At the moment when the red brake lights came on, Wesley reattached the license plate that read ETH10K. He smiled and said, "You can buy another car, replenish your position, but you need to reclaim your pride first."

After Chinese New Year, when ETH plummeted, the market was filled with predictions of "800 dollars ahead." He sold all three cars—the Ferrari he used to buy soda, the SUV for grocery shopping, and the red Porsche with the "ETH10K" plate, even letting go of the license plate. He also liquidated his two properties in Australia, went to a farm to pick fruits, did physical work during the day, self-studied coding at night, and worked for several projects.

On August 11, when ETH surged back to 4350, he didn't rush to increase his position or buy a new car. His first action was to redeem the license plate. He stated that this small piece of metal was a way to hold himself accountable to his past.

During an interview at OKX, I sat across from him. He didn't quite look like a traditional "trader," more like an engineer. He spoke logically, not indulging in buzzwords, and enjoyed discussing from a "verifiable" standpoint.

"I won't sell, I have no plans to sell. Once it reaches 10,000, I'll put the ETH into Aave/Compound, borrow a bit of stablecoin, but still won't sell. Even if there's a pullback, it doesn't matter, as long as it's low leverage."

When he said, "I won't sell," he said it calmly, as if completing a necessary task.

From 2015 to 2025: A Twisting yet Clear Path

2015—2016, Hong Kong Investment Bank → Entrepreneurship (chatbot lending MVP)

Wesley graduated from a finance major, received a full-time offer in Hong Kong, and worked as a bond salesman for two years. "Working felt like acting, and I am more introverted, so I resigned and returned home to start a business."

His first "product" was neither an app nor a website but a chatbot built using the Facebook SDK—a student-oriented network lending system. "To be honest, I had only been coding for a month or two. I couldn't develop a complete app or website. The most convenient way for me was to write the logic into the SDK, guide users with text to complete operations." At that time, without ChatGPT or LLM, he used conditional logic to parse keywords, broke down the loan process into executable dialogues, and created a rough but functional MVP in this way.

After going live, due to the extremely lean team (basically just him and a partner), and the light product logic, the break-even point was reached in two to three months; the total transaction volume was around 10 million, serving five to six hundred users.

"The idea of starting a business was very simple for me: my family was poor, and I wanted to study abroad but couldn't afford the tuition," he said. He rented a place in Wan Chai, paying two months of rent as a deposit, with the deposit alone amounting to 26,000 Hong Kong dollars. The bank wouldn't lend to him, and the landlord wouldn't accept credit cards. In the end, with the help of several friends pitching in, he was able to settle in. "At that moment, I thought, can students like me have a more dignified path? Upload a student ID, a scholarship record, and get a small loan?" Among the first group of borrowers, a student used the money to buy a ticket to Japan, and upon landing, immediately repaid the loan. Luckily, there wasn't a single bad debt. The numbers were small but surprisingly stable.

Later, after arguing with his partner, he was forced to learn how to code by himself, "otherwise the company would be doomed." Not long after, the company was sold as a whole, and he pocketed his first batch of original savings.

2016-2017, Australia Working Holiday: Financial Analysis during the Day, Self-taught Coding at Night

In 2016, after wrapping up a business project, he had the idea to go on a working holiday in Australia. To obtain a visa, he decided to study first, but his undergraduate degree was in finance, and in Australia, "the job must be related to the major," so he ended up studying finance and working in finance.

During the day, he worked at a small community bank, with tasks including even counting the incoming and outgoing cash in ATMs. There was a bizarre incident: a gangster from South Africa tampered with the cash-in-transit vehicle, skimming a bit off each time money was loaded into the ATM, eventually making off with 7 million in a year. The bank was a publicly traded company, and in the end, it was covered by insurance, but his position was also affected. Following that, the bank experienced a hostile takeover, and he was transferred to financial analysis: equity valuation, M&A models, Excel reports—solid processes, yet a very slow pace with coworkers leaving work at three or four in the afternoon.

After dusk, he devoted all his "free time" to programming: casually finding courses online, going through open courses and PDF textbooks, filling the gaps in data structures, algorithms, and operating systems piece by piece; at the same time preparing for the GRE/TOEFL, planning a path of "going to the U.S. for a master's → getting OPT → entering a big tech company."

Reality was not dignified: having only written code for a year with no formal training, his resumes were repeatedly rejected. To maintain his Australian status, he briefly took up finance-related courses, only to end up back in his original field. Over the course of two years, he saved around 400,000 Chinese yuan in Australia and became more convinced that if he really wanted to code, he would have to return to the Chinese community to solidify the path of becoming an engineer. So, he chose to return, officially transitioning to the engineer track, laying the foundation for later entry into Web3.

2018–2019, Australia→Repatriation

In Wesley's photos for us, two are of cars, another is of the Australian sea, with the wind blowing across the vast embankment. As for the "room photo" below, it's not in Australia but a cabin he rented after returning to his home country. The room is small but very bright.

“The view is nice, and many friends are willing to come over,” he said with a smile.

After returning to the Chinese community, Wesley joined a Hong Kong-based insurtech startup as a backend engineer. He arrived at a time when a cryptocurrency exchange collapsed, leaving eighty to ninety practitioners unemployed. The company quickly hired many of them, and “suddenly the language of the office turned into crypto jargon.” This was his formal entry into the industry.

In 2019, he began accumulating ETH and Synthetix (SNX) — the "DeFi Summer" of the previous year. By the peak of the 2020 summer, SNX surged in the DeFi narrative. He jokingly said, “I didn’t have much money at that time, so no matter how much it rose, it was just a passing thrill.” What truly prompted him to take action was funding rate arbitrage: together with colleagues, he developed an arbitrage algorithm for spot-futures basis/funding rates. By the end of 2020, the strategy was producing an annualized return of 80%–90%.

“The problem was I didn’t have money.” He took a one-page PDF to meet old classmates and friends in the financial industry: investment bankers, private bankers, some HNW individuals. He didn't talk about "alchemy" but instead about “spot vs. futures basis, holding costs, Carry,” explaining in a way that even traditional finance people could understand. At that time, the market had already shown interest in Crypto, but many were unwilling to bear the volatility. A solution that offered exposure to crypto with a stable yield was very attractive. In the end, he raised nearly tens of millions of dollars in Hong Kong and Singapore through connections and began live trading.

The team was almost non-existent — “basically just me.” He connected the API to the exchange, automated execution, and in the first year, this personal strategy achieved around 87% return. After making money, he suddenly realized, “I rely on the API to run, but I don't really understand blockchain itself enough.” So, he resigned, systematically studied the EVM: from the Yellow Paper to Solidity, from reading contracts, examining bytecode to writing his own tools. “Among my friends, some are in the core development team,” so he followed suit to strengthen his engineering foundation and make sure that the system could run even more solidly.

2020–2021, DeFi Summer Bull Market, Recognizing ETH

What truly brought him into the heart of the Web3 wave was not the noisy stories of overnight riches, but rather a "craft in the gap": closing the spread between spot price and contract price into a path that could be traversed repeatedly. Known in the industry as funding rate/basis arbitrage—without betting on direction or chasing trends, it speaks of discipline and patience. During the good market conditions of those two years, he even served as a "proxy runner" for others, managing an AUM reaching tens of millions of RMB with a recorded annualized return of up to 87%. Approximately 60 clients went through the process of setting up their accounts on exchanges and connecting APIs. "I was even worried they wouldn't agree to the 30% management fee," he chuckled, ultimately stating, "the keys are in their hands, and at most, I can just turn off the API." "It's like fixing a road, with traffic flowing back and forth, slowly making money."

The impulse to code also completely took the lead at that time. He joined a top project to code as a "CTO": releasing updates, rolling back changes, adjusting parameters, integrating price data, and refining settlement rules. The blockchain is not always secure—during his first week on the job, the project was hacked, resulting in losses of millions; a few months later, it suffered a second attack, with hackers siphoning off tens of millions of dollars. These two setbacks pulled him back from the bull market euphoria, but they also instilled a set of rules: multi-signature with time-lock for critical operations, avoid upgrades whenever possible; verify every deployment to the bytecode; start with small-scale gray releases and roll back in case of issues. "Code must be verifiable for the system to be trusted," he said.

After the second incident, he chose to leave, ventured out on his own, and built a small system for NFT trading/settlement, structured with "fixed fee + 10% commission." One transaction earned him 80 ETH. It was also during this time that ETH truly solidified its position in his mind. It wasn't about someone shouting what price Ethereum should be, but rather that it provided a reliable certainty: visibility and accuracy before interaction; lending, swapping, vaults, derivatives all interconnect like LEGO bricks, providing leverage.

As for price, he prefers to entrust decision-making to structure rather than emotions—"(Ethereum is) transparent, clear; Solana is relatively like a black box, nothing visible… so more centralized." "At least when I'm interacting with every EVM, I can first go see (the code/bytecode) myself, and after reviewing it, I decide whether to engage with it."

This "structure-first" simple principle was not adhered to without regrets all along the way. He was also swept away by the craze at the peak of the market. In 2021, he used 35 ETH to purchase a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT, whose floor price rose all the way to 140 ETH, but he never sold. Whenever he attended events in the crypto space, as long as he displayed his monkey avatar, someone would always come up to strike up a conversation.

At the peak of the bull market - After the release of Otherside, he spent hundreds of ETH to buy Otherside containing Koda and Azuki. Turning his back faster than turning a book, the former "blue chip" quickly collapsed, eventually approaching zero.

"Later, I realized that using these materialized symbols to attract others was not suitable for me." As the bear market arrived, he almost liquidated all his assets, carrying only a checked baggage, becoming a digital nomad in various parts of Asia. Surprisingly, he began to enjoy the connection established solely through chat and interaction - no showing off, no cheats, just the challenge of communication itself.

2022, Back in Australia, Buying the 'ETH10K' License Plate

LUNA, FTX encountered issues one after another, and he slowly cleared out the client accounts: "Only running my own money." During the most tumultuous months, he flew to Australia, giving himself an account of his "youth" - a large house by the beach, a yard, a sports car, living very close to the beach, watching the sunset. He even went to study for an IT master's degree as a career path, with the idea of "settling down in life" in mind.

It was also during that time that he registered the 'ETH10K' license plate in Perth - at that time, ETH was still around 3000 USD, and he intuitively felt that 10K was "not far away," so he treated this license plate as a bet and a belief.

Reality quickly smoothed out the romance. In the over 300-square-meter house, he only used one room in six months; out of the three bathrooms in the house, he only used one regularly. The sports car was hardly driven, and grocery shopping relied on a regular SUV. The sea breeze was nice during the day, but very desolate at night - the rhythm was like a retirement town, with few people and scarce social interactions. He suddenly realized that those symbols he once thought were important - a big house, a nice car, a sea view - could not provide meaning.

What weighed even more on him was the pressure from his trading system. The trading platform API went down for seven minutes in the early morning. He was running a fund rate strategy of "long spot, short futures," where theoretically both sides should hedge each other - but during those 7 minutes, a coin surged two to three times. At that time, there was no perfected cross margin, so he had to manually move the spot profits to cover the futures margin; when the API went down, the balance was lost, the futures leg was liquidated, the spot leg fell back and lost again. Three small client accounts were blown up that time, and he fully reimbursed them with that month's performance fees.

He didn't guarantee the principal, explained all the risks, and charged a 30% performance fee only when making money. For many traditional traders used to '2% management fee + 20% commission,' this 'only sharing profits when earned' method seemed more like binding the interests of both parties together. However, after the FTX incident, he thought more clearly: if my position was on that side, I might as well be at zero. With the increasing API stability issues, counterparty risks, and the frequency of being woken up at night, he made a decision - to return external funds and only run his own money.

2023–2025: Selling the Villa to Pick Apples, Dollar-Cost Averaging into Ethereum; Buying Back the License Plate as a Statement of Faith

Looking back, what he truly held onto for the long term was from the beginning of that major dip. In 2022, as Ethereum plummeted from 4871 to 880, he stared at the chart, "I did consider selling when it was in the eight to nine hundred range, but ultimately held back." After that, he entrusted the decision to discipline: starting from around 1200, he began dollar-cost averaging, "I continued to buy at 1000 and kept buying all the way to now. Whenever it dropped by 50%, I saw it as a crash and added more funds." On the other hand, he eliminated those things that he once thought would bring satisfaction—the seaside villa and sports car. He said he felt "empty" during that time, so he went all out, sold off the cars, and ran to an orchard to pick apples. With more sweat, his heart settled down: cash flow relied on strategy, accumulation relied on dollar-cost averaging.

Starting in 2023, he completely cleared external funds and only operated on his account: still using the same low-leverage, non-directional strategy; while also engaging in contract activities, writing smart contracts/NFT contracts, settled by "fixed fee + commission." By 2025, this funding rate arbitrage program could still achieve around 10% annualized return—"I originally thought I would play for at most three years, but didn't expect it to continue into the fifth year." He assessed that "the probability of success in the future is probably lower, but with a small volume, you can still get a piece of the pie." The methods are not fancy: go live if it can be verified, grayscale first if it can be rolled back, and no running naked if it can be hedged.

In the spring of 2025, he bought back the "ETH10K" license plate. It's not to show off, but more like giving himself a footnote: the choices made in the bear market, he is still willing to stand by today.

Why Ethereum? Finding Confidence in the Code

When Yuki asked him "Why is the license plate Ethereum," Wesley gave an engineer-style answer: because it can be verified.

His logic is straightforward—an immutable contract will run based on the on-chain code, without the need to trust anyone; in the EVM ecosystem, you can first view the source code or bytecode, and then decide whether to interact with it. "For an engineer like me, this is trust."

He also discussed Solana: "It has great performance, but after deployment, there is no way to verify the bytecode on-chain like with the EVM. Personally, I see a lack of assurance." This is not a denial but a preference: weighting towards areas where you can understand and replicate.

And what about BTC? He respects its "digital gold" status and acknowledges that a long-term portfolio of BTC + ETH is reasonable; but when it comes to his own holdings, he almost exclusively buys ETH—"You could say it's 'professional bias.' In my mind, Ethereum is more like an operating system such as iOS/Android."

This summer, he reclaimed the "ETH10K" license plate. After the interview, he was about to fly to Bali, then transfer to Phuket. Before leaving, he sent a message to his friend: "As the red taillights illuminate, the bear market's dark clouds are left behind in the rearview mirror."

We circle back to life from "verifiability" and "risk constraint": he loves cars, capturing that red glow at the tail of the car; and he will also roll back repeatedly for a small bug at 3 am. On the day of ETH's sharp rise, the first thing he redeemed was the license plate—"Not out of vanity, but to reconcile with his past self."

He doesn't encourage people to go "all in," but he is more willing to share "how to learn." The simplest path is like this: first, get the code running with Udemy's Python Bootcamp, then fill in the basics and details with O'Reilly's Introducing Python (2nd edition), and finally, take the "Data Structures & Algorithms" specialization course on Coursera to solidify the underlying logic—first learn to do it, then understand why.

This interview is part of the OKX Friends series. What we care about is always those who put technology and finance on the same page: the market will fluctuate, the method must be verifiable. Wesley's story is just a footnote—low leverage, heavy auditing, verifiability—an underlying rule that spans cycles.

If Ethereum reaches $10,000, that "ETH10K" license plate will remind him: slow down, don't drift.

Disclaimer: This article is for reference only. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the position of OKX. This article is not intended to provide (i) investment advice or investment recommendations; (ii) an offer or solicitation to buy, sell, or hold digital assets; (iii) financial, accounting, legal, or tax advice. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such information. Holding digital assets (including stablecoins and NFTs) involves high risk and may experience significant volatility. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital assets is suitable for you based on your financial situation. For your specific circumstances, please consult your legal/tax/investment professional. You are responsible for understanding and complying with applicable local laws and regulations.

This article is a contribution and does not represent the views of BlockBeats

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