Note: Anyone looking for analysis here can skip this post. There is none here.

I first got into crypto just over a year ago (perhaps like many others). I don’t believe I’ve had a “successful” year, in the sense that I believe there are many others who have been able to achieve phenomenal gains in the same timeframe, whether through buying some altcoins or flipping NFTs. But I did feel like I learnt a lot and wanted to pen down some thoughts on what it’s been like.

2021 is not the first time I had heard of crypto. But when I had first heard of it in 2017 or so, I was not aware of DeFi. It was all BTC to me at the time, and fundamentally I was not convinced by the idea that BTC could gain the mainstream adoption needed as a currency (as the term “crypocurrency” implies) - why would BTC take over sovereign-backed fiat money? Money is money because people believe that money is money. In the case of fiat currency, the foundation of this belief is that the government backs the currency.

In 2021, I looked at crypto more closely than I did before and it was really ETH and DeFi that got me hooked. I was not a huge fan of financial economics in uni. I took one such module, found it incredibly dry (though helpful for my own investing journey), and then sort of left it at that. But the notion that tradfi could be replaced by DeFi was intriguing. It was a gateway for me to explore crypto closely. Today, I think I am now a reasonably proficient user of crypto. I have tried staking, LP farming, bridging, for instance. I know how to use a hardware wallet now. I have tried to understand more of what I see on etherscan. Late in 2021, I also tried my hand at NFTs - with artblocks and Parallel Alpha as my gateways. I also follow tons of people on crypto twitter, and there are some seriously smart people writing very insightful pieces, including macro pieces. Modern macroeconomics in university is, frankly, dry too, but these writings I came across actually made macro interesting.

It feels like I have learnt a lot, but I also know full well that I have only scratched the basics. I hope that one year later, I will be able to learn even more to the point that I can write posts about it.