Leonid Bugaev told Cryptopostman about his journey of becoming a crypto investor, the main pitfalls of DeFi and other important life hacks that are useful for every crypto enthusiast.
I have long been interested in such things as mobile marketing, networking. I have even written several books on these topics. Based on this kind of interests, I understand why gadget mania in society is felt more and more strongly. I never doubted that smart devices were the future, and therefore studied them for many years.
Later, I became interested in the cases in which money can be more mobile and liquid. This question has interested me for a long time. Unfortunately, I missed the first three years of bitcoin development and got into the cryptocurrency market at the stage of the first waves of ICO. This was preceded by an acquaintance in 2017 with Yuri Gugnin, who is currently involved in the Karma project. At that time, I had an incredible experience of participating in a non-IPO. Then I realized that working with money in the blockchain is not at all difficult. I also really liked the work of the Local Bitcoins website at that time.
Before the crypto winter, many projects asked if I was engaged in blockchain marketing, to which they received a negative answer. At that time, I happened to help my colleagues a lot in educational projects, supplementing their client list with ICO projects. It was exactly mobile and financial marketing.
And so, working with money in a new way, I realized that the future belongs to the blockchain. Of course, work with the first wallets was not very convenient from the point of view of UIX, although even now there is still room for improvement. One thing is for sure – all this has become much more accessible to the mass user.
Then I worked with bitcoin. At the family council, we discussed a lot whether it is worth investing in this asset. The decision was positive, and the financial and time frames were clearly defined. And the result turned out to be very good: we increased the investment amount by 2-2.5 times. I was very happy at the time that we had succeeded. I studied this positive experience in detail in order to build a further strategy and identify new frameworks and guidelines.
And so I began to invest in cryptocurrency more systematically, devoting more and more time to it. There was a period when I even began to engage in mentoring, helping different teams to scale. This work required a lot of time. It was then that the guys from the Modelta team came to me.
They told me that they are making a financial model for a very cool startup called Chatex. I quickly studied it. It turned out that the project is in great demand and a lot of money is being invested in it. I myself did not notice how I ended up being part of a cool international project, helping to create and develop it. My active participation in it lasted about a year, until I noticed another interesting project called DeFi. Almost at the same time, I really liked such well-known projects as 1Inch, Aave.
It was for people like them that I saw the future. A future in which there are no intermediaries, in which everyone can be both a banker giving out money and a person receiving it. And all this is done in seconds without filling out an endless amount of paperwork. In this I saw the beauty of the blockchain. I believed that DeFi was the benchmark for where to go.
But, when I began to understand everything in detail, it turned out that the interface for interacting with this project has a huge number of barriers. Even opening a wallet for a simple user was not so easy, and depositing money had many nuances that not everyone could figure out.
What attracted me to DeFi so much? Very professional programmers work there, from whom you can learn a lot. As part of this project, it is worth mentioning Oleg Ivanov, who touched on the acute topic of the anonymity of many projects. He then said that either the project would cease to be anonymous at some point, or it would go into ultra-radical anonymity, because of which it could be cut down at any moment. In certain circles, the popular news is that the lost $4 billion of Bitfinex has been found in New York. This suggests that there are more and more deanonymization tools that allow you to find out who, where and when interacts with a network that initially seemed completely anonymous.
Another question has always interested me – where does such a return come from when investing in cryptocurrency projects? The best way to understand how it works is to try to participate in this story yourself, investing some of your money. This will give much more experience and understanding of the processes than reading books about it.
My call is don’t read about DeFi, use DeFi. Now there are the best financial conditions to try. Personally, I put the first money on Pancake, after which I could not “pull” it out. Somewhere high profitability, but high risks, and somewhere – on the contrary. You have to choose between greed and the desire to be safe.
In the context of all this, I recommend a very good site: Debank.com.
There you will see the wallet address, see what assets people keep money in. Here, thanks to the openness of the blockchain, it is possible, having learned the address of the wallet, to unscrew and see all transactions, all movements and all transfers. Therefore, if you decide to try it, then take an example from a successful trader by dividing his billions by 1000.
Many people ask how much you can earn on all this. DeFi, for example, when it grew behind bitcoin, gave 15-20 per annum in stables, while guys who call themselves hodlers usually twist to their heads and say that just keep everything on the air or bitcoin. They believe that this is the only correct strategy. For me, the proposals of traditional banks and financial systems look very inefficient. In addition to all this, one should not forget the whole army of investors who bought alts at one time. Some projects have fallen apart. When talking about the instruments on which you can earn high interest, you should not forget those examples when projects in which a lot of money was invested were suddenly closed. This is a story about risks that you should always remember. For a traditional investor, the world of cryptocurrencies is very unusual and incomprehensible, given its huge volatility.
“Missari” has published a chic report, which presents the best trends. An interesting example was shown by Convex and Pancake, which started with their yield of 9-10%, and then added another 2-3% in their tokens, which gave an additional boost. Then everyone realized that it was possible to collect additional liquidity.
It will always be useful to analyze tokenomics and have your head on your shoulders. Personally, I love looking at Huobi blockchains and beyond. Teppa Solana can also be mentioned here. But there the barrier to entry is quite large. Also pay attention to the breeches and evaluate their prospects. Bridge is very big and important money. The influx of millions of new DeFi users depends on the development of bridges. But Solana is at the forefront of development, so fakups are possible.
Summing up, I will give a number of recommendations for beginners.
First of all, always think twice before making any decision and do not forget about safety. Right now I open DeFistation.io, and it pops up in response that this is a fraudulent site. And I don’t know if that’s true. After all, this may be a safety net against an antivirus, or maybe they really slip me some copy of the site. So double caution is in order here.
Second, avoid ether projects with DeFi. It is very expensive. I have part of the investment that I can’t use as each transaction takes $140. And I should have 3 such transactions.
Enter projects through the understanding that greed is your enemy. You will always be attracted to interesting numbers that will seem unrealistic. But, if you do not have an understanding that this money may disappear into nowhere tomorrow, then you do not need to participate in this. It’s like a casino. I recommend very carefully entering those projects that are registered and shown in the top ten DeFi pulse, as there are the most pumped and verified contracts. It is also unlikely that Aave will break as there is a lot of liquidity. Talk to people who have been there in one way or another. Start with Defistation, DeFi Pulse., and learn English, because from there you will periodically come across Chinese sites that are better translated into English than into Russian. I had cases where I didn’t know where the “back” button was. At times like these, everything seems to be lost. But, knowing the principles of the smart contract, sometimes it is possible to resolve a difficult situation through other tools for interacting with the platform. Do not use any open Wi-Fi networks, any Java scripts or games on the machine on which you are investing. This guarantees you maximum security. Write down an investment strategy, how much money you invest. Sit down at the computer only when the brain is working well. I had a couple of very unpleasant moments when I made mistakes in translation and because of this I suffered losses. The human factor is also worth considering. Everything needs to be checked twice or thrice. Use test transactions. Remember that when making real transactions, you will have to pay for any transaction. Now I’m experimenting with play-to-earn, but this is an even more complex story, which is too early to talk about.
Start by learning DeFi. Do not hurry!
CRYPTOPOSTMAN thanks for the interview Leonid Bugaev.