The long
version.

Twelve years at poker tables. $2M+ in cashes, about $500K profit. Second place at France Poker Series, €80K. That money funded everything: living, investing, the apartment, the life. I know variance. I know bankroll management. I can recite the rules in my sleep.

None of that saves me from myself.

2020. I throw $60K into crypto because a guy who played against probability for a living thought he could outplay a market that doesn't bluff. COVID hits. Portfolio bleeds to $20–30K. I grind. Slowly.

Then BSC farming happens. Food coins on PancakeSwap. CAKE and SUSHI and things that sound like a lunch menu but print like a slot machine.

$20K → $800K. In months. Not years. Months.

May 2021. Elon tweets. Market dumps. My alt portfolio — because of course it's all in alts — drops 50%. Q4 recovery. Back to ~$800K. I don't sell. Obviously I don't sell. Why would I sell when we're going higher?

Living off crypto means no salary. No safety net. I pulled $100–200K out over the years to eat, pay rent, exist. The roundtrips look bad on paper. They're worse when your grocery money is evaporating.

But I was going to make it. I was sure.

That's the first time I was sure.

Worse than losing money: watching money you didn't make.

August 2021. I buy a Pudgy Penguin for 2.4 ETH. Three months earlier I was staring at CryptoPunks thinking "who pays $15K for a pixel face?" They did a 30x without me. Sick.

Then Doodle #322 for 12 ETH. It went to 20 ETH. I didn't sell. Of course I didn't sell. But I did flip a lot of NFTs profitably along the way. Skateboard Guy: 5 ETH in, 23 ETH out. Best flip of my life. Those wins funded the grail hunt.

January 2022. Azuki drops. Clean anime aesthetic. Perfect execution. I look at this art and something clicks that has nothing to do with money. This is it. This is my thing.

So I do what I always do: go all in. Move nearly everything liquid into NFTs. Hombre becomes my crypto identity. Anonymous. Later HombreAI when Midjourney launches and I think AI art is my calling. I make beautiful things. I make no money. I move on.

Meanwhile I spend an entire year trying to buy one specific Azuki from someone's favorites list. My grail. Finally get it for ~$50K. The "Golden Ticket." My PFP for two years.

I still have a solid NFT collection. Beautiful art from Azuki, the animated Golden Pendant (1 of 50), a wall of memories from an era where I confused loving something with holding it forever.

July 2023. Azuki Elementals mint. I go in with leverage. With borrowed money. With emotional attachment that has zero to do with risk management and everything to do with identity.

−$120K.

In poker we call it the coffin shot. The hand that buries you. Except in poker there's always a next tournament. In crypto with leverage and borrowed money there isn't.

I know all the rules. Twelve years of poker drilled bankroll management into my bones. I can teach it. I just can't follow it when the asset becomes who I am.

November 2023. Something cracks open.

I think I just born now, threw skin of boy and become a Man.

I start cold showers. Every day. Quit alcohol. Gym at 6 AM becomes the one thing I can control when everything else is chaos.

Smallest portfolio of my life. Strongest version of myself. Those two things showed up together, and they keep showing up together.

2024 is the year I pay for everything. 22 seed investments, 95% underwater. The portfolio is a graveyard of conviction plays that went nowhere. Debt repayment mode. No trades. No drama. Just grind.

October. I sit down and interrogate myself like I'm a suspect. No sugarcoating, no narrative. Just: what is actually driving you? What's the hidden thing you won't say out loud?

Biggest fear is being mediocre and having skill issue for greater achievements. Biggest fear is failing and going to normal job.

The fear that I'm not good enough. That all of this, the risk, the roundtrips, the 2 AM screen-staring, is a very expensive way of avoiding a cubicle.

November 2024. Everyone around me is making money. Bull market raging. And I'm sitting on $100K of debt wondering what the fuck went wrong.

Smiling outside but have really difficult time inside, it's eating me from inside.

One line written at 3 AM to an AI that already knew all of it:

I am worthy whatever my net worth number is currently. I am worthy because I am a good person who is intelligent, trustful and committed to improve not only my life but everyone else from my circles.

And in December I stop consuming AI and start building with it. "How do I make my own agent?" Two years earlier I'd asked ChatGPT "write me API" without knowing what an API was. Now I'm asking it to help me build a brain.

December 2024 was when I stopped playing and started building.

Trump launches a token. I'd been writing about this exact scenario for months. When it drops, there's no hesitation. There's no analysis paralysis. Twelve years of reading tables and this is the clearest read I've ever had.

$60K → $900K. One night.

$900K after $100K debt four months earlier feels like vindication. The pattern recognition works. The pain was tuition. You're not mediocre.

For one night, I'm the guy who called it.

Then Melania launches her token. Market fragments. I close my position. Click the button. Sell.

I reopen somewhere else within the hour.

I knew to close everything in one click. I did close it. Then I immediately reopened elsewhere.

$900K → $500K in days.

I can close. I proved it. The addiction to having a position is stronger than the discipline to stay flat. Do I trade because I want money, or because I need the voltage? I know my answer. I've known it since the poker tables. I keep pretending it's different this time.

HYPE DCA. Deep in Hyperliquid's ecosystem. LIQD at 5M market cap — I become the 13th largest holder. Position eventually worth ~$800K.

Perps are printing. +$200K in a single month. I have the spot bag. I have the perps PnL. I have LIQD. Peak overconfidence trifecta.

June 2025. Portfolio touches $1M.

I do nothing. Zero. Not a single take-profit.

Twice this year I was close to $1M and not once did I take enough off.

LIQD doesn't move when HYPE rallies. Choppy market shreds the directional perps. Everything unwinds at the same time. The kind of correlation event that looks obvious in hindsight and invisible in the moment.

$1M → ~$50K. Perps cumulative: −$300K.

September. 2 AM. Writing in Polish because English doesn't hit hard enough for this one:

I think I'm a gambler, always want more.

The poker player spent twelve years mastering the difference between gambling and calculated risk. The crypto trader spent four years proving he couldn't tell them apart.

I switch vocabularies overnight. "How much can I make" becomes "how do I not lose." Diamond hands becomes delta neutral. Conviction becomes risk management. Gut feeling becomes Brier score.

PFP changes too. Azuki Golden Ticket → HYPIO during the HyperEVM era (good growth time on X, threads, education) → Sun Jin Woo. The current one. The actual Arise.

I stop talking to AI and start building with it. Outgrow ChatGPT. Move to Claude. The conversations go from "am I doing enough?" to "how do I architect this system?" Same energy, different direction.

Automated bots running 24/7. Signal pipeline tracking 3,000+ markets. Brier score 0.22 vs market 0.27. LP farming strategies running while I sleep.

Under my real name, AI consulting. Two personas that never cross. Same brain, different masks. If you know both, you know too much.

Execution is the flex. Everything else is cosplay.

From "write me API" to autonomous infrastructure in three years. Zero formal education. Pure immersion.

March 2026. I go back to the poker tables for a session. $100K in 3 days. Whatever I don't touch in crypto turns to gold. The irony writes itself.

The poker player who couldn't stop roundtripping now builds systems designed to remove himself from the decision loop. The best trade I ever made was against my own instincts.

The stone is still rolling. I know its shape now.