From Solana's worst trader to DeFi's best analyst (I hope).

Hey, to the 20-ish people that followed me when I was active last year. You won't remember who I am. I used to share the best traders on the top coins of the day back in October. I did that for a couple of days, then tried to make a dashboard for it, accessible for free. At that time, I was a real trencher (also a gambling addict?) but I fucked up and lost all my profits. I forced trades, looked for dopamine and adrenaline rushes that trading provided me. That was dumb and when I actually did some good trades, I didn't research and fumbled significant bags... like day 1 fartcoin buy.

So what's the plan?

I'm launching a DeFi/onchain/Blockchain research blog. I'm calling it 888research. I don't have everything figured out yet, but I'll try to lay it out for y'all. It will be a data-first, no-bullshit blog where I share my research on various DeFi subjects. For now, I have several topic/article ideas that each belong to one of these themes:

• Onchain Strategy : Expect onchain plays, edge cases and weird markets.

  
  

• Protocol Study : Using TradFi logic to find the good stuff.

  
  

• VC funding : What’s being funded, what’s catching alpha, and what the meta is quietly shifting toward.

  
  

• Custom DeFi Tools : Custom tools, dashboards, and automations to free fellow degens from their shackles.

I will publish the articles here and share them on X too (@faaa3as).

I'll open-source as much as I can, so that you get value and certainty out of my claims.

Why am I posting now?

I stayed away from trading for a while, got busy at work and school. BUT I didn't leave crypto 100%. Heck, I even wrote an 80+ page master's thesis on it. Doing this, I got reminded of what I already knew. The potential, bright minds, and actual cool tech that is in this ecosystem. This motivated me to try and land a job in the industry. The problem is, besides a terrible PNL and a few Python scripts that don't work anymore, I have nothing to show. Nothing that proves my knowledge of blockchain tech, nothing that screams "that guy is competent.".

A second motivation is getting away from the AI slop and the brain fog that it created in me. I'm, of course, guilty of using AI way too much, especially for writing stuff. Because of this, I struggle to write stuff clearly and elegantly. That's why I'm making the promise to only use AI to write some code necessary for my analysis. Don't get me wrong, I love using AI, but writing and conveying a message should be a basic human skill. I'll also use AI to create illustrations, but I will always add my touch. The only writing aide I'll get will be from https://hemingwayapp.com/. This will help me avoid the gargantuan sentences that I tend to write.

The last thing that motivates me emerged after watching this video. We own nothing anymore. Everything is a subscription; everything can fall apart if tech giants decide to. I want to contribute to the internet and own a part of it. If X banned your or my account tomorrow, we'd have nothing that we created. All the tweets, the research, the hard work put into those posts, all gone forever. I understand the importance of having a platform like X to reach people, but I want to hedge against that risk. That's why I crafted this blog, and I'll do everything to make it the highest quality possible.

Outlook

There you have it: the project, my motivations, and my promises. The easy part is over; now comes the challenge. Digging deep, providing value, and finding truth. I'll test it with 1 article every two weeks and see where it goes from here. This will be the only article about me for now. The first article will be about a mix of strategy and tooling, basically replicating some hedge fund strategies. If you read it when it comes out, please criticize it; be harsh, tell me what's shit and what's not.

888, always.