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Nansen's Conversation with the Secret "Giant Whale": How to Become a Smart Money Trader

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The Nansen team analyzed the wallet of one of the top traders in the cryptocurrency space and interviewed the owner of the wallet.

Original title: "Inside the Mind of an Ape: Fiskantes"

Original source: Nansen

Original compilation: The Way of DeFi

The Nansen team interviewed a top crypto trader and analyzed one of their wallets.

For months, Zee Prime Capital has jokingly referred to itself as "And Others Capital" in its Twitter bio List the names of well-known VC firms by name, and the new VC will be relegated to "other investors"), which has become an industry-leading investment institution in the second half of the 2020-2022 cycle. , infrastructure, DeFi, and P2E projects have made early investments.

The rise of Zee Prime, Thanks in large part to the growing profile of one of its founding partners, Fiskantes, one of his bright spots was correctly predicting that high-throughput blockchains would eventually fail due to a 200-year-old "energy consumption paradox." Becoming Congested, he predicted the rise of NFTs early on and contributed to Zee Prime's continued success. Currently, Zee Prime manages several funds, including the $35 million flagship fund Zee Prime II, which will complete financing in 2022.

However, Fiskantes' journey has not been all smooth sailing, and prior to his current success, he was an experienced poker player and A would-be cheesemonger who drained his money on the troubled Gouda cheese business. Real estate investing helped put Fiskantes back on his feet, and he eventually made his mark in the crypto space with his cautious, interdisciplinary approach.

In an interview with Nansen, we were surprised to learn that Fiskantes' extensive expertise is largely self-taught reading habits by-products. Zee Prime is the force behind a well-known Smart Money NFT wallet, and successful crypto investing requires “making something die inside of you.”

Read on for an in-depth look at how Fiskantes invests, as well as details about a particular Zee Prime wallet.

Question 1: How did you start investing? Have you received relevant training?

Fiskantes: I remember in college, I tried to Possibly doing more summer jobs to save money like security at events, warehouse work at IKEA, I'm also reading some books on not working for other people like Robert Kiyosaki's and some really basic stuff. Studying law became boring for me and I started to feel like I needed to do something else.

I find it challenging for some stockbrokers to promote their services at our university. They will give you $100,000 of test dollars for a demo trade, which you can use to buy some stocks. At the end of the year, they pick out the top performing portfolios and give those testers some money.

I'm from a small town in a small country so I didn't even know that a guy like me could actually buy stock in a company , so I was really excited when I realized that I could open an economic account and start buying shares in some American companies. Then I randomly bought some stocks that I didn't know much about and ended up with a portfolio that performed better (it was pure luck, I didn't know anything at the time). That's the whole point of me saying, 'Okay, now I need to save up and start investing. 』

I was reading some articles on the Internet about investing, and one of them was about poker. Here's a PR article about the company PokerStrategy that says, "Oh, everyone can be an online poker pro and everyone can make money like this."

Interestingly, this article was written by one of my current business partners, Pavel, who was working for the poker company at the time.

I actually went to Gibraltar to meet these people because I wanted to work with them. This was probably 12, 13 years ago, but that's how I got to know some of the people I worked with.

I started off with a $50 promotional bankroll from playing free poker and being able to spend five or six years in my career Amassing a decent amount of money mid-year, but I'm also investing part-time and trying to understand what it means to invest in the stock market.

It was about 2011 and I started looking at value investing, which is the same as most of the past 12 years that have produced great returns for me Crypto or stock investing is very different. The PokerStrategy team also built another trading and investing project called Tradimo, which I wasn't deeply involved in, but I was involved in building the community early on.

They were talking about the Facebook IPO and all these growth tech stocks. I'm the one trying to promote more value investing method content out there, but no one really cares. Everyone wants to chase tech stocks, and in retrospect, that's actually a relatively better strategy. If we look at returns now after the bubble burst, it's still better than most value investing recommended by Benjamin Graham or Warren Buffet.

I remember I tried all these crazy deals and I burned myself out so bad I went back to the drawing board Ask, well, so what's the best way to invest?

In Tradimo, a guy from the Netherlands bought bitcoin, which was my first exposure to bitcoin, and he said, "It's something new , we should pay attention to it, we should write articles."

I'm not the real decision maker of this platform, but I say the idea is stupid. Let's focus on some serious stuff, shall we? So my first exposure to Bitcoin made me ignore it for 3 full years.

Afterwards, I played some poker games at online poker rooms that accept Bitcoin as payment, and that's how I slowly got into crypto The story of the field, from being a skeptic who was very pessimistic about it all, and then I met some crypto hackers, I talked to them, I became very ideologically driven and oriented in 2016 and 2017, to To me, crypto is more about ideology than money making.

Question 2: It sounds like you are learning multiple skills in several different areas at the same time. Do you think this has helped your development? Or is it holding you back? How does this all work together?

Fiskantes: Actually, sometimes I feel anxious because It was me who knew I didn't have enough time to learn all the things I wanted to learn.

When it comes to study, I have a very cheerful personality, but I'm really not focused and I can't spend much time on study one thing.

And my poker friends, they are all very keen on playing poker, just like autistic patients, they are very interested in poker Every situation that may arise in the game is well known. All those numbers are very useful, but they're useless anywhere else, just like you can't send them to IKEA to buy a chair.

So these guys, when poker isn't profitable anymore, they basically don't have much chance to switch careers outside of crypto . A lot of them are playing crypto games now because it's also a really fun game. It's very different, but it also gets you deep into some things. But I've always wanted to do more, I've always wanted to be in business, I've always wanted to do more outside things like add value, not just poker.

After I quit law studies I studied Applied Psychology for three years because I just wanted to get a university degree. Plus, it's been really interesting to me, figuring out how the human mind works, especially when I'm playing poker under pressure. Sometimes I get angry, I stop focusing, I want to know more.

So it was very necessary for me to learn as many different things as possible and to find my own path in life. I think having an advantage is either very specialized, for example if you invest in real estate, if you invest in a place you are very familiar with, you need to know the price, you need to know how the industry will develop further, which of course is very helpful . Or, you need to invest in some super new frontier that doesn't have great maps.

Before crypto, I was trying to figure out virtual reality (VR), which had a small bull market or hype cycle in 2016 , but it's not really something that works for me. For a while, it was just a fun hobby, but I tried a lot of things and I actually took most of the money I made from poker and invested in a company.

This is a story I probably never shared, but it's very interesting. There's a company in Eastern Europe that basically buys cheese like Gouda and takes it to another country and ages it for a few months and sells it at a premium because 12 or 24 months Gouda is cheaper than a New cheese is worth a lot more. So all you need is some kind of infrastructure for secure storage, and then you just distribute them to supermarkets, wine shops, etc.

While this company looks great on paper, its numbers look great and I'm heavily invested in it Funding, I kind of knew the founder but I probably didn't really know him because then I found out he did a lot of questionable things which meant he had a huge debt that he didn't disclose to anyone and later the company It went bankrupt and I lost a lot of money because of it.

It was around 2016 and I became more and more fond of crypto, not just because I was a poker player using Bitcoin , also because I read the white paper and made a crypto transaction. Looking back at that time, it's crazy to me to try to invest in the food industry or a real world business because the food industry and these brick and mortar industries are so hard to penetrate.

So basically these businesses went out of business very quickly. When I look at crypto, of course I don't think it will be as easy as it has been in years. However, it is still much more convenient to locate in this industry than in the real world.

Question 3: What lesson did you learn after being screwed by this cheese company?

Fiskantes: The most important lesson is of course risk management, Even though I've taken some classes before, I've spent more money on this. Another problem is that there is a huge discrepancy between ideas and numbers on paper, and actual execution, and this is my biggest takeaway.

I'm pretty sure if this business was run by someone else maybe they had more resources, a better Distribution network and better organization, I think this business will make a lot of money very quickly even compared to some tech industries. But it's all about the team and the execution, and if I had been more experienced in dealing with people and discussing the business with the teams I was trying to build, I could have discovered this faster, which I don't. It's very different from investing in stocks or playing poker, right?

Question 4: Your early experience seems like the perfect course to get into crypto. You studied psychology, you studied gambling strategies and the psychological aspects of poker, you also studied the markets, what do you think about that?

Fiskantes: In a way, I consider myself more Some of the lawyers I know or people who do other things are better prepared, but, crypto was such a different beast in the early days and I made a lot of mistakes too.

After the cheese business, I never made a crucial mistake again. I've never used leverage, or I've never really allowed myself to crash from investing too much in a project. But I also saw these super early stage ICOs that promised a huge addressable market, and I invested in them. At the time I was still impressed by things like having ex-Google founders or having Vitalik Buterin as an advisor, and I was pretty sure about some of those projects, but they didn't pan out.

Yeah, I think I definitely have a better crypto background than most, even from a mindset or psychology standpoint So does it. I don't really mind volatility, I don't mind losing money, it's normal for me. I don't spend too much time looking at price charts or obsessing over where Bitcoin is headed next, and that's an advantage.

Question 5: We discussed early losses from which we learned lessons. Did any notable early wins affect your view?

Fiskantes: My stock value investing strategy is okay, but It never really produced any great returns, so I basically gave up and went into the ETF passive investing camp. So while it's doing okay, I wouldn't say my stock is doing too well, but probably my biggest early success was buying a condo in 2014.

Buying an apartment at the time was a huge investment for me. I have a mortgage, but only 50%. I paid the rest in cash, and I was like, well, this is probably one of the biggest deals of my life, so I need to really turn this into something important and pay attention. Now, that number isn't even that big compared to what I'm doing these days, but at the time it was a lot of money.

I actually spent a lot of time doing due diligence. I hired an advisor, so when we went to see deals, I paid him a pretty reasonable fee. He would carry around tools, measure the humidity in the walls, see if the windows were sound proof, he would check everything and give me advice on how much money I should negotiate. He was very instrumental in my home buying process, I looked at at least 30 or so condos, and I bought one that at first looked really bad.

It's in a pretty nice part of town, but it looks terrible. Like if you're someone who makes decisions based on emotion, or like the way things feel and look, you're not going to buy it. The guy said to me, well, this is by far the best place we've ever seen. I know it looks bad, but it's easy to rebuild and structurally everything is fine. It's in a great neighborhood at a great price, and he suggested I buy it right away, so I did.

Then I plan to rebuild the house, I hire some workers, yes, 5 years later, when I sell the house The return was much greater than the average return of the real estate market at that time. It's actually something in the physical world, and I can see it being recreated in real time. It felt really good, and I thought maybe I could do more real estate investing in this area. But then crypto got hot and I basically gave up on the idea but it was probably my biggest non-crypto investment win and it wasn't just luck, I actually did my due diligence and it was all right .

Question 6: A consistent theme I hear here is talking to experts, when you first get into poker, you go to Gibraltar , and then you buy the house, you hire a consultant. Are you still doing these things? Do you bring in industry experts before Zee Prime decides on an investment? How are you doing your due diligence now?

Fiskantes: This is a bit different, I mean, crypto It's a fast-growing new industry, and you don't have the specialists you have in other industries. But, for example, the games that we've been looking at lately, mostly because of some of our collaborators, especially Pavel that I mentioned earlier, this guy from Gibraltar Poker, he's built this huge gaming company that's not only For poker, there are several other games. He’s been an executive at a company in the gaming space for 11 years, so he knows games and how to make them fun and profitable, better than most VCs investing in crypto games these days. So it's a lucky coincidence that we have this guy on board, but he also has contacts in the esports world, so we can hire more people.

To this end, we have built our own small team and now focus on the game. Beyond that, we're hiring, I wouldn't say experts, but we've hired very bright, young and hungry people from traditional finance who are now analyzing some of the DeFi opportunities. Early on, we were more of a ragtag bunch of people from different backgrounds, but now, as we've grown, we're trying to methodically build a team or group of people who are directly focused on the various areas in which we invest.

Whatever we do (maybe we get lucky, but we're getting a lot of rewards), we don't want to fully pivot, but might Expand our investments into other areas we believe are necessary to advance human civilization.

So we may hire some external experts and advisors to help us invest in this, maybe a little more passively, not like we do in crypto Hands-on, but maybe in the next three to seven years, we'll think about this... I don't want to reveal too much, because this is just our internal brainstorming. But, you know, we're talking about some sort of nuclear or alternative energy, especially now in Russia. We believe that Europe needs some sort of renaissance as it dreams of other sources of energy and heat.

So, if there is enough capital, we can help make that happen. Having said that, we are not experts in this area and never will be. So we may need some outside help and invest more passively.

Question 7: This is something you have mentioned many times in interviews and I see you have talked about it on twitter. Investing with a higher purpose seems to be your motivation.

Fiskantes:Yeah, I mean flip coins is interesting. I'm also involved with flipping, especially NFTs. It's fun, but never the main motivator. After a while you realize that if you bought a bigger yacht, you wouldn't be happier if the numbers on your screen were bigger, or I don't know what other people do with their money, But what you can do is, either stop focusing too much on your career and investments and start doing other things like focusing on your health and relationships or at least aiming higher why are you collecting all these numbers , and how to handle them in the future.

I kind of want to do both. My partners and I agree that we need to give back or identify areas where human progress may be underdeveloped, or where capital may be misallocated or inefficient in some way, and we'll try to figure out how to think about these differently, how Move them to where it is better for all of us.

It feels a bit cliche, but I feel like it comes down to motivation in its purest form. You have to have something bigger than yourself and try to help something that may outlive you.

This will be the crypto way. It's funny how so many people get very rich so early without having to build a company for 20 years. I think we're going to see more and more of that because we're young and we want to live again, I don't know, 50, 60, 70, 80. We don't want to see the world burn in flames when we grow up. So I think it makes more sense to move from a purely "let's crank the numbers up to something" mentality to a greener, more pleasant world in which we live.

Question 8: There are so many geniuses in the crypto field, do you think some people are naturally suitable for trading? Is this learnable?

Fiskantes: I think you need to have something to do at this point. Well, a lot of them are trained, and if people haven't been trained since childhood, or aren't used to taking big risks, then they're not doing well with numbers.

Especially trading, where you're literally staring at the screen and trying to navigate a noisy environment In, make quick decisions about large amounts of money very, very quickly. You kind of need some kind of... I don't know, I don't want to sound cynical. But something inside of you needs to die.

Question 9: Is there anything inside you that needs to die?

Fiskantes: Something needs to die inside of you, you You know, some people get emotional when they think about money. We play this game with poker players, we go to the bar to have some drinks, and we ask the bartender to flip a coin. If we lose, we will pay triple the price. Or if we win, we pay nothing and the bartender needs to make it up with his own money.

Most people are very risk averse, and for them the concept of losing money is more painful than the vision of winning larger sums. So I think you need to be a person who may not have much perception of risk, but at the same time, you should not be inclined to gamble. Many people are addicted to the digital dopamine boost that goes up and down like crazy.

So to me, the numbers are not that interesting. I'll play poker, but that's just a grind. I would sit and play for a few hours each day, and happily go on to other things. Some people were just glued, they couldn't leave the table. You know, when the action is strong or whatever.

Question 10: So what is painful for you? In trading, there must be something that will break your heart. What will break your heart?

Fiskantes: For example, I didn't Invest in something, or I'm missing something for sloppy reasons. I can get a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of opportunities when everything is going up so fast. Yes, making hasty mistakes is painful, even for me.

But another thing, this is more from an investment standpoint, another thing I see that is painful The thing is, I sympathize with builders who are under a lot of pressure to create something important and interesting and innovative, and these people get so much hate and pressure. You know, sometimes I just want to dump some coins or something that might not be doing so well. But I just feel like these guys are working hard. And we're just flipping their tokens back and forth here.

So I find it a bit painful when I see really good projects with really nice and well-meaning teams, they Struggling because Token is only dropping because of time and community. Yep, that's when I want to get out of the industry or take a long break, and it usually has something to do with things like that.

I would consider myself chaos neutral, which means sometimes I just want things to work out in weird ways and cause a stir , and might even make headlines, just because I want to see the industry test its limits.

We support founders, even though they may have eccentric personalities, or their design is flawed, they should probably be more active solve this problem. But I'm partial to the ones who have a lot of ups and downs and try to do something interesting and new. So sometimes, even though things aren't working out, but people are talking a lot, I feel like the industry is moving forward. So sometimes I get weird, but usually my greatest joy is when I see something materialize in an unintended way and it makes people's lives better.

Question 11: As I was browsing Nansen, I was a bit surprised that we didn't flag a lot of Zee Prime wallets, do you guys think about covert operations a lot?

Fiskantes: Speaking of OPSEC, because I may be our team The most public figure in , I personally don't even control any substantial funds other than my own funds, as in, I sometimes use small funds to test things myself. I've played with some NFTs, but I don't personally have direct control over many wallets. I might be backing up on some multisig, but I don't even actively sign myself. I think I have the biggest purpose on my shoulders, so I'm very, very careful.

So you can send me all your messed up PDFs and I'll even open it, but you won't get from it something. Maybe some Forgotten Runes Wizards.

Question 12: Let's talk about NFTs, I'm looking at your personal account history, around October 21st last year, your address activity There's a surge, you're starting to play the NFT game, is there anything in these markets that particularly interests you?

Fiskantes all-time activity chart

Fiskantes: Within our team, my attitude towards NFT is very different . Almost everyone said, "No, it's just a weird fad. Who cares about having a pixelated picture?" I said, "Well, I need to dig deeper and see if there's something."< /p>

This is interesting to me too, on the normal alt trading market you can only use bots for arbitrage, but on Opensea you can use A very limited and slow order that does all sorts of interesting things.

When I was playing poker, there was a proprietary trading platform in Eastern Europe that was recruiting traders for the Warsaw Stock Exchange and Actively traded on Vienna Stock Exchange - a small trading platform with very low liquidity in stocks. So, you can do these market making operations manually, and you can make a lot of money by using very stupid algorithms. So, as a poker player, I was hired to try it out, where I learned a few tricks on how to use the order book.

I was there for three weeks and I realized I didn't want to go to any office and wear a shirt or anything like that, so I Resigned, but I learned a few tricks. So last year I discovered that you can use these tricks in NFTs because these markets are very illiquid and difficult to automate. So that's what I did, but really I also just wanted to buy some lottery tickets and see if something popped up. In the beginning, I bought a CryptoPunk and a few other things for very little money.

Order book strategies are actually not that complicated. By the way, you can do this on Kraken in early 2017 or late 2016. Basically, what you do is, you see a big spread between buy and sell orders for certain assets, for example, Parallel's Prime Keys, and for a while you can buy at 10E and at the same time Sell at 12E. You can trade both at the same time, so you can earn the difference several times a week.

Fiskantes realized gains dashboard

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I don't do this very often, but I do think, well, this is a viable strategy, and if it doesn't have super high ethereum fees, it might be a good way to learn how Best place to do this type of deal, so it's not for everyone.

Sometimes I also try to do rare or floor sniping when someone happens to hang out with something that has a rare trait. You buy it quickly, and then you can sell it later. I do that too, and I think I can make a pretty good return on this activity if I really focus on it. But by then we were already running our fund, and I wasn't interested in clicking stuff all day long (which is something I've been playing poker for five years, so I don't want to be doing it for the rest of my life).

Now I feel like the NFT market has overwhelmed me, it's full of imitators, not like I used to play Times are so exciting. Anyway, after playing with it, I basically went back to the rest of my team and was able to market them, not outright buying too many NFTs, but looking more closely at some NFT game items or NFT infrastructure items, And develop a theory for what we want to buy.

Question 13: Many people believe that a powerful market player like you controls the industry behind the scenes. To what extent is this true?

Fiskantes: I'm not one of many private groups insiders. If there are any chat groups so important that they drive an entire market, I'm definitely not one of them.

Sadly, I think it's a mixed issue, there's definitely backroom deals, insider information, and other types of stuff, like, a lot of the big players will have alpha sources. But I don't think it's any different than other industries. It's just that the industry is growing exponentially, and it's so new that exploiting even small asymmetric information is much easier than it is in some very traditional industries.

What I want to say is that compared to four or five years ago, I am a little tired now, not so starry-eyed and naive And ideological, at that time I was more inclined to believe that all crypto is to equalize opportunities and make everything more decentralized and democratic.

In some ways, it's still moving in that direction. Everyone, anywhere in the world, can build smart contracts, which is an equal opportunity for everyone. The common ground then is just pure art skill of figuring out how to play the DeFi/MEV game better than everyone else without any support. If the game is global, it can be anywhere. All you need is your computer, and you're earning tens in your mom's basement.

Wallet Analysis

As part of the interview, Fiskantes discussed some of Zee Primes' big investment successes, Including early Synthetix and Solana investments, and buying Luna at $1.

However, Fiskantes also revealed that Zee Prime is an increasingly complex organization with multiple other entities under the same roof operate. This includes Sigil, a DeFi-focused liquid staking tool, and a new member of the family: Devmons.gg.

For active NFT traders, Devmons may be a familiar name, as it is a prolific GameFi and NFT flip wallet.

Devmons.eth implemented Earnings Dashboard

Devmons has over 1600 Parallel collectible cards and has successfully flipped NFT collections like Goblin town and Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult.

Their current portfolio is dominated by Parallel with a lot of Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult derivatives, Loot and Pudgy Penguins holdings.

Devmons.eth NFT investment Combination Dashboard

In recent months, Devmons.eth's significant trades have included increasing their Loot position, as well as attempting to amass top-tier Frontier game items.

However, Devmons is a wallet with the label "Smart Money" because they are an "Airdrop Specialist" and this address Received a large number of Tokens in multiple airdrops. We could see this clearly at their recent Opensea event where they got close to 20+ Forgotten Runes Warriors Guild NFTs worth at least 5.5 ETH.