Back home for Christmas in 2021, my brother asked, “Have you heard of this DeFi thing?”
Six months later, hooked by the concept of building a decentralised economy, naively yeeting my whole student loan into $LUNA and going balls to the wall distilling complex DeFi systems into simple research pieces, I dropped out of my degree and joined a DeFi startup.
Five years navigating this high-paced techno-financial society taught me one important lesson: the skill that matters most is being able to filter out the noise and develop a spidey sense for innovation asymmetry. And most importantly, when those senses start tingling, bet with conviction, as those opportunities don’t come around very often.
So when, in September 2025, I noticed sentiment and narrative beginning to shift around a nine-year-old asset with a formation ceremony that included people like Snowden, that shared Bitcoin’s monetary model but added an optional layer of privacy, my spidey senses started tingling.
After a few days digging into the backstory and potential, I became convinced that the narrative and timing presented extreme asymmetry. I also recognised that outspoken backing from people like Naval was being overlooked. Powerful people bring social capital, distribution and network effects. With my spidey senses now pounding, and drawing parallels to both the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum, I bet everything I had, shifting all my capital into ZEC.
While I realised this decision was naive in the sense of a single, concentrated risk vector, I was rapidly become aware that taking risks was the hallmark of everyone who has experienced some form of success. But more importantly, I sensed that with AI, rampantly rising debt, and a new public opinion on the potential of BTC as an asset class, I was at the right place at the right time.
With AI capabilities developing at a rapid rate, I also decided it was time to take a step back from markets, sit on my hands, touch grass and build some fun side projects. The previous cycles had taught me many lessons, with overtrading being one of them. I noticed asymmetry, had sized with as much conviction as possible, and now I simply needed to wait. Focus on other things, and allow the market time to catch up with the inevitability which I saw coming.
One year later, having gone deep into Claude and Codex my capabilities as human leveraging technology to build, connect and trace the patterns in complex systems has 100x. My initial ZEC entry had also increased in value over 10x.
I have always been drawn to physics for metaphors in my life, and have resonated with the idea that this period in my life was the catalyst for the activation energy needed to move to the next shell. In an ironic yet poetic way, the period in which I paid the least attention, was also the period in which i witnessed the most growth. Sit on your hands and reap the rewards.
Being in the next metaphorical financial shell, but still far from being “financially free” I now must re-assess my strategy. The behaviour that got me here was concentration, but now that same behaviour is what could destroy everything I’ve built. I bet big. But now I am now fully exposed to the movement of one asset, and that centralised dependancy is evidently a risk.
The question I must now ask myself is the following:
If I were given this amount of capital, what would I invest it today?
Having capitalised on growth, yet still being only in the early innings of my portfolio goals I realise that I need to build a protected financial floor, while maintaining exposure to asymmetry sized larger enough that being right would still change my life.
I recently re-read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, where a section on venture returns stuck out to me. Thiel argues that venture returns follow a power law, stating:
“The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.”
Theil’s points reinforce my initial ZEC position, stating that you should bet big on asymmetry, only holding assets that have the potential to meaningfully outperform the entire portfolio. However, in order to risk cognitive bias that reinforces my position, I have also sought wisdom to the counter point. Nassim Taleb’s, The Black Swan provides a good example.
“If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most ‘risk measures’ are flawed, then your strategy is to be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.”
Or put simply:
Ratchet success into a permanent hyper-consvervative floor
Size with conviction into a few hyper-aggressive winners
Cash and Gold would cover the Hyper-conservative floor, with a hyper aggressive split open to contenders. ZEC has to be looked at again. The fact it has already gone up 10x means nothing. Today ZEC sits at around 1.65% of Bitcoin’s market cap. Even after a 10x, I still believe it is within reason that ZEC could grow to 10%+ of Bitcoin’s market cap.
While ZEC still remains one of my highest conviction bets, I also want to broaden the search into other areas where I think asymmetry exists exist, but with completely different drivers.
Power and energy bottlenecks
Physical AI
Equities
Uranium and nuclear
Crypto and monetary networks
Analysing each with a simple heuristic:
In the future, what becomes much more important?
Who captures the value?
Is the trade already consensus?
What breaks the thesis?
Can this become a portfolio-defining winner?
After a year of touching grass and sitting on my hands, I now plan to start sharing research, analysing potential asymmetric investments, and sharing portfolio allocations and splits bi-weekly on here.