Why most crypto investors pick wrong and how to evaluate new projects

Transcript

DM. Good morning. Welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that holds on like a memecoin trader in denial. I'm your host, Jay Hamilton. It's Monday, March the 17th, and today we are discussing the state of the markets. What is going on? Are we are we continuing to go in this bull run? Are we in a bear? We're going to look at some stats from over in Asia. We're going to zoom out a little bit, see the bigger picture, and see why, you know what, Bull Run might still be on. Also, we're going to look at some evaluation frameworks for new projects. If you're thinking about investing in a new token, how do you think about that? How do you decide if you should invest in that?

What does that mean? Obviously, in these markets, you're trying to look for the alpha wherever you can, and we're going to get into some details there. We're also going to look at the state of token launches because believe it or not, even in markets like this, even when it's red out there, there are new tokens launching. I'm not just talking about memecoins. I'm talking about fundamental utility based tokens as well. And we're going to talk about what the state of those token launches is. Is it a good idea to launch a token right now? And is there opportunity as an investor today to break this all down? We are joined by Laura Enamid Nova. Did I get that right? I'll try that again. Laura, close enough. Close enough. Well, Laura is the chief ecosystem officer at Gate.io, one of the leading global exchanges. Over 21

million registered users, 8 billion in user deposits. She's also a principal at Gate Ventures with over 300 million assets under management. She also was recognized by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the top 10 women entrepreneurs. So really excited to jump in with Laura today. Now before we jump in, if you guys want to hang out with us every day, you should join our Telegram group. I'm in there. The rest of the Milk Road team is in there and we talk to you guys on a daily basis. So join the Telegram group. It's free and we can chat on a regular and help you guys navigate this very difficult market. Today's episode is brought to you by Definitive Advanced Trading on Every Chain. It's also brought to you by Coin Shift, powering top crypto treasuries with their yield bearing stable coin,

CSUSD. Without further ado, Laura, welcome to Milk Road Show. Well, thank you for having me here. I've been a fan of Milk Road, you know, for already a couple of years, I think. So excited to be awesome. Love to hear it. Okay, let's start with what you're seeing right now in the industry. You sit in a very interesting seat at Gate.io being one of the leading exchanges. You see a lot of the volumes and you see a lot of the behavior of what people are doing. Are from your perspective with what you're seeing in the stats and the numbers, are we heading into a bare market, are we seeing a decrease or is this just a pullback and the bull market still on?

So it's a very good question and you know if I would have this magic ball to know what the future holds I would probably wouldn't be here and be somewhere in Bahamas having you know a cocktail. So in the end we are in this interesting phase where on one hand we kind of were expecting for the bull market to hit and there was you know bitcoin hitting 100 uh 9,000 before correcting back to 80. Some of the retail institution investors were like yes now we're in a bull market now all the tokens going to be launching. We know we're going to make a good buck.

But then like hey it all started to kind of crash down and then with us uh and Trump being elected on one hand you know all the crypto industry was like that's it a person who loves crypto is in charge there's going to be positive regulations we're going to see more institutional adoption coming in and what do we see a meme coin being launched what do we see uh tariffs being posed and you know tariffs are not bad thing in a long term but in a short term that takes a very big toll on the retail and if we're asking is there going to be a bull market or are we in decline I would rephrase this question uh in a way

will retail have money to purchase excessive amount of coins because right now the liquidity is very scarce so like in the last bull market I've been in crypto space in 2016 there were you thousand couple of thousand coins probably you could purchase they were quite good with good teams with good track record right now all of those founders that did well last cycle and their senior managements they left to start their new things that means we had an exponential growth in how many tokens are being launched every single day so my question is if we're having 10 times more 10 times more tokens being launched do we have at least 10 times more

liquidity from retail Unfortunately not. I mean in the end we like it or not. I come from Lithuania but US and Wall Street still dictates a lot of markets and right now people don't know where how to buy groceries. At least in US prices are skyrocketing. So you know crypto is was never you know this fundamentally safe investment as for example co gold and like you know gold just reached alltime high of $3,000. I mean what a couple of days ago or last week and crypto was always either you kind of gamble to see if something was not or after you diversify into like stocks fund uh funds ETFs you kind of

put a little amount to crypto right now when a lot of people are struggling to buy groceries they're not thinking of crypto so to answer your question where we are right now we're in this kind of crossroad and retail is not in control here. Here right now we have politicians in major being in charge on what kind of monetary policies they going to start implementing within the next 3 to six months and is there going to be recession or not? Because if they're going to start, you know, stupidly printing more money and if the interest rates uh will have, you know, a uh positive uh outlook, then yes, we're going to have a bull market. There's

going to be more money in the economy and people going to start buying, you know, everything. But if in macroeconomic uh level the economies are not going to be doing well, unfortunately, we'll go into recession. And if we are in recession, then you know, gold is your friend. and s I mean certainly we've we've never felt the the tailwinds from institutions and regulatory clarity that we have right now. So, and that's why, as you said, so many people expected that 2025 would be this mega bull run all year, up only uh dangerous expectations. Nothing is ever up only. Uh but the the tailwinds are very clear and very

evident. At the same time, we have these macro headwinds that are currently keeping us down and keeping us underwater or at least keeping us level. Now, that being said, it's it's tough to complain about Bitcoin holding around 80K. That is a strong strong indication of the future, but we're a macro asset class now, right? We're no longer a small asset class, right? Bitcoin is in the trillions. It takes much more money in order to move this thing if everybody expects it to continue to double non-stop. And as you said, we have a lot more tokens this bull run than we had last run. Last bull run, we had like 10,000 tokens. Thanks to pumped up fun and memecoins, we've got probably 8 to 10 million tokens now. So, there's a lot

the liquidity is spread out over a lot more. It's why a lot of altcoins haven't done as well this cycle. There's just too much going on. And we haven't seen new retail come in, right? We haven't really, you know, every cycle we had, we hit that moment where we have euphoria and mania and new retail come in. For for you at Gate, are you seeing the same thing? like are you because Asia is a very interesting market and we don't talk a ton about the Asia market on this show. We tend to focus more on the North American market in the Asian market. What are you seeing? Are you seeing new retail investors come in? Did you see it during maybe you already saw it in Q Q4 2024? Did a lot of them buy the Trump token or is it just the same traders

just trading back and forth as we've seen mostly in the North American market? So unfortunately we don't see a very big retail coming in right now. We actually see more institutional money flowing. But the issue is institutional pockets are never going to be as deep as retails because in the end if we're thinking of high net worth individual family offices maybe pension funds at maximum at best they going to allocate what 1% to a risk investment like crypto. And that's the best case scenario. Usually if it's a huge uh pension fund is going to be 0.001. So even though we see you know big trfy firms like black rockck

fidelity, frankly templaton are deeply involved in crypto from like tokenization to ETFs and uh ass investment strategies. there are more talks and good PR rather than the amounts that would actually move the candles up. So I wish I would be more positive and be like yes you know Asia is going to save the market. Asia is not going to save the market. I would actually again it's my personal opinion. I would say US is the country have to look into and if there's going to be very good regulations uh changes in laws that's going to be the needle is

going to actually pull everything but as we see right now SEC is dropping all the lawsuits they drop lawsuit against Kraken Coinbase and among others so that's a good indicator so we need more money being printed crypto becoming properly clearly regulated in US and Then ideally to products, VEP to investment uh products being like hey our retail our users want crypto why don't we start offering some sort of even simple financial products to enter crypto market like ETFs as an example and that's going to push the needle. So Asia is amazing. It's doing very good.

We already talked before the show that Vietnam, Thailand are great markets right now, especially when it comes to traders and just volumes. But if we want Bitcoin to reach 100,000 and you know all these projections 150 200k that looks so you know impossible even at this stage unfortunately we need us to make some moves. If you're only trading on centralized exchanges then you're not going to make it. The best traders know the alpha is onchain. Definitive founded by Coinbase alums lets you trade any token on Salana base or any chain all in one platform.

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regulated real world assets and secured with institutional-grade risk management by our friends at Stake House Financial. Put your treasury cash to work, earning native yield and protocol rewards. Built by the team behind Coin Shift, which is trusted to manage over 1 billion in business treasuries on chain, including a Gitcoin, and hundreds of leading institutions. See why CSUSDL is gaining traction at milkroad.com/coinshift. Mhm. Yeah. And and we don't the we're we're in a bit of a holding pattern right now with the US, right? As as you said, a lot of uncertainty be being created in the US

economy uh as a result of tariffs. Doge is really leading to the economy to you know, Trump has said it himself. He is he does not care about the stock markets. He wants to push the US economy down a little bit. He wants to get it down and then he wants it to grow for the next three years of his presidency. No surprise, right? Like take the pain in year one and then hopefully ride the highs through the rest of his term so that he can get another term in office. So that's no surprise. And and we don't know, right? Uh the the mar the market is pricing in that we're going to see rate cuts in the US this year and we might see those soon if the economy can continue to struggle and the hope is

that we see these rate cuts and then that leads to a push. Will we see QE in the US? Don't know. If we do, they probably won't call it QE, that's for sure. I think we're done QT. So, it's it's a a bit of a wait and see on the US right now, which is kind of how it feels in all markets. So, when we zoom out, there's this question of like and a lot of our our listeners and what we're encouraging everyone to do is just, you know, be patient. This is a time when like, you know, don't don't panic, don't sell, don't rage quit, don't leave, be patient. Yeah. like re reallocate your portfolio. Take a hard look at your portfolio and think about like are there tokens that you're in that you know you might think ah like I might want to take

a loss on this one. I don't know if this one is going to come back because the truth is a lot of tokens can have you know that big rise and then they never come back if they don't have the fundamentals. There's also a bit of a shift from pumpamentals to fundamentals happening. Are you noticing that on on your end? like are we still in memecoin treat season in in Asia because we're definitely not in memecoin season in North America anymore. So before I answer this question actually while we were talking I found a very interesting piece of statistics and graph which I will ask your pol uh production team to just add it here for everyone. Basically now here you can see a Bitcoin retail and large investment holdings and in this graph you can see that around the

time of 2024 uh November when Bitcoin was reaching all-time high all the retail started to basically sell whereas large institutional investors are started to buy and acquire more and more Bitcoin. So right now we have a huge gap between institutional investors who are owning according to this interesting statistics around 1.7 million in bitcoin uh holdings versus retailers that they have only a small fraction of it. So very interesting data retail is not holding Bitcoin institutions are institutions are continuing to purchase.

So something very interesting for your audience to kind of look into. And then to answer a question, I was just gonna say certainly it feels like uh and you could say I mean the stats say it uh 100k was it's a round number and round numbers have an effect on markets. And what did 100k do to to the Bitcoin market? It was a signal to a lot of long-term Bitcoin holders like, "Okay, I'm out. This is enough for me. I've had my gains. I'm out." But at the same time, the institutions are coming. which should feel so bullish, right? It is long-term. It is incredibly bullish because, as you said, what are these what are these institutions doing?

They're not taking big percentages of their portfolio yet. They're testing the waters. And so, what'll happen is they're going to test the waters. They're going to get in. Two things happen with institutions. They're not trading. They're in, they're in for a long time, right? So, they're not in and out like retail is. And also because they're testing the waters, they should be adding over time is what will likely happen in the coming years. Anyways, sorry, go to go to your No, I think you're 100% correct. Like look, BTC uh ETF alone saw more than 25 billion of net inflows in the first two months. 25 billion, that's an incredible amount. So 100% I would say re retailer are not doing good. And look, if you bought

Bitcoin somewhere at the bottom around 20,000 and then you waited waited it out till 100k that's 5x and this market making 5x that's incredible because the markets of you know 10 20 30x are not going to happen anymore. It's not 201617. And now kind of coming back to your question what about the meme season? Thank god it finally over. I am so so grateful that people understood that gambling is fun but that is gambling and kind of started to reshift their focus to other industries and other narratives and right now we see anything still AI especially AI agent related doing very

very well and yes for for whatever reason still at least from venture capital perspective that's what the projects we're seeing uh raising uh and sending us decks the most in terms of project that are actually getting funded is infrastructure. Throughout the years, anything infrastructure, especially when you're solving very complicated issues or problems in a very simple way is something that grabs attention of uh venture capitalists as well. We kind of saw a little bit of slowdown from especially tier one VCs but now we started to get more and more announcements of like Dragonfly of SE one Pera starting to reinvest again. So

that means they made a pause throughout probably around all-time high season. That means like December, January they were slowing down and now they probably closed around within last like month or two. they're starting to announce because usually it takes around two to three four months from the the moment you start talking to actually going through the deal and then you announcing and that makes sense. You don't want to invest when the market's hot. You want to invest when it's the bottom. So me seeing uh especially large tier one VCs right now starting to announce their investments is a good sign because maybe you actually reach the bottom. Who knows? and we can see more and more liquidity coming in. But again, it all

depends on people who are very much above us. Okay, let's let's take a look because it it is interesting to think about new tokens that are launching. Uh and I don't mean meme coins necessarily. Uh I mean I mean new projects that are launching that are you know fundamental utility based like real projects that have you know maybe they're infrastructure maybe they're deep pin um h how do you you know you sit in this interesting seat being on the venture side how do you evaluate projects that are launching and looking at investing in them and then I think I would love to sort of dovetail that into how a retail

investor should be looking at new projects. So, if you're a retail investor, you're probably getting into a project two-way or you're getting into some kind of early community round or you're already getting it at the exchange listing because right now we don't have these ICO ICOs anymore. Usual cycle is there's some kind of seed preede VCs come in, there is a round and then there's usually exchange listing. Sometimes they do dexes but I don't understand why you're doing dexes. There's no liquidity indexes. So if you're I will talk more from the retail perspective as this is going to be more interesting for the audience. You have to think of one key thing when the project goes into the

exchange that means there's going to be some kind of unlocks either from VCs or from Kels and in current market no one is making money. What does this mean? This means if the token is launching on any kind of multiplier even 2 3 4x everyone will want to take profit and will want to dump the token. So you have to be 100% sure that you know the tokconomics and you know what's going to be the sell pressure because and then what founders do on the day of the launch and I also have a marketing background so I helped a lot of token launches back in the day is there is buy pressure and there is a sell pressure

and founders need to make sure that the buy pressure is bigger than the sell one and in this market when no one is making money and there's not a lot of retail coming in and sweeping like look bar chain launched recently weight in it as well as everyone expected it like Mona is going to launch very soon. Uh we'll see how it's going to be. There's no retail. So as a retail investor in this current market, I would be very very cautious to invest straight on the day of the listing. Unless you're 100% sure there's going not going to be that much uh sell pressure, I will be cautious.

Number two is then kind of continuing on this tokconomics route is there's going to be unlocks and there's going to be dumps. So again, you need to time it very very well. Make sure if you don't have the tokconomics of the project and it's a early state project that you know it's still and have a lot of unlocks. Be careful about it. Be very very careful. Get the tokconomics or just don't invest because you might get drug just because of simple no market dynamics. Then if you're 100% sure there's going to be no unlocks then you have to ask yourself this question in this market how can you be sure that the founders have enough budget simply budget and be of course knowledge and talent to sustain the

token price and pump it because in the end in this market everything goes down. So if you're sure the founders have enough resources capital and that usually is if the uh they did a very good rounds then sure you can kind of bet it but if the project didn't you know raise 10 20 30 mil because marketing is very expensive kes are very expensive everything is very expensive this space with all due respect I don't think having 100,000 marketing budget in this market you can sustain a token price for a long period of time and this I'm talking about new project I'm not talking about established projects Then number three, make sure you are part of their community, their telegram, discord, whatever they have and try to

find alpha if there's going to be any kind of partnerships, positive announcement because because in the end people trade the news. So what you have to do is buy the rumor, sell the news, try figuring out if there is anything big planned. Try to meet him. If you're in a jurisdiction where you can actually go to a conference, meet the management team, meet the founders, do that, talk to them, ask them. Usually if you just talk to the person, they're gonna slip in. They're gonna say, "Yeah, yeah, we're planning this integration. We're planning this update, whatever." Try to get this, try to get those rumors because if you want to special treat, you have to treat edges. You have to have some kind of alpha because if you're just looking at the candles and you're believing in, you know, all this

technical analysis, well, I'm not the person going to help you out. I'm looking more from fundamental perspective and from the perspective of can I get an edge and alpha to see that, hey, this project is going to do well. One more thing that's very important is to focus on real adoption metrics. I will shatter a lot of people's perception on crypto and again I come from marketing background so I've been doing that for many years before going to VC round is majority of data is fake followers Discord community members so when you wait let me let me say when you say fake do you mean like you don't mean like they're lying you don't mean

fraud you mean like Twitter sure they have a 100,500 100,000 followers, but they're fake followers. That's what you mean. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Like right now, you can spend I think it was back in the day like $50 to get like 5,000 fake bots that are also engaged with your content. Like that's that was a normal thing. Oh, let's buy followers. I'm very against it because who cares if you have 100,000 community members? They're not going to these are fake. They're not going to buy anything from But don't but don't a lot of exchanges so like one of the keys for a new token is get listed on centralized exchanges. you said it yourself, right?

Like you can get listed on a DEX, but DEX don't have the liquidity that centralized exchanges have. Uh and and there's a whole process to get listed on a centralized exchange, right? You can't it's not like centralized exchanges just list any new token. And a lot of centralized exchanges, they'll do things like look at your Twitter followers and you have to have a certain number of Twitter followers. So what a lot of projects do is they buy Twitter followers so that they can hit that benchmark that is required by the centralized exchange. And I'm not look I'm not I'm not defending defending I agree with you, right? Like buying Twitter followers is not a great marketing tactic by any means, but getting on a centralized exchanges is key, right? So if again depends which exchanges you're dealing with, at least

at G.O, we know how to check. So having fake followers is not going to help you out because the listing team is going to see it within first look and it's going to ruin your reputation or credibility. So maybe some thing is again when it comes to exchange business there are the exchange that actually have volumes and when you listen a token you get some volume natural organically from the exchange and there are other exchanges that don't have volumes and they're wash trading and we all know it's a open secret in our industry but they they live not from the trading fees they live from the listing fees because some of these listing fees are outrageous like hundreds of thousands of dollars for you know an exchange that you know they're not going to bring you any Well, so of course there's a chance they're not

going to care. They're like, "You're ready to pay the listing fee. We're happy to take it." So, as a founder, you also have to do due diligence and you have to be smart about it and look into who you're talking to and what kind of metrics you're getting because exchanges will check. They check they're going to Twitter followers. Same thing with for example, TVL. Another thing that a lot of founders are faking it just you know asking liquidity provider to kind of stake the tokens and I've seen product that they have let's say 50 million in TBL 40 uh five uh million comes from one person from one whale yes it looks like million looks like an amazing uh you know number it's not true

so as a retail investor you have to be very very careful and understand how the market works. That's why again not a financial advice. Your money is at risk. But look more at fundamentals and look at the market perspective. If the market is down, it's better time to buy than when the market is up. And if you're going to day-to-day trading, well then you're on your own. Well, and it's so funny because you say you say that that would that would say to me that now is the time to lock in if you're an investor and to be really focused on the market because the market is down. And now is, as you said, now is when you buy, not when you sell. But a lot of people do the opposite. Fear comes into

place in these markets. They sell, they panic, they think, oh, it's never coming back. But what also you're saying is we are we're an evolving industry and as the industry evolves it gets harder and harder to make gains, right? And there is a look, I'm not going to take away from the there is generational wealth to be made in crypto. We are still early. I I very genuinely believe that. But with each cycle, it does get harder, especially as there is more and more tokens. So, it's not as easy to know which ones to buy and which ones to sell and where the opportunity is and where the money is going to go. And also, as

the industry evolves, we're getting a lot less of the uh retail who wants to just come in and gamble. We'll always have that. You said it yourself, you're excited that memecoin season is done. It'll make a comeback. There will be another memecoin season. There's no doubt about that. Unfortunately, we're in very turbulent times and like you can say it's the bottom. I wish I would Yeah, it would be the bottom, but then on the other hand, we don't know what's going to happen uh in a week. There might be another black swan event and then good luck all the fundamentals. Yeah. I mean, the the I think the thing is like you you have to really as an investor in crypto, you really have to know your timelines constantly. As an investor in anything,

you really have to know your timelines. And so if your timeline is that you need money in the next like three months because I don't know, you have some life expense or you're buying a house or who knows, right? You know, yeah, true. Go get a job and get get a job in crypto and build something for the long term and make Yeah. I mean, that's obviously that's a great perspective. And I mean look I have one more last thing uh t before we go probably to some other uh conversation topics. In January and February we saw record high number of launches more than 240 across all the like layer ones and layer 2s but after 30 days only 8%

retain significant liquidity. Like so these are these are when you say these are these aren't memecoin launches. These are no these are not memecoin launches. No, these are legitimate projects such as bar chain. So we saw 240 of those and only 8% kept liquidity liquidity. Yes. After 30 days. Jeez. That was a piece of statistics I found while I was preparing for this podcast. And I could give you another very interesting fact. So many of these new token launches had hugely inflated uh FDVS uh like 1 billion more but they all release only 3 to 5% of total supply into circulation. What does it mean?

That create a huge supply overhang basically leaving a heavy sell pressure to all the unlocks like it's not sustainable. These project are launching at huge FTVs with very uh small floats are not going to do well long term and these some of these called VC coins are not going to do well for retail and you have to be very very careful as a retail investor investing into that. Well, it's funny because like that's that's why retail loves memecoins because it's simpler, right? I don't have to do all the research to understand the tokconomics, to understand the token unlocks, to understand the fundamentals

of the business, to know who the team is, right? It's it's pure gamble, so I might as well just go for it. Now what you're saying one more thing there was a statistics and I I I need to find this picture so you can share it with everyone only I think it was only thousand people made more than 1 million from pumpf fun. Oh my god. So yes we have this here the stories as this 14year-old becomes you know rich overnight but that's stories that media loves because that generates clicks.

Realistically, majority of people are losing in pump fund and all their equivalents. And the problem is our psychology works in this very interesting way that they want to believe, you know, everything happening is happening good for them. And they hope they're going to be that lucky one and then they start gambling because in the end memecoins are gambling. There is no fundamentals. There is no logic behind it unless you have some kind of insider information. But the thing is, but the thing is what we're saying though is that uh even fundamental based infrastructure, it's also gambling right now, right? Like don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the the majors, uh the the the coins that have real revenue, the

projects out there, and there's there's a lot of those. There's a lot of fundamentally strong projects that you can invest, but they don't get a lot of attention other than like, you know, Bitcoin, ETH, and Soul. Sure, they get a lot of attention, but not a lot of people are talking about uh the other fundamental a lot of the DeFi projects that are doing very well. You know, they're just they've been around for a while. They're not as sexy. Like, you know, a like are people really excited about a like maybe, but not not like they are. They don't get the attention that new projects get, right? new project comes out, gets a lot of attention, gets a lot of hype, but really the investing in a a new infrastructure project is really just as risky as investing in a memecoin at this point. It's just a different set of

risk. I wouldn't say it's the same as risk risk. I think so. I know. At least with infrastructure project, if the team is legit, you do all the research, you know, they actually want to develop the product and we take out all, you know, potential bad actors out of the picture. At least you see the tokconomics, you see their business idea, business vision and some kind of strategy, how they see the token being used and then down the line increasing the value. So at least you can see some sort of vision. Whereas with memecoins like trust me bro like that's it. There is there is no strategy. There is absolutely nothing.

The only thing you can bet is like the community is going to be cool and they're going to shill it. That's it. So if you're betting on like yeah like we're all fun you know crypto bros we're going to show something sure I think but I wouldn't be trusting that versus an experienced team have a reputation that they put on the line that they want to actually deliver deliver something and they see a problem and the founder is you know they can't sleep they want to find a solution for the problem and you see the perseverance at least I can bet on him not trying to rug. And yes, if the project doesn't work out, it's still risky. I mean, we're talking about early stage investment. Everything in the space is risk, but it's less risky than I like. Trust me, bro. This meme cat is

cool, so everyone's going to buy it. The next cat, the next dog. Uh, let me ask you, you previously I think you you got your entry into crypto through an ICO. Is that correct? that you can you tell us that story because we don't get a lot of people that did ICOs back in two cycles ago on the show. So I will tell you exactly how I went to crypto. So back in my college I said physics and I was I think in second year of my uni and that was what I was like 2014.

Where'd you go to college? uh in Lithuania uh in the university. I unfortunately didn't go to a fancy college but I got a full scholarship to study in my home country and basically one of my classmates were like Laura there is this called thing called Bitcoin. I'm like what is it? It's like this magic internet money. I'm like tell me more and that's how I learned about it. And then as uh one part of my uni study we had like microeconomics kind of finances and everything. I needed an extra credit for my to get like a better grade. I'm like can I do a presentation uh on something interesting about economics and the professor was like yes. So in second year of college I was doing a presentation about Bitcoin and I got and this is 2016 that was that 2016

I went into crypto space that was I think 2014. Okay so no you're yeah no one you're you're presenting Bitcoin in nobody knows what this is new to everybody. Okay. Yes. Like you're crazy. The only my thing I was a broke college student back then and I couldn't convince my parents to like you know sell the house take the second mortgage go all in in crypto but I bought a little bit like couple of hundred it did well I sold and then 2016 I bought was like around $2,000 I bought with all my savings again it wasn't a lot but it was something that kind of allowed me to go into that space and then I was already in tech helping with tech marketing I was actually invited to do one of the first ICOs And I remember when the guy

approached me, he was also from Lithuania and he's like, "Lora, we're going to do this ICO. We're going to have a free WEIT white paper and a wallet and trust me, we're going to do good." And I'm like, "Are you crazy?" He's like, "No, no, no, no. It's fine. Like, and if you're going to help us out, like it's couple, it's only like two months project. We're going to share with you like a percentage." I thought he was crazy. Like, honestly, like, where's the company register? Like, we don't need a company. We have a wallet. I'm like, "Is this wrinkle?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah, like there's no wrinkle. It's fine." And I'm like, I was just out of college. I had nothing to lose. Like 2016, so I was what, 21 years old. And I'm like, sure, bro. Let's do it. We raise uh we raise seven figures back in

the day within like a week. And then I was like, my friends go to work in like Trefy and they're grinding 12 hours in like a bank or something. I mean, I could probably do this. So then from 2016, I helped uh quite a few crypto projects to launch. Some of them did miserably. I mean I have no understanding of like no one had understanding back then of what crypto is and like how to do everything but some quite okay. If you remember waves platform the OG layer one I worked a lot with them some some of them gave me tokens and those tokens kind of did okay. So that's kind of where I started my crypto journey then started my marketing agency worked a lot on that then I'm kind of into investing. So your

your original project that you worked on, like did it is it still around? Like was it was it a rug? I gotta ask. Right. So they actually delivered a product. It was a gamble project back in the day. They delivered a product that wasn't an issue. Are they around right now? I have no idea. I haven't touched for many, many years. But at least we delivered. That was I'm very happy about it. It was delivered. It was good. There was no issues with that. But you got to basically go through an ICO very early, very early 2016 like that was 2016 2017. I mean that was the ICO cycle when everybody was was we were seeing that and what I think is sorry to interrupt you but we were still writing white papers and people read

white papers. We were still posting in Bitcoin talk forum if anyone remembers the forums like we had a thread there. had to answer questions like that was such a dystopian marketing compared to now. Yeah, it was very different. Very different. Yeah. And I mean a very a very interesting way to learn about the space to go through an ICO process very early. Uh I mean happy to hear that it wasn't a rug and that the project product was actually delivered. But I mean, who knows what happened to that product. And no surprise, that's a lot of products very early on, they do fail.

And that's I mean, look, anybody who's sitting here saying that, oh, my token or my investments are not going to fail. You know, for all these reasons, no, no. Like, let's be real, this is high risk. There's a high failure rate. It is difficult to succeed in starting a new business. and to make a business that is sustainable, it's very challenging, especially when you add in tokconomics and all these new things and these new innovations that we're all still trying to figure out. Uh where where do you get your alpha from? If you're, you know, if you're looking for alpha, where are you getting it from? Because I think that one thing that we talk a lot about on the show is how challenging it is to find trustworthy resources and trustworthy information.

meeting people in conferences in real life. Even though everyone's like this is a decentralized industry, everyone can be every anywhere. You have to go to a conference. You have to meet a person, shake hands, go for coffee, go for lunch, build a relationship, and that's when you're going to get the best alpha. I hardly read crypto Twitter. I read it for news to see what's happening in the space, but I don't read for alpha because I don't trust any of Kales and we can talk about it a lot, but do not trust crypto kills at all. Discord, telegram, why why don't you trust K? So, I'll tell you a very good story again. I come from marketing background. So while at a marketing agency, we have done the

research uh taking all the top kills. We're talking like those were having hundreds of thousand Twitter followers and seeing what kind of signals they kind of post and then how did those tokens perform and what we found out is they were actually working with market makers to inflate the token price as after the time of the signal to kind of show that yeah, we're actually doing uh well where in reality it would all be well kind of fake.

Also uh we found out while actually working with these skills, majority of them do not have enough power from their community to actually shield those tokens. So think if there's an influencer have let's say a couple hundred thousand uh community members and they sh projects per month. Simple math. Do you think their community will going to have the actual you know just purching power to buy? Of course not. And then if you see these these are not real. So unfortunately in this space also one more thing if you give 10 signals let's say to buy or sell whatever and out of these 10 signals three do well what Kale is going to do are they going to say

that there has three out of 10 no they're going to delete the old tweets which we have found Carol's doing I'm not going to be naming names I don't want to have you know death threats on my name but we have seen Carol's deleting tweets and there are tools where where you can find it online as well and just spotlighting those like I gave you solid like $2. I gave you Cardano like five cents and now I'm giving you this. Yeah. And how many should coins you gave that did did nothing. So you have to be very very careful with kills. Right now the only kills that kind of work are usually the small ones that don't have a big community yet and they're really trying to prove something because in the moment they post the signal you are their exit

liquidity. So you need to be very very careful which skills to follow. I'm not saying all of them are bad. There is definitely some good ones who are talking about fundamentals or just teaching you how to trade and you can follow them or those who are talking about the macro perspective like hey where the market is going how can you evaluate the data you're seeing. But basically if there is someone who selling you signals I I'll always ask like this. Imagine you're a trader and you're a very successful trader and you can make double your money in let's say a year or even half a year whatever carols are promising you. Why would you sell signals? Why would you sell this alpha?

Why would you spend time taking let's say taking and creating telegram community having mods having you know people managing answering questions you would just silently enjoy trading and making money. And then if you actually want the fame, you probably would get the fame in different ways. So you have to be very careful with all of these signals. And number two, you have to be very careful with all of these courses as well. Because in majority again, if you made a lot of money, why would you sell a course? You just continue making money.

So I spend a lot of time in Dubai. That's my basically one of my kind of primary homes. If you see a guy posing with Lamborghini in Dubai, it's probably rented. And like there is even the website where you can check based on the number plate where the card belongs to. So you have to be you have to be very careful with things because look if you have wealth and if you have huge amount of wealth you're not going to you're not gonna flood it like you're not going to show it around social media like I know very successful people who are worth hundreds of millions. You would never say you never see that. You would never in their social media. They wouldn't be the ones posting hey this is my Lamborghini. this is my Ferrari. Uh oh, I'm here playing uh flying private. Like you have to be

very very careful and ask yourself why this person having the secret sauce of success of money is sharing it with you rather than you know comfortably sitting at home making money and enjoying life. Is it? Yeah. The hard the hard part is as you said there is there is there is some good koss out there. There's some there's some great people who love to create content and love to educate, but there is also a lot of people who are taking advantage of you and it is very difficult to know the difference. And so yeah, you really have to be careful particularly when you're on uh Twitter or Tik Tok or Instagram. Like when

you're on these social platforms, it's that's where you have to be really really careful because you can generally you can get a lot of people who are just fly by night come in very easy to create content there, very to post, easy to get a following, easy to get a fake following, all these things that you've said. So uh yeah, yikes. Be careful out there everybody be careful out there. It's my recommendation is to get a mentor. Just find someone who you appreciate, you like. Usually meet them in person and just ask them to be a mentor and that's going to be much more available to you than following these crypto Tik Tok gurus on how to become rich overnight.

Yeah, it's great advice. Great advice. Laura, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure to have you on the show and break everything down and get some insight uh from you over on the Asia side. We really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me here. Thanks for listening in everybody. Have a wicked awesome day. We'll see you back again tomorrow. As always, if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one. There's also a link in the description to our free 5minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh. And if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game, we're going to also leave a link for Milk Road Pro.

You get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying. And this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto. One final note, this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice. Investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose. Thanks so much for listening in my friends. Have a wicked awesome