road to (hopefully) $30m | month 3 recap the goal, for anyone new: documenting $5m to $30m in spot crypto, every position shown, the losses too. sold solana near the top last cycle and retired off it. doing this one in public. running tally: $5m start in march, $5.9m end of april, $10.4m end of may. june closes around $8m. first down month. read the $8m number with this in mind. about $1m of that is fresh capital i moved from stocks into crypto this month. a deposit, not a gain. back it out and the real move is roughly $10.4m down to $7m. that's the month. monthly grade: F the first two months of this cycle felt amazing. june i was wile e. coyote, running off the edge, legs still going. here's what happened, and i didn't play it well. zcash had an exploit scare early in the month. a live bug in the orchard pool, sitting there about four years. whether it was ever used can't be known until everyone migrates to the new ironwood pool next month. so far it looks clean, coins leaving the pool aren't flooding exchanges. but it's an overhang until ironwood and there's a chance another shoe drops. tho i'm not expecting one. at the peak i was up around $3m on zec. it had already pulled back from there. i was on vacation, didn't see the exploit live, and when i saw it i sold everything. on a coin whose whole pitch is sound private money, supply integrity is the thesis. i'd rather lock the gain than wake up to a zero. banked a gain north of $1m. that part i don't regret. here's the part i got wrong. after that sell the disciplined move was to sit on my hands. i already had lots of chart concerns. bitcoin was weak, the zec exploit was unresolved. instead i bought the whole zec position back near 450. i was deep in profit on the exploit sell and on hyperliquid too, so i was playing from a position of strength, and i went looking for offense. basically i was too eager, and the mistake was buying back when i should have been doing nothing. then price bled. i actually could have scratched out near breakeven more than once and i didn't take it. i kept waiting for bitcoin to bounce off 60 and drag zcash back up. i was protecting my scoreboard. i had a million dollar win in hand and i did not want to hand it back and go red. so i held, waiting for a bounce, and it bled more. anyways, i pulled the rest of the plug and cut most of the rest of zcash and near, average around 390 on a 450 entry. ugly fills. i left about $500k of zec and near on the table on purpose, which is a small piece in case we somehow manage to go up. i sold there on purpose. knowing i might be selling a local bottom. bitcoin could bounce in july and zcash could see 450 or 500 again and i'll have sold the low. i made the call anyway, because i don't think this bear is over, and i think bitcoin and the alts see lower before the year is out. i don't know the month. but i'm confident enough in the direction to raise the cash and wait. for better or worse, putting my money where my mouth is. net on the whole zcash round trip i'm still green, call it +$150k to +$200k realized. but a million dollar win turned into a couple hundred k, and i'm the one who did it. all good though, this is part of the cost of doing business. the only real consolation is the loss wipes out most of my short term gains for the year, so a chunk of tax i'd have owed is gone. not a strategy. just the one upside of being wrong. so where the port stands. hype untouched, the position i don't think about, down a touch, near its highs, nothing to fud. a small zec and near stub left for optionality. the rest is cash, more cash than i've held since march. so here's where my head goes from here. i got away from the thing (i think) i'm actually good at. i made my money buying spot and sitting on it, and that only works for me personally when the entry is one i believe in. zcash in june wasn't that. it was a price that had already bounced a lot and bought on a fear of missing the rest of a move. i talked myself into it. so i'm going back to basics. mostly cash, and the job now is to find entries i'd hold for a long time without flinching. the catch is i've put a clock on myself. i want to be allocated for this cycle and the prices i want might not show up. so it's a balance, wait for the entry, but don't wait forever. that's the whole game from here. find the spots, and if they don't come, deal with it when it's closer. just resetting to how i should have been playing the whole time. portfolio below. around $8m, down on the month, about $1m of it freshly deposited. still aimed at $30m. the plan didn't change because the month went red. the way i execute clearly needs work. i'll get better. month three done. onwards brothers.

road to (hopefully) $30m | month 2 recap the goal, for anyone new: started with $5m cash in march, $5.9m end of april, $10.4m end of may. crypto as an asset class barely moved. "round 2" is me documenting going from $5m to $30m in spot crypto with proof of every position. fortunately sold solana near the top last cycle. doing this one in public. a good month doesn't mean i'm right. just means i'm up *right now*. things can get ugly very quickly. section 1: what changed ZEC roughly doubled, then gave a chunk back. HYPE gained ~80% and held most of it. BTC sideways the whole month. the portfolio went over $10m mid month, pulled back to the mid-8s on a hard ZEC dip, then recovered into the close. closing the month at $10.4m (up $4.5m from april). i'd be lying if i said i was unfazed by the round-trip to the mid-8s. that pullback was the first time round 2 felt real, not theoretical. the rotation thesis i've been writing about since march is what drove the run. crypto's overall pie isn't growing. BTC is flat since i bought in late march while AI stocks, prediction markets, sports betting, and quantum stocks all soak up speculative capital that used to flow into crypto. that's the structural backdrop. the only way an alt rips in that environment is intra crypto rotation. and the math here is the part most people are missing. HYPE and ZEC combined are ~$25b of circulating market cap. ETH alone is ~$250b, 10x the size of both of my bags put together. if even a small fraction of ETH holders look at a five year flat price chart and ask "why am i still here" and rotate, the math doesn't have to work hard. ETH drops 10%, that's $25b looking for a home, and if even half of it lands in HYPE and ZEC, those coins fly on their own. stablecoin holders are the other half of the story. a lot of people sat in stables waiting for an october 2026 bottom that may or may not arrive. the stablecoin share of total crypto market cap has been declining for two months as that money chases winners. ZEC and HYPE were the winners. some of that stable money found its way in. no new capital required. just rotation, from ETH into the narrative leaders, from stables into the price leaders. that's what drove the run. the late month chop gave some of it back and then took it back again. which brings me to what i actually did about all of it. section 2: what i did nothing. doing nothing through a runup is harder than doing nothing through a flat month. and doing nothing through the pullback that followed is a different kind of hard. when things are flat the inaction defends itself. when things rip, reverse, and recover in the same week, every day you don't act is a day you're choosing a path. there are two playbooks available for spot plays this cycle. worth naming them both. playbook 1: hold towards the cycle top. buy in the bear, ride the drawdowns, sell when the framework says sell. this is what i did with solana last cycle. it requires stomaching real drawdowns. i sat through significant pullbacks on sol after it had already 10x'd. one decision at the start, one decision at the end, a lot of nothing in between. playbook 2: swing and rebuy. trim into strength, buy back on weakness, repeat. on paper this is more profitable if you get it right. in practice you have to be right about three things instead of one: when to sell, when to buy back, what to buy back into. miss any one and you're worse off than just holding. plus short-term cap gains, a ~20% drag on every round-trip. plus you have to find a better asset than what you already own, and i don't. if i did i'd be holding it instead of HYPE and ZEC. i'm picking playbook 1. and this month was the first real test of that. ZEC ran to ~$675, came all the way back to $500, then bounced to $570 into the close. still meaningfully off the high. the playbook 2 move was to have trimmed in the 600s and plan to rebuy lower. the playbook 1 move was to do nothing. the real reason i didn't trim isn't discipline, it's opportunity cost. i want to be in ZEC. if my thesis is right, the pullback might not be deep enough or long enough for a clean rebuy, and i'd end up sidelined in a position i was already correctly in. trimming to chase a better entry when you already have a good one is playing it too cute. so i didn't. obvious caveat: it's easy to talk about playbook 1 when the screenshot i just posted is green. the real test isn't the run up, it's the first 40% drawdown. i sat through one on sol last cycle. i'll find out if that experience transfers when it happens. this week was a small preview, not the real exam. here's the thing about playbook 1 that nobody talks about: it's not easy because it's lazy. it's hard. the entire crypto information environment is built to pull you off it. every week, something else is running. every day, someone on CT is telling you to rotate. when ZEC pulled back this week, my replies filled up with "is it time to rotate to [other coin]?" because the other coin had started moving and ZEC had paused. that's the trap. attention follows momentum, momentum follows attention, and the loop runs on you mistaking short term price action for an actual thesis change. what i keep telling myself: my thesis hasn't broken. HYPE and ZEC were the call when i bought them and the case for both got more confirmed this month, not less. a coin running for a week elsewhere, or my own bag giving back 20% off a high, is noise unless something has actually changed in the coins. nothing has. at my core i'm lazy, and the lazy move and the right move are the same here. it is to do nothing. section 3: what would change my mind a few things, none of them tight rules. if ZEC or HYPE make a meaningful move up over the next month or two, i'd consider trimming some. "meaningful" is intentionally vague. i don't know what the number is until i see it. probably small if i do it. what i'm explicitly not going to react to: ETH or SOL outperforming HYPE and ZEC for a month or two. that's going to happen. these things ebb and flow inside a cycle. ZEC consolidating after a double, or HYPE giving back 20-30% while another major runs, is normal. doesn't break the thesis. doesn't move me. the coin specific thesis break would be one of my bags doing something actually wrong. HYPE's revenue dropping, ZEC failing to capture the privacy narrative when conditions are obviously favorable, a regulatory action targeting either of them directly. and if either ever round trips back to my cost basis, that's when i find out how strong the conviction really is. i don't think it happens, but i'd rather say that now than figure it out in the moment. what won't change my mind: a 20-30% drawdown without a thesis problem. one bad week. one scary headline that doesn't touch the actual reasons i own these. a note before next month at some point i'll publish my full sell framework, the actual conditions that would move me from holding to selling. but that's bull-market content, and right now the more honest question is whether i'd hold these through a real drawdown. so i'll write whichever one the market makes real. probably get to both before this is over. everything in this recap is a snapshot, not a vow. i'm picking playbook 1 today, end of may 2026, with the information i have. if conditions change i'll change with them. and you'll see me say so. flexibility is the point. things are going very well *so far*, but things can change very fast in crypto.

sold all my $near today (~$1.1m). rotated into $zec and $hype. the conviction i had in near was real but never grew. meanwhile zec and hype kept earning more of it. trimmed once earlier and the discomfort came back. when you've already trimmed and you still want to sell, the position is telling you something. 2-asset barbell now. ~60/40 zec/hype. full april month end recap thursday morning with the why on each.