want to gain knowledge and 'make it', what general advice do you have?
A: Read my first few substack articles. It teaches whale watching, project research, etc.
If you are starting from a small account, I would master the lowcap shitcoin trade. $50k tokens go to $5m a lot more than $50mm market caps going to $5bn. There is a lot of trash, and you have to watch out for landmines, but if you build up a wallet list, use supplemental software like chainEDGE, and build a network of people to research things with, you can do very well.
If you don’t like markets / trading, you probably won’t like crypto. Once I got started, I have lost many nights sleep chasing rabbit holes and getting rugged. If you don’t live and breathe it, you are better off just owning ETH.
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Q: I've been a long-time subscriber to your Substack and believe its one of the best in the space. Could you tell folks about it?
A: For sure.
So I have a free newsletter, where I cover a bunch of stuff. We have weekly updates on what is going on in crypto, and what smart money flows look like. Sometimes I do educational content. Or upcoming catalysts, unlocks, narratives. It really isn’t very structured, but I write everything with the goal of making people smarter and hopefully making money.
Then the paid version is more deep dive protocol research, where I flagged things like GMX and XMON before they mooned (but also have some losers given the market has been down only).
The paid version also has a monthly whale watching segment, where I go through smart money flows, what is notable. And flag wallets worth following.
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Q: You are building something called ChainEDGE, correct? Can you tell us about that?
A: chainEDGE is basically the software version of my substack. I want it to help crypto users make money and avoid losses.
The beginning premise is it will function as a smart money monitoring tool, but is cross chain. So you can see Arbitrum and Optimism flows, across our “smart trader” database.
We have a lot of other stuff in the works, but this core engine is what will be out in our public beta launch in the next week or so. Down the line we will have more analytics around our traders, wallet alert services. NFT trading analytics. But the core starting idea is watching smart wallets for a cheaper price.
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Conclusion
Huge thanks to @OnChainWizard for all the above wisdom!
Make sure to follow his Twitter account as well as the the @ChainEDGE_io account as well!
And make sure to subscribe to his Substack by clicking here!
Finally, here is a great (audio) interview he recently did with @blocmatesdotcom that is also highly recommended!
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Note: Thanks to our official sponsor for this month @NestedFi - a new ‘Social Trading’ protocol active on all the main EVM chains (see below)!