GPT is so wild sometimes. Me: When is the next FOMC meeting? GPT: Searching music . apple . com It eventually finds the right answer but if you've never watched live where it says it's searching, it's endlessly amusing.

I was chatting with some of my followers yesterday, reminiscing about the “good old days” of crypto - when every day felt like a brand-new discovery and the landscape felt far more PvE than PvP. One thing the group kept returning to was how important the relationships we develop are to our journey in this space. Sometimes community and belonging matter more than profit. This isn’t a new discovery for me. I learned an underlying truth many months ago: Most of us simply want to be seen, heard, and appreciated. We want to belong to something. To be part of something. And yet, that inevitably comes into conflict with what this space has largely become. Crypto has normalized PvP and transactional relationships. Instead of connecting with others on a deeper level through our shared interest in a still-niche form of finance, we too often form the ugliest kind of transactional relationships. We interact with people because of what they can do for us. Will they give us alpha? Will they pump our bags if we shill theirs? Will being close to them increase our own relevance? Eventually, people stop looking like people and start looking like opportunities. But the relationships that make this journey worthwhile are the ones built without an ROI calculation attached - the people who celebrate your wins, build you up through your losses, challenge you when you need it, and expect nothing in return but the same honesty and loyalty. The hope for profit may be the thing that brings us here. But belonging is often what makes us stay. 🫡 From the depths — The White Whale 🐋

I've been telling you this was happening. They wanted your BTC, and they got your BTC. Because no one believed the bottom was the high 50s. And look, let's say my prediction is wrong. It is after all just a prediction. Let's say we go lower. It's still a good time to buy BTC.

How Two Things Can Be True At Once - Hyperliquid I find myself in a weird place with Hyperliquid. I am incredibly bullish on the hyperliquid:native token. But I am becoming increasingly bearish on Hyperliquid as a trader-facing exchange. For many months now, I’ve talked about how much I wish Hyperliquid would spend real time improving its user interface and overall user experience. Because traders live and work inside these products. The interface matters. The flow matters. Intuitive design matters. The small things that reduce friction matter a lot when real money is on the line. And yet, for over a year, Hyperliquid has failed to ship any meaningful improvements in those areas. As one of the largest revenue-generating protocols in all of crypto, at some point you have to ask: why? The answer seems pretty clear. They chose to be an infrastructure company. They chose to build the rails. The engine. The backend. The liquidity layer. The thing other people can build on top of. And to be fair, they have done that incredibly well. For a while, I wondered if I was just a lone voice in the wilderness. Maybe the things I wanted only mattered to me. Maybe most traders were perfectly happy with the experience as-is. But $82 million generated by builder codes tells me I’m not alone. Over 20,000 unique traders connect to Hyperliquid through another interface every single day. That is not a rounding error. That is the market speaking. That is traders saying, “We like the liquidity. We like the engine. But we want a better cockpit.” Companies like Based, Insilico, and even wallet apps have listened to what active traders actually want. They have focused on smoother trading interfaces, better workflows, simpler execution, and features that make the experience feel less like you're fighting the product and more like using it. That revenue exists only because the demand exists. And that’s the part I don’t think should be ignored. It is entirely possible to focus on infrastructure while also improving the customer experience. I understand Hyperliquid runs an incredibly lean team. I understand the desire to pick a lane and stay focused. A lot of infrastructure companies don’t try to be everything to everyone. They focus on becoming the best infrastructure layer possible. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that. But that is much closer to a B2B business model. And my personal passion is B2C. It's where I've spent much of my adult life. And I am a consumer of these products, after all. I am a trader. I care about what it actually feels like to use them every day. And from that perspective, Hyperliquid has become a strange contradiction inside my own mind. As infrastructure, I think Hyperliquid will continue to dominate. As the "AWS of perps", it may become one of the most important companies in the entire industry. And because so much revenue flows back toward HYPE, I believe the token has some of the best potential in crypto. I fully expect HYPE to be one of the darling runners of the next cycle. In fact, it already has been - in a bear market no less. But as a trader? I keep feeling disappointed. Because it could be so much better. That is the frustrating part. The trader experience still feels like an afterthought. And the data shows I'm not alone in feeling that. So yes, two things can be true at once. HYPE can be one of the best tokens in crypto. And Hyperliquid can still be leaving a massive amount of trader love, loyalty, and user experience on the table. 🫡 From the depths — The White Whale 🐋

The Memecoin Journey - A Debrief (Secrets Revealed) On December 7th, I made what hindsight has shown to be a huge mistake. I CTO’d a meme someone had made using my image/likeness without my authorization or participation. I did so with the purest of intentions. Ironically, I said often in the beginning that one of two things was going to happen: I would personally end up being everyone’s exit liquidity, or it was going to absolutely moon. Turns out both things can be true at once. What Happened While it is true that I’ve personally put more money into the trenches than any single individual ever, with hundreds of thousands of dollars given away and multiple millions invested into the chart, I could not escape the curse I was warned about: people will blame you for every red candle. The mental health strain, combined with real-life issues that are still ongoing, became too much to bear. I would not recommend running a coin to anyone, and I understand now why 90% of people who launch coins are simply in it for the max extraction game. I saw firsthand how this space can corrupt people, and I now understand how people end up taking on a villain arc. I was never tempted to take on that villain arc. It’s just not in my DNA. But for the first time, I could understand how people get to that place. What happened was simple. Between personal issues and running this coin, I got to a very dark and dangerous place. An Apology First, I owe everyone an apology. For not being strong enough, I am sorry. I misjudged the response of the trenches. I believed in my heart and soul that the best thing I could do, considering I had to walk away, was to lock over half the supply - supply I had spent a LOT of my personal money to acquire. After all, I never wanted it to be about me in the first place. I wanted it to be about what the movement stood for. And I genuinely believed that removing the question mark that always sat in the back of some people’s minds about the Treasury wallet was the best parting gift I could offer. A final “fall on my sword” moment that would be incredibly bullish for the holders. Instead, it had the opposite effect. I posted my goodbye message and logged off assuming some sort of God candle was being printed. But I forgot a core truth: markets hate surprises. I also owe a sincere apology to my dear friend and personal mentor, @Evan_Mann . I have a few mentors in this space; however, Evan has been mine for the longest, and I had developed a sincere friendship with him. When he initially warned me not to do the CTO, for reasons that ALL came to pass, I didn’t like what I was hearing. I pushed him away and eventually stopped talking to him. I incorrectly mistook his sage wisdom and guidance as a lack of belief in me. Even though we are long past the days of Evan teaching me the history of various blockchains - yes, I’ve been with him that long - Evan remained a trusted and valued friend and mentor to me, often counseling me on big-picture matters. Because no matter how far you go in life, or how much you learn, I believe everyone can benefit from solid mentorship to keep them grounded and focused on their journey. So Evan, for pushing you away, I’m sorry. The Core Problem In my parting message, I mentioned that PumpFun was a cancer to this space. It’s true. The entire engine is designed to profit Pump, not traders, not even serial deployers - PumpFun itself. They do not care about anything that doesn’t feed them. And they feed on volume and volatility. Everything from how the bonding curve is designed to the liquidity design and shape of the PumpSwap pool is meticulously built to bring them maximum profit. After surpassing $100M MCAP, on the climb to $200M, I was involved in a group chat with many from the PumpFun team. We had broken the nine-figure curse, and this thing was just exploding. I wanted to strengthen my relationship with Pump and see what they might be able to do to help us out. I knew they were the mafia, but I had an obligation to my holders to do everything I could to help the coin succeed, even if that meant dining with the devil to see what the devil could do for us. They were excited to chat with me and eager to hop on a call to present their multi-point plan to help the coin succeed even further. Then Penguin launched, and the group chat went silent. They ghosted the call we were supposed to have. After doing some on-chain sleuthing, it became readily apparent that Penguin had some outside support. I highly suspected that outside support was coming from Pump. I followed up with a message along the lines of, “It’s okay if you guys are going in another direction, I just want to close the loop on the conversation,” at which point they came scrambling back to me. I eventually had the previously scheduled call, but with only one member of the team. I again laid out the areas where we needed help. I diplomatically tried to thread the needle without putting them on the defensive about the liquidity shape issue. I said we could really use some downside support, as the liquidity shape hard-coded to Pump tokens is “thin air” below. This was when the first big reveal came. I was told this should not be public knowledge, but he admitted to me during that call that they do internal market-making on some coins to “help them out.” Then he dropped the bombshell that they had already invested $800K into the project at “about a $70M MCAP” using their market-making services. I said, “I probably already know which addresses are yours, as we run very tight monitoring,” and his knee-jerk reaction was to laugh. He said he found that highly unlikely because they spread it across multiple addresses. I asked how many, and he paused while I heard some tapping away on the keyboard. 436 was the answer. Almost as if he felt he had shared too much, he quickly followed it up by saying, “We do this to help the coin go up,” but in the same breath said, “We run a delta-neutral strategy.” Both of those things cannot be true. You cannot remain neutral while still having a goal of “number go up.” But it begs the further question: why is the casino out there disguising itself as players in the first place? It most certainly isn’t for the benefit of other players, as the track record shows clearly. They do nothing that doesn’t directly benefit them. After that call I was promised a follow up with an action plan in a few days. They went back to ghosting me and that follow up never came. Inorganic Price Discovery When ByBit decided, of its own accord and without including me in the conversation, to list us on perps, I was immediately terrified. As a trader, I know that perps drive price action more than spot does across the board, especially on lower-MCAP coins. It’s almost impossible to compete with leveraged dollars on spot, not when someone can spend $10 of real money and have $500 worth of notional buying or selling power. We quickly identified the on-chain wallet addresses for the perps market maker and quickly identified their method of hedging. While various market makers employ various methods, this market maker consistently hedged on-chain WITH the direction of the trade. So if someone longed, we would see their wallet addresses immediately buy spot. If someone shorted, we would immediately see their wallet addresses dump spot. Because they transferred spot to and from CEXs, it was impossible to know how much spot they had acquired for their operation, at what price, etc. But they always seemed to have supply, and it didn’t come from us. The problem is that perps already have a short bias toward memecoins to begin with. Add on top of that the fact that we were clearly in a bear market, and the amount of sell pressure that came directly from ByBit perps was nothing short of a colossal, consistent downward boot on our necks. This is really hard to counter. One could simply assume that I should have encouraged everyone to just go long on the token on ByBit. But the problem is that when that long closes, it results in a sale on DEX, whether it closes because someone reached a take-profit point or because a long got liquidated. With that knowledge, one would assume that everything should end up equal in the end, right? But no. The persistent waves of shorts caused sell pressure on the chart, which spooked spot holders. So the perps activity never truly ended up being a neutral force as positions opened and closed, because spot holders continued to lose confidence in the chart. Not to mention, there seemed to be an endless supply of short sellers. At one point, there was $55 million in open interest on our token. I can’t even begin to compete with that kind of buying and selling power. But I tried. I tried my best, and lost another six figures of my own money in the effort. Many days I was successful. But over the long term, I simply couldn’t overpower design mechanics: being soulbound to the PumpFun liquidity architecture, plus the power of perps. Every day was a constant battle of David vs. Goliath. Bleeding my own cash reserves endlessly, only to be met with a thousand people asking me, “why chart go down?” and “What are you going to do?” What’s Next? That remains up to the community. I have not touched the treasury wallet since my sign-off, nor will I. LP operations continue to be run by a trusted friend. Yes, I heard there was an accidental sell by the treasury wallet the other day, with an immediate repurchase after. We all make honest mistakes. I accidentally have done a wrong-way swap in the past as well, but no one ever noticed at that time. For my own sanity and peace of mind, I will not be engaging in any commentary or discussion about the token moving forward. What I will do, slowly and as my real-life struggles allow, is re-emerge here on X as my old self. Talking about important topics and finding my way back to some peace. I believe the best thing I can do for anyone at this point is simply be my authentic self, as that’s what a lot of people were attracted to in the first place. I gave all of myself to this, including flushing away more money than has ever been spent by any dev in the history of the space. I never promised a specific result. I only promised to do the best I could. And I did, up until the point it almost killed me. I hold no shame for that, because I know what I did, even though a few loud voices would like people to believe otherwise. And at the end of the day, the person I will always have to answer to is the person I see staring back at me in the mirror. This space is wild, though. And what’s old becomes new again. So do I think this is the end of the coin? No. My gut says it’s not. It’s simply the end of me risking my sanity, my entire savings, my daily reputation, or my life for its performance. It will do what it does, what the people will it to do, and I'll be the best example of my personal values that I can be. Personally, I will never be buying a token that ends with the suffix “pump” again in my lifetime. 🫡 From the depths — The White Whale 🐋