SOLbound: a memoir of making it
1 | Hard pivot
People get laid off sometimes. What happens next?
It’s November 2022 when I become one of the vaporous. I’m released, effective immediately, from a job that has it all — fat comp, lax standards, indulgent team/company offsites, and a vast office in Manhattan permanently stocked with pastries, La Croix, and le booze. The moment I get the news, I think: should’ve known the music was getting ready to stop.
When it did, my severance check was as generous as my comp had been. After a few days of beer, cigarettes, and cope, I came to my senses and realized this was actually enough capital to do something with.
The first thing I did was buy $10k of stETH. ETH was around $1200. Having only interacted with Ethereum, L2s, and EVM chains, I felt this was a clever but safe investment. The merge had been finalized to surprisingly little fanfare just a couple of months prior, and my gut told me that the market hadn’t actually priced it in.
I put my stETH in the equivalent of Tony Soprano’s wall safe. Transfer from CEX, fresh wallet, ledger. Don’t touch it, I told myself. Don’t monitor the yield or even look at prices. Leave it there ‘til kingdom come.
Keep in mind that at the time, Ethereum was the smart contract platform. My modest investments across various L2s (despite not making me rich overnight) had proven worthwhile, and I’d found the protocols genuinely fun to use. I believed Ethereum was the future, and that getting laid off would, in the end, count as a mere speed bump compared to the sheer on-chain artistry that I was about to unlock. This was my chance to buy crypto’s most promising blue chip at a deep discount. This was it.
Of course, this was supposed to be a passive strategy. To keep busy during the waking hours, I started my own business as a writer and consultant for startups. Layoffs meant that startups would need freelance help to keep the lights on while they waited for interest rates to come down and VC money to come back. That was the plan.
Writers can work from anywhere. That’s why, when my gf decided to pursue a masters’ degree in Europe, I deliberated for about six seconds before announcing that I’d be joining her! It hit her like a red shell. The conversation went something like this:
HER: “So, um… you know I’ve been wanting to internationalize my career for a while. I feel like to have the career I want, I need to pick up some more technical skills, and it’s actually cheaper and better if I can do that abroad.”
PUMP: “International eyes… internationalize… international lies…”
HER: “So, um, I feel like that’s what I have to do. I think I’m gonna do it in Europe.”
P: “Okay. So where does that leave me?”
HER: “I mean, it’s only for a year. And the flight isn’t that far if you want to come visit. There might even be some people in the program who are into some of the same, um, crypto stuff as you.”
P: (looking at phone) “It says here that the program is around 70% male. So I guess chances are good there might be some crypto bros. Hmm. How come you’re choosing this program specifically?”
HER: “Um...”
P: (still not getting that she wants to leave me for the heir to the Toblerone fortune): “Look. How about this: I can come with, and do my writing from Europe? That way I get to experience it too :)”
So it was settled. We were going to Europe.
2 | Lord wif hat
A few months go by as we prepare for the move. My business is grinding along, and so is the value of my stETH vault.
Around June, the move starts to feel real. There’s a lot to get done. We need to pack all of our things, clean up our place, and throw a goodbye party. After five years living in the same city, a good amount crap has accumulated — hats, purses, shoes, books, winter clothing.
In a rarely-opened drawer in a bedside table, I find a long-assumed-lost pair of sunglasses and a jar containing some weed gummies. No expiration date. I put on the glasses and pop a gummy. Moving on to the closet, I start taking down shoeboxes and sorting through them. At the bottom of a worn Adidas box, I find my old passport wallet. Feeling something small inside, I unzip the wallet and root around. My heart leaps.
It’s my old Trezor hardware wallet.
My first cycle in 2017-2018. I got into crypto in grad school, and even wrote a paper analyzing language patterns in altcoin whitepapers. Like most newcomers, I overtraded my (very small) stack. After dabbling in BTC, LTC, ETH, and even XLM, I eventually decided to YOLO into a single, high-conviction project.
That project was Raiblocks (now rebranded to nano).
What happened to Raiblocks was as cold-blooded a rug as you’ll ever see. The operator of an exchange known as BitGrail (where I was storing my tokens) was SBF before SBF; In early 2018 he disabled withdrawals without warning, freezing almost $200m of user funds with no explanation or timetable. To make matters worse, the guy was Italian 🤌.
There’s much more to the story (which I won’t get into) but in effect, Raiblocks was my blackpill. I’d shoved all-in based on a fundamental thesis, and lost everything. More accurately, I’d let someone take everything from me. The small device that I now held in my hands was the last relic of my first failed cycle, and a stinging reminder that five years later, in spite of the time and effort I’d dedicated to studying crypto, and my everliving conviction in the tech, I somehow still hadn’t made it.
I race to my laptop and plug it in. After missing the first try, I get the passcode right on the second. Balance: 0.06 BTC. Or, around $1750.
My following actions cannot be explained. Possibly, they are divine compensation from the heavenly father for having been rugged by an Italian. I am not a religious person but there are phenomena in life which are beyond our comprehension. In these times we can turn to a recognition of our own smallness, or we can turn to the lord. If $JESUS exists, he turned his loving gaze to me that day.
I immediately send the .06 BTC to Coinbase and swap it for USD. Then I set a bid for 100 SOL at $17.50. Why SOL?
Everyone remembers “Sell me all you want at $3”. This was one of the hardest tweets of all time. SOL did an 80x from that level and was THE banger trade last cycle — now, at sub-$10B MC, do people really think it can’t run back turbo?
Ethereum has its drawbacks, both technically and culturally. Transactions are slow and expensive, and anyone who points this out is labeled a hater. I don’t really like bridging. I don’t really like spreading out my capital across multiple L2s. SOL feels like a strong alternative bet given prevailing ETH-maxi attitudes toward these issues.
The Soylana Manlets community, led by Ansem, is doing an extremely effective job growing the Solana attention economy. I see more memes, mentions, and analysis of Solana across my timeline than any other alt-L1 — and a lot of them are actually funny. The vibes are refreshingly positive.
My order fills. For a couple of weeks, I let my stack sit on Coinbase, and even add a bit on dips. By early July, I’m up to 132 SOL at a ~$2350 cost basis.
We finally move to Europe in early August. Around this time, my writing business slows down somewhat — consistent 40-hour weeks decay into 30 or 25 — and I find myself with more free time. I mostly use this to research crypto and play Baldur’s Gate.
I want to know what’s cooking in the SOL DeFi ecosystem. As a stETH user, liquid staking is something I understand and am generally bullish on. Naturally, one of the first opportunitiesI look into is liquid staking for SOL.
Wait — Lido is offering 6% yield on stSOL? Wtf, that’s double what I’m getting on stETH! After a few weeks of further study, I decide that I should definitely try this. I spin up a Phantom wallet and transfer my SOL, which I swap for stSOL.
Let me reiterate: I’m not religious. But someone — Jesus again, maybe — took the wheel that day.
I have a good amount of savings left after the move. Europe will be cheap, I reason, and the business is making enough to pay for living expenses. Fuck it. I transfer a quick $2200 to Coinbase and buy a second clip, bringing my total SOL stack —all staked — to around 250 tokens.
This should be the end of the story until the market makes new ATH. But since we’re talking about Solana, it’s not.
3 | The trenches
Europe treats us well the first couple of months. The cost of living is low. Bread, wine, produce, dairy, and meat are all much higher in quality, and we spend long, lazy days wondering how we ever thought the rat race back stateside was a way to live. I cook luxurious meals in our little apartment, and we sit outside for wine-soaked picnics with colleagues from my gf’s grad program.
There are times when the sun shines. This is one of them.
Days and eventually weeks pass. The picnics become less frequent. My gf’s masters’ program turns out to be more demanding than she expected — both academically and socially. Soon I’m making dinner for one most nights. Despite the meme that Europeans are lazy, her classes are brutal. She arrives home in the evenings exhausted and sometimes drunk. her cohort is mostly comprised of well-heeled European 20-somethings, which means that everyone is drinking heavily, even on weekdays.
I’m concerned, but I don’t mind spending more time alone. I’m a natural introvert, and it’s not like I’m not welcome at the student parties or bar nights. I’m simply bored by them. I feel happiest when I’m doing constructive things: writing, reading, working out, and researching crypto.
Unfortunately for the collective mental health of the crypto industry, much of the “research” process takes place on Twitter and Youtube.
This is technically my third cycle. I’ve learned to ignore the legions of soyfacers on Youtube. As a man of taste, I prefer serious analysis from serious sources. However, I also started to notice that some of these supposedly serious people are bullish no matter what.
“Price is going down? We can buy cheaper bro — that’s bullish!”
“Bridge got hacked? This will shake out the tourists and leave only strong hands — super bullish!”
“Government arrested the dev? This will rally crypto users to lobby congress, who will finally wake up and pass bullish legislation!”
I’m bullish, but I also know what would have to happen for that to change. Not all is currently well in Ethereum land, but the biggest Ethereum content creators’ bullish sentiment still seems to only go one way. On top of that, the vibes are just off with a lot of these guys — not that they’re dishonest or scammers, but rather that they seems copy-pasted from Web2. Having just been laid off from a Web2 company, I’m less than enchanted by the familiar arrogance on display across the ETH-centric crypto media.
So I start to look for alpha further afield. This leads me into the mf trenches.
I’ve already decided that I won’t touch my stETH bag. My stSOL bag, on the other hand, is ready to be played with. I look into ways to boost the yield using the borrow/lend protocols on Solana. According to DefiLlama, Solend is top dog by TVL. But another protocol, marginfi, is offering something called “points”.
What are points? Well, they’re kind of like pre-tokens. You can’t trade them or take them out of the ecosystem. But there’s a leaderboard! The idea, eventually, is that you’ll get an airdrop of real tokens based on how many points you have. I’m intrigued, but I don’t want to ape in blindly. So I join the marginfi telegram channel to learn a bit more about the platform.
Oh my god. Where the fuck am I?
Non-stop spam messages rattle out like machine gun fire. Copypasta hangs over the chat like a toxic haze, bedeviling my senses, making it impossible to distinguish the sincere from the satirical. An unusual aura of cruelty hangs in the air. New joiners, when they enter this trench, are mercilessly bullied just for saying hello or asking straightforward questions.
I’m here for alpha. I asked a simple question of my own: “wen we dropping the token boys?”
Some anon in the chat replies, “wen we dropping the token boys?”. Others pile on, parroting my question back to me. It was a stupid question, fine, but they won’t stop repeating it. One guy screenshots my profile picture on telegram, turns it into a sticker, and posts it over and over. Welcome to the fucking trenches.
I mute the chat. I sit there, strangely humiliated, and think of my gf. What would she say if she knew that THIS is how I spend my days? While she studies organizational management and networks with future corporate leaders, I’m getting absolutely dunked on by random people in a chat room. Even worse, I’m doing this because I think it might make me rich someday.
I feel silly. Is this all just a scam? Have I spent all this time feeding a delusion? The more cycles you’ve spent in crypto, the more these doubts can weigh on you.
And yet, there are encouraging signs. The marginfi site is slick and functional — almost as if it hadn’t been designed by the people threatening homoerotic assault in the Telegram channel.
Solana isn’t even my home chain, I tell myself. May as well take some more risk. I deposit my stSOL into the marginfi pool, and can’t help but smile when my points start to accumulate the very next day.
I check in on the marginfi chat periodically. It’s still overwhelming, but the group does address real issues amid the chaos. I ask questions (more precise ones) and get thoughtful responses. It’s different, but I like it. It doesn’t feel like anyone is there to show off their intellect or knowledge of the network. It’s just a bunch of people who want to use Solana.
After a couple of weeks, I notice something important: a conspicuous lack of mentions of stSOL. This makes no sense to me. Lido is the premier liquid staking provider on Ethereum by an insane margin — shouldn’t that translate to market leadership on Solana, too?
At the same time, the chat is perpetually crowded with users asking when deposits caps for JitoSOL (a competitor to stSOL) will be raised. It’s true — the JitoSOL pool is almost always full, and fills up almost instantly when caps are raised. Meanwhile, the stSOL pool is usually 40-60% full.
I dwell on this. Why are users so much more eager to deposit JitoSOL?
Here’s the thing about the trenches: they’re full of desperate souls just like you. We’re all trying to make it, and to do that, you don’t need to be the smartest or ballsiest. You just need to remain calm.
Eventually, I figure out why people are clamoring to enter the JitoSOL pool. Jito is running their own points program, and all you need to do is hold JitoSOL. Extra points are awarded for depositing the tokens into a lending pool like marginfi.
The strategy unfolds before me like a war map: I should:
Deposit JitoSOL
Borrow SOL against it
Swap borrowed SOL for JitoSOL
Repeat.
JitoSOL’s 6% APY would likely remain higher than the 4-5% APR I was paying to borrowing SOL. I’d capture that spread and increase my exposure to SOL while stacking points in the background.
I lock this shit in. It should work. It must work. The Solana ecosystem is showing signs of life, and even if this whole thing rugs harder than Raiblocks, I still have my stETH. I still have my business. And I still have my gf.
4 | Study this
If you were in crypto in Q4 2023, you know what happens next. SOL starts to run harder than Tom Cruise on whatever drug Bitboy takes to get out of bed in the morning.
The price hangs around $22 for a while, then in the blink of an eye climbs to $40. At this point, I’m exhibiting the classic symptoms of euphoria. I’m taking screenshots and sending them to my trader friends. I’m tweeting out cryptic memes with the caption, “higher”. I’m dropping smug hints to my gf that it’s been a “good week”, and remarking out of the blue that “maybe we should do a weekend in Italy”.
Maybe it’s time to sell.
Or not. In the end, the fact that I’m looping a JitoSOL-SOL position delays my exit. It’s still a good position, I reason; the borrow/lend rates are still in my favor and the points are rolling in. If I withdraw, the JitoSOL pool on marginfi will likely fill up again, and there’s no guarantee I’ll get back in. The apes in the marginfi chat are going wild — I see calls for SOL to $70, $100, $140, and higher still. Can this thing run more?
Can Bitcoin act as a store of value and unit of exchange?
I HODL, and three weeks pass. Now SOL is at $60. My business is closing out the year on a weaker note than I’d hoped, and the imminent holiday season means there will be almost no work in December. Working for yourself is great; you set the hours, schedule the meetings, and plan the workday as you please. It also sucks ass; you’re on the hook for every little thing and there’s no chance of a sneaky hookup at the holiday party.
My gf and I are planning a trip for the end of the year, but she hasn’t been herself in weeks. Between the pressure to perform in class, the pressure to socialize 24/7, and the pressure to find a job after all this is done, she’s badly burnt out. In fact, I’ve never seen her this burnt out in our five years of dating. The much-romanticized grand move to Europe, while indeed rad, has been a destabilizing force. In our old life, we knew what to expect — from the day, from one another, and from ourselves. Now, each day could bring who-knows-what.
I want to be a good partner, but there’s only so much I can do. I can’t fight her battles any more than she can set my stop losses.
It feels wrong — while my gf is working super hard and barely keeping it together, I’m somehow unbothered, moisturized, happy, and in my lane. Crypto (while still juts a hobby) has reinvigorated my sense of purpose in life. I wake up every day filled with a desire to learn. I’m writing less, but studying whatever I can find that’s of use — whitepapers, governance forums, dashboards, shitposts. The market is moving upward, and t feels like the golden bull market of legend might finally come if I can be patient and work hard for just a little while longer.
I start to believe that maybe I can see us through this rough patch. If I can stay positive, everything will work out. Maybe all that I’ve done in crypto, from getting rugged to finding my old hardware wallet and now finally getting serious about the space, is connected somehow. Maybe I’ll make it.
And then:
Announcing your deliverance.
Nevermind the blog. I jump to the points page. Looks like I’ll get around 13k points. Is that a lot?
I spend the next week reading up on the airdrop. I want to sell it, obviously — newly airdropped tokens tend to fly for a couple of days before dumping. There are also reasons to hold. According to Jito themselves, JitoSOL is “MEV-boosted”, which is kind of like saying a Wendy’s Baconator is bacon-boosted. I don’t need to know the specifics. Just give me the burger.
After looking into the JTO tokenomics, reading a shit ton of cope on the TL, and poring over a number of salt sheets, I’m looking forward to selling anywhere north of $1 per token.
My bear market PTSD has me thinking this is too good to be real. $13k just for staking some SOL and lending it out? I guess everyone catches a lucky break now and again. Somehow, it can be more difficult to believe when it’s happening to you.
5 | Making it
It’s December 7th, the day that JTO drops, and I’m in my efficient but stylish European apartment. It’s been a routine Thursday — I worked out, did chores, handled a bit of admin for the business, and now I’m ready to lock in. I have a coffee and half a baguette ready at hand. Browser is open to the Jito page. Separate browser is open to Coinbase.
At 6pm, I claim my points and send 10k of them to Coinbase. It’s at $2. Oh my.
I sell 2.5k tokens. As the price hovers around $2, I continue to sell 1k clips, one at a time, ripping off and eating a chunk of baguette with each clip. The USD balance in my account is climbing. Remain calm, I tell myself. Stick to the plan — anything over $1 is a sell.
$20,000+. Not bad. And I’m still holding 3800 tokens.
It’s exam season for my gf. For a week, her waking hours have been spent in study groups and classes; in the evenings, she takes over the desk while I read on the couch or make dinner. Her stress level is crescendoing into exam week; there are final papers and group presentations. She’s been threatening to drop out. I know it’s just the stress talking, but I wish I could make her life better.
This all coincides with the week of the airdrop. On one hand, I feel guilty. I’m sitting on my ass, collecting free money from the internet while my partner is working day and night to succeed in legitimate endeavors.
On the other hand, I don’t want to forget what it took to get here. Only ~10k wallets received the Jito airdrop. I took risks. I didn’t sell. I got roasted in the chat. I studied. Relative to the work required to earn a living in the real world, earning money in crypto can feel arbitrary. But it’s as real as anything in this world.
I don’t know how much to tell my gf.
”Someone gave me $20k.”
“I aped into a liquid staking derivative token and the team behind it airdopped a different governance token which is now trading at a premium on Coinbase so I’m scaling out there while… 🥱”
Yeah… maybe I shouldn’t tell her.
She’s not a crypto native. If anything, a sudden windfall like this will worry her. She might think I’m lying or harboring a gambling addiction. Remain calm. She’ll find out in due time.
I wake up Friday, the day after the airdrop, and see JTO at $3 on Coinbase.
The remainder of my airdrop, which I’d intended to hold, is worth a lot more than I thought. Fuck it — I immediately start to sell — smaller clips this time — as the token oscillates between $2.75 and $3.50. By the end of the day, my tokens are gone and I’m up another $10,500.
This is it. I’m making it.
In this moment I am euphoric. This has to be the top of something — of Solana, of crypto, or of my career as a trader. And what are you supposed to do at the top? You’re supposed to sell.
I unwind my JitoSOL position on marginfi, and sell that too. SOL is around $75. My stack is worth around $19k.
In five months on Solana, $4,700 ran up to $50,000.
How much money is life-changing money? Crypto Twitter would have you believe that the answer is “no amount”. There’s always someone with a bigger stack, who trades with more leverage, who sells the pico tops and buys the shmico bottoms. For some, $50,000 is a ridiculous sum to be excited about. Pathetic, even. 50k is what you should be up or down on the day, bucko. Now you’re writing a post about how it makes you feel? And you expect anyone to care?
Even if 50k is not much for some, it means something to me. Not because it changed my life — but because it reminded me that I can change my own life.
My gf is changing her own life, too. The past few months have shown me that you can’t live someone’s life for them. While she works on her career, I’m working on my business. While she’s looking for a new industry to work in after her program, I’m looking for shitters to punt. We are not the same. But we are on the same side.
We’re both in the trenches. It isn’t a problem if she needs time to figure things out. It isn’t a problem if she doesn’t understand this hobby of mine. You don’t always need a witness. If something is good for you, do it.
Crypto isn’t my day job. But anyone can see how exciting the culture, the tech, and the opportunities are in this space right now. You don’t need to start with that much. You can make it. For me, it was only possible on Solana.
I’m still holding my stETH.