Before entering the crypto world, I had been in entrepreneurship. In 2016, I devoted myself to my third entrepreneurial project Digital Gorkha. We developed a simple visitor management and security application for physical locations, and raised some funds, but it was obtained from a group of inappropriate investors, resulting in the excessive dilution of equity.
Tweet: 'Digital Gorkha' was my previous entrepreneurial project, it was an innovative yet straightforward technological product. Digital Gorkha (acquired in 2016) was the first attempt to develop an access control security application. Later, MyGate company (valued at over 5 billion USD) executed this idea very well.
This mistake has put us in a predicament. Despite the project's stable appeal and income, completing Series A financing is almost impossible because the equity structure is in disarray, and the products we develop do not have a real technological moat.
As a founder, I watched helplessly as my own company, which I founded, went downhill, racked my brains to change its fate. It was then that I started looking for a technological moat, something that could help us secure the funding round that was about to slip away.
At the same time, the immense pressure from my parents came crashing down like a mountain as my wedding date approached, and I hadn't received a salary in six months. I am temporarily staying at my university friends' place, relying on them to help me with food and accommodation.
I have nothing more to lose.
Just in one late-night Google search, I accidentally discovered blockchain.
Because I have a background in network security and some understanding of encryption technology, I quickly grasped the architecture of blockchain. I read materials about different application cases, explored its future potential, and finally read a blog about a blockchain-based identity recognition system, and inspiration struck instantly.
Digital Gorkha project has a verified database covering visitor information from over 100 locations in more than 20 cities, recording over 1000 visitor records daily. If I could put these identity information on the chain, I could create a truly defensible product.
GetXS emerged, it is an identity authentication layer based on blockchain under Digital Gorkha.
Tweet content: 'Back to 2016, I was building GetXS - a decentralized distributed identity recognition (DID) platform. At that time, we were rated as one of the top ten Web3 startups in India. We released the whitepaper and planned for the initial coin offering (ICO), but due to some reasons, we were unable to proceed as planned, and the product was never launched.'
I started pitching this project to investors, but it was the middle of 2016, and Indian venture capitalists were indifferent to blockchain investments. I pitched to angel investors like Anupam Mittal, Kunal Shah, and even large funds like Accel and Red Sequoia, but none of them saw the potential.
Looking back now, it can be considered an early version of Worldcoin, but at that time, I didn't even raise a rupee.
We struggled for six months, but the speed of fund consumption was too fast. The debt we carry to keep the company running is suffocating us every day.
My parents mock me every day because I am penniless and about to get married. Another person is about to enter my life, but I have nothing.
I had no choice but to almost give away 30% of the equity for nothing, which also forced me to leave the company I founded with my own hands.
The real estate developers who invested in Digital Gorkha do not like my exploration in the blockchain field. They want to run the company in their own way.
In spirit, I already feel that this battle is bound to be lost, struggling to breathe under economic pressure. So I gave up entrepreneurship and started looking for a job in the blockchain field.
Fell into the "rabbit hole" of cryptocurrency
I did three things:
Founded Its Blockchain blog to record my learning experience in the blockchain field.
Together with a new co-founder, GetXS will be relaunched as an independent entrepreneurial project.
Serving as a blockchain consultant at an IT company in Bangalore.
The money I earn is barely enough to make ends meet, and I simply cannot afford to bring my wife over to live with me. Just then, I remembered Bitcoin. In October 2016, I bought my first Bitcoin.
Three months later when I checked the price, I found that it had doubled. At that moment, everything changed.
I started to delve deeper into the field of encryption, looking for the next opportunity like Bitcoin. I found Ethereum and Ripple, and made my first truly meaningful investment. As a result, my portfolio appreciated tenfold within a month.
And so, four months later, I quit my job.
I told my manager:
"What's the point of coming to the office every day and doing nothing? I can sit at home and earn four times the salary by doing some exciting things."
Since then, I have shifted the focus of Its Blockchain from blockchain to cryptocurrencies, with a focus on altcoins and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO).
One day, I published an article: "Top 10 cryptocurrencies worth buying in August", and the server crashed. Even after three upgrades, the website still reached 150,000 views that month.
I have captured the market demand. We doubled down on the creation of this list-style article, with traffic soaring to 1 million views at its peak.
The initial coin offering (ICO) craze is in full swing, and we have amazing traffic. So I started monetizing by providing advertisements, paid articles, and consulting services to crypto investors.
Tweet content: 2017 was the peak of my career. I founded a cryptocurrency media publication, Its Blockchain, with an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) exceeding 500,000 US dollars and attracting 500,000 page views per month. I also own a paid consulting company with 500 members, earning enough money for me to retire at the age of 25.
At the beginning of 2017, my bank account balance was zero, but by the end of the year, the income I received from Its Blockchain alone exceeded 1,000,000 US dollars.
Life is beautiful, but greed has the upper hand.
2018 Bear Market: Portfolio Significant Drawdown
At that time, everyone believed that investing in altcoins was a faster way to make money than Bitcoin.
So in January 2018, when the altcoin market was booming, I exchanged 90% of my Bitcoin for more than 40 types of altcoins, intending to hold them forever.
This is the biggest mistake I have made.
The market is starting to slowly collapse. At first, it seemed like just a normal pullback, and the rebounding market made me feel a little comforted.
I keep telling myself, "Everything will be fine."
Because I was busy traveling around, smoking pot, and spending money like a crazy rich man, I thought the market would always reward me. I only looked at tweets that confirmed my biases.
But what is the biggest misconception?
Bitcoin has rebounded multiple times from the support level of $6000.
Everyone thinks this support level is unbreakable. Everyone continues to hold. Everyone thinks this is just a healthy correction.
Then reality dealt a heavy blow.
Bitcoin fell below 6000 US dollars, plummeting all the way to 3200 US dollars.
At around $4000, I gave up and sold all my assets.
In the end, my assets were only less than 5% of what they were at their peak. Once again, I had nothing.
I am eager to recover the losses. I started futures trading, and by early 2019, when Bitcoin rose to $13,500, I recovered 30% of the losses.
But the sideways market makes me extremely miserable, technical analysis completely fails, and I begin to fall into a continuous loss dilemma.
Tweet content: You can follow my Bitcoin and Ethereum trades at this URL, my nickname is b3y.
I found a job at Blockchain Whispers, making Bitcoin by writing analysis articles.
I could have stored these bitcoins, but I didn't. I bet everything on futures.
Then, in March 2020, Bitcoin crashed. I was forced to liquidate my position and lost everything.
) Lessons in the cycle
It was at that time that I completely left the cryptocurrency industry and switched to making movies, doing this for a year.
Looking back, I have drawn three key lessons:
Greed is your biggest enemy. When you earn enough wealth to change your life, you should know when to stop and not blindly pursue unlimited profits.
Your lifestyle may become a trap. I raised my living standards too quickly, and when I lost everything, I felt like I was suffocating.
Emotional investing will lead you to complete failure. I only focus on information that confirms my biases, turning a blind eye to obvious danger signals. But the market doesn't care about your thoughts.
In 2020, I thought I had left the cryptocurrency industry forever.
But as we all know, no one can truly leave the cryptocurrency field.
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The content is for reference only, not a solicitation or offer. No investment, tax, or legal advice provided. See Disclaimer for more risks disclosure.
KOL self-report: annual income of 1 million US dollars at its peak, but how did I drop to zero later?
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
Before entering the crypto world, I had been in entrepreneurship. In 2016, I devoted myself to my third entrepreneurial project Digital Gorkha. We developed a simple visitor management and security application for physical locations, and raised some funds, but it was obtained from a group of inappropriate investors, resulting in the excessive dilution of equity.
Tweet: 'Digital Gorkha' was my previous entrepreneurial project, it was an innovative yet straightforward technological product. Digital Gorkha (acquired in 2016) was the first attempt to develop an access control security application. Later, MyGate company (valued at over 5 billion USD) executed this idea very well.
This mistake has put us in a predicament. Despite the project's stable appeal and income, completing Series A financing is almost impossible because the equity structure is in disarray, and the products we develop do not have a real technological moat.
As a founder, I watched helplessly as my own company, which I founded, went downhill, racked my brains to change its fate. It was then that I started looking for a technological moat, something that could help us secure the funding round that was about to slip away.
At the same time, the immense pressure from my parents came crashing down like a mountain as my wedding date approached, and I hadn't received a salary in six months. I am temporarily staying at my university friends' place, relying on them to help me with food and accommodation.
I have nothing more to lose.
Just in one late-night Google search, I accidentally discovered blockchain.
Because I have a background in network security and some understanding of encryption technology, I quickly grasped the architecture of blockchain. I read materials about different application cases, explored its future potential, and finally read a blog about a blockchain-based identity recognition system, and inspiration struck instantly.
Digital Gorkha project has a verified database covering visitor information from over 100 locations in more than 20 cities, recording over 1000 visitor records daily. If I could put these identity information on the chain, I could create a truly defensible product.
GetXS emerged, it is an identity authentication layer based on blockchain under Digital Gorkha.
Tweet content: 'Back to 2016, I was building GetXS - a decentralized distributed identity recognition (DID) platform. At that time, we were rated as one of the top ten Web3 startups in India. We released the whitepaper and planned for the initial coin offering (ICO), but due to some reasons, we were unable to proceed as planned, and the product was never launched.'
I started pitching this project to investors, but it was the middle of 2016, and Indian venture capitalists were indifferent to blockchain investments. I pitched to angel investors like Anupam Mittal, Kunal Shah, and even large funds like Accel and Red Sequoia, but none of them saw the potential.
Looking back now, it can be considered an early version of Worldcoin, but at that time, I didn't even raise a rupee.
We struggled for six months, but the speed of fund consumption was too fast. The debt we carry to keep the company running is suffocating us every day.
My parents mock me every day because I am penniless and about to get married. Another person is about to enter my life, but I have nothing.
I had no choice but to almost give away 30% of the equity for nothing, which also forced me to leave the company I founded with my own hands.
The real estate developers who invested in Digital Gorkha do not like my exploration in the blockchain field. They want to run the company in their own way.
In spirit, I already feel that this battle is bound to be lost, struggling to breathe under economic pressure. So I gave up entrepreneurship and started looking for a job in the blockchain field.
Fell into the "rabbit hole" of cryptocurrency
I did three things:
The money I earn is barely enough to make ends meet, and I simply cannot afford to bring my wife over to live with me. Just then, I remembered Bitcoin. In October 2016, I bought my first Bitcoin.
Three months later when I checked the price, I found that it had doubled. At that moment, everything changed.
I started to delve deeper into the field of encryption, looking for the next opportunity like Bitcoin. I found Ethereum and Ripple, and made my first truly meaningful investment. As a result, my portfolio appreciated tenfold within a month.
And so, four months later, I quit my job.
I told my manager:
"What's the point of coming to the office every day and doing nothing? I can sit at home and earn four times the salary by doing some exciting things."
Since then, I have shifted the focus of Its Blockchain from blockchain to cryptocurrencies, with a focus on altcoins and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO).
One day, I published an article: "Top 10 cryptocurrencies worth buying in August", and the server crashed. Even after three upgrades, the website still reached 150,000 views that month.
I have captured the market demand. We doubled down on the creation of this list-style article, with traffic soaring to 1 million views at its peak.
The initial coin offering (ICO) craze is in full swing, and we have amazing traffic. So I started monetizing by providing advertisements, paid articles, and consulting services to crypto investors.
Tweet content: 2017 was the peak of my career. I founded a cryptocurrency media publication, Its Blockchain, with an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) exceeding 500,000 US dollars and attracting 500,000 page views per month. I also own a paid consulting company with 500 members, earning enough money for me to retire at the age of 25.
At the beginning of 2017, my bank account balance was zero, but by the end of the year, the income I received from Its Blockchain alone exceeded 1,000,000 US dollars.
Life is beautiful, but greed has the upper hand.
2018 Bear Market: Portfolio Significant Drawdown
At that time, everyone believed that investing in altcoins was a faster way to make money than Bitcoin.
So in January 2018, when the altcoin market was booming, I exchanged 90% of my Bitcoin for more than 40 types of altcoins, intending to hold them forever.
This is the biggest mistake I have made.
The market is starting to slowly collapse. At first, it seemed like just a normal pullback, and the rebounding market made me feel a little comforted.
I keep telling myself, "Everything will be fine."
Because I was busy traveling around, smoking pot, and spending money like a crazy rich man, I thought the market would always reward me. I only looked at tweets that confirmed my biases.
But what is the biggest misconception?
Bitcoin has rebounded multiple times from the support level of $6000.
Everyone thinks this support level is unbreakable. Everyone continues to hold. Everyone thinks this is just a healthy correction.
Then reality dealt a heavy blow.
Bitcoin fell below 6000 US dollars, plummeting all the way to 3200 US dollars.
At around $4000, I gave up and sold all my assets.
In the end, my assets were only less than 5% of what they were at their peak. Once again, I had nothing.
I am eager to recover the losses. I started futures trading, and by early 2019, when Bitcoin rose to $13,500, I recovered 30% of the losses.
But the sideways market makes me extremely miserable, technical analysis completely fails, and I begin to fall into a continuous loss dilemma.
Tweet content: You can follow my Bitcoin and Ethereum trades at this URL, my nickname is b3y.
I found a job at Blockchain Whispers, making Bitcoin by writing analysis articles.
I could have stored these bitcoins, but I didn't. I bet everything on futures.
Then, in March 2020, Bitcoin crashed. I was forced to liquidate my position and lost everything.
) Lessons in the cycle
It was at that time that I completely left the cryptocurrency industry and switched to making movies, doing this for a year.
Looking back, I have drawn three key lessons:
In 2020, I thought I had left the cryptocurrency industry forever.
But as we all know, no one can truly leave the cryptocurrency field.