On the day of Ethereum's big pump, he put the "ETH10K" license plate back on｜OKX frens - Conversation with Wesley

A big believer in Ethereum, Wesley sold his house and car during the bear market just to keep investing. After the price of Ethereum skyrocketed, the first thing he did was to redeem the “ETH10K” license plate, which is not only a proof of faith, but also an account for his past self. This article is from an article written by lockBeats and is organized, compiled and written by Rhythm. (Synopsis: Ethereum topped $4640 less than 5% from the “all-time high”, surpassing Netflix and Mastercard in market value) (Background supplement: China’s A-share aunt shouts about cryptocurrency: Bitcoin is digital gold, Ethereum is Web3 Huida, SOL is the blockchain casino leader) The moment the red taillights came on, Wesley put the license plate with ETH10K written on it back in. He laughed and said: “The car can be bought again, the position can be replenished, and the face must be recovered first.” After the Spring Festival, ETH fell to the cold, and the market was full of “800 knives” judgment. He sold all three cars, a Ferrari that he usually uses to buy Coke, an SUV grocery car, a red Porsche with “ETH10K”, even the license plates were removed, and two houses in Australia were also disposed of, running to the farm to pick fruits, manual work during the day and self-programming at night, and working for several project parties. On August 11, ETH stood back to 4350 On this day, he did not rush to add a warehouse or change cars, the first thing was to redeem the license plate. He said that this small metal plate is to give an explanation to his past self. During the OKX interview, I sat down with him. He looks less like a traditional “trader” and more like an engineer. Speak logically, do not pursue hot words, and like to start with “verifiable”. “It won’t sell, I’m not going to sell.” After it rose to 10,000, I put ETH into Aave/Compound, borrowed a little U out, and still didn’t sell it. Even if the drawdown is not bad, low leverage is good." This phrase “will not sell”, he said calmly. It’s like accomplishing a thing that needs to be done. From 2015 to 2025: A curved but clear line 2015-2016, Hong Kong investment bank → entrepreneurship (chatbot lending MVP) Wesley graduated from the finance department, got a full-time offer in Hong Kong, and worked in bond sales for two years. “Working is like acting, I am more introverted, and then I quit my job and went home to start a business.” His first “product” was neither an app nor a website, but a chatbot built on the Facebook SDK—a set of online lending for students. “To be honest, I’ve only been writing programs for a month or two, and I can’t make a complete app or website. The most convenient thing for me is to write the logic into the SDK and guide the user through the operation with text.” At that time, there was no ChatGPT and no LLM, so he used conditional judgment to parse Keyword, split the borrowing process into executable conversations, and a rough but runable MVP was completed. After the launch, because the team is minimalist (basically just him and one partner), the product logic is also light, and the cost will be returned in two or three months; The total transaction volume is about 10 million, serving five or six hundred users. “My motivation for starting a business was simple: my family was poor, I wanted to go abroad, and I couldn’t afford to pay the tuition fees.” , he rents a house in Wan Chai, pays one for two, and the deposit alone costs 26,000 Hong Kong dollars. The bank didn’t lend, the landlord didn’t accept credit cards, and finally a few friends cobbled together to let him live. “At that moment I wondered if a student like me could have a more decent path. Upload your student ID card and scholarship record to get a small loan?” Among the first borrowers, some students used the money to buy a plane ticket to Japan, and returned the money when they landed. Fortunately, there wasn’t a bad debt either. The numbers are small, but surprisingly stable. Later, I quarreled with my partner and forced me to learn to write programs on my own, “otherwise the company will be yellow.” Soon, the company as a whole was sold, and the first original accumulation was dropped. 2016-2017, Australia Working holiday: financial analysis during the day, self-study procedures at night In 2016, after finishing his entrepreneurial project, he had the idea of going to Australia for a working holiday. In order to get the identity, I first went to study, but the undergraduate is finance, and in the local “work content must be consistent with the major”, and in the end, I can only read finance and do finance. I work at a small community bank during the day, and I even have to count the cash in and out of the ATM every day. There was a bizarre case: an underworld big brother from South Africa did tricks in the process of transporting money armored vehicles, each time he installed a little less ATM, and swept away 7 million a year. The bank was a listed company, and it was eventually backed by insurance, but his position was also affected. Then the bank suffered a hostile merger, and he was transferred to do financial analysis: equity valuations, M&A models, Excel reports – the process was solid, but the pace was slow, and colleagues left work at three or four o’clock in the afternoon. After the evening, he handed over the entire “white space” to programming: find classes on the Internet, brush open classes and PDF teaching materials, and make up the data structure, algorithms, and operating systems one by one; At the same time, prepare GRE/TOEFL, and plan a road to “go to the United States to study for a master’s degree → take OPT → into a large factory”. The reality is not decent: I have only written a program for a year, I have not received systematic training, and my resumes have been repeatedly returned. In order to maintain his Australian identity, he also briefly went to finance related courses, only to return to his old business. In the past two years, he has saved about 400,000 yuan in Australia, and he has become more and more sure that if he really wants to write a program, he must return to the Chinese circle to follow the path of an engineer. So he chose to return and officially turn to the engineer track to lay the foundation for his later entry into Web3. 2018-2019, Australian → Return In the photos Wesley gave us, two are cars, and the other is the Australian sea, and the wind blows through the empty embankment. As for the following “room photo”, it is not in Australia, it is the cottage he rented after returning to China, the room is not large, but it is very bright. “The scenery is good, many friends are willing to come.” He said with a smile. After returning to the Chinese community, Wesley joined an insurance startup in Hong Kong as a back-end engineer. Catching up with the collapse of a crypto exchange at that time, eighty or ninety workers lost their jobs, the company recruited a lot of people in one go, and “the language of the office suddenly became crypto jargon.” He also officially entered the circle. In 2019, he began configuring ETH and Synthetix (SNX) – the year before “DeFi Summer”. In the middle of summer 2020, SNX soared all the way in the DeFi narrative, he laughed at himself that “there was not much money at that time, and no matter how much it rose, it was just a bright eye”, and what really made him do it was funding rate arbitrage: he and his colleagues made a spot-contract basis/funding rate arbitrage algorithm. By the end of 2020, the implementation will be in place, and the annualized rate will be 80%-90%. “The problem is that I don’t have the money.” He was carrying…