🎙Gmoney | Layer Zero

welcome to layer zero layer zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but is composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been today we are speaking with g-money the famous knitted cap ape on twitter and a prolific just market investor

and g-money has been sharpening his teeth in markets from a very very early age he got into the world of markets at the age of 12. so the world of the world of finance the world of markets definitely pulled him in very very early and getting those lessons under his belt uh early in his life uh lifetime really helped him get into the world eventually into the world of crypto i think he's a it's he's a phenomenal person to actually be able to uh remove bias and uh personal interests in markets and really just being able to

look at the broad market as a whole and make informed decisions after that uh and uh that's what allowed him to really establish himself before getting into crypto uh and then got into crypto in in 2017 smartly used the lessons of the the dot-com bubble to time-ish the top of the market and then not have to go through the grueling bear market and then also fantastically timed getting back into crypto uh and so really just used uh kind of in the same

way we were when we were talking to dc use his experiences in legacy markets to really inform his guidance into crypto markets uh and then we go into the his transition into the worlds of nft and i really like the juxtaposition between uh g money's time and nfts versus g money's time in tradify markets where one is very transactional one is very just like performance based nfts are much more community based and and you know and what are nfts other than art so art based as well and i think it really tells a fantastic

story of character development of going from you know cold traditional markets into warm fuzzy nfc community markets so i hope you enjoyed this conversation with g-money before we get to that conversation however we have to talk for a moment about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible matcha everyone's favorite dex aggregator has just launched an open beta for gasless trading so if you're trading more than five thousand dollars in common eath and wrapped bitcoin pairs and your gas fees on matcha are free and that's why you should be using matcha

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plus a variety of yield strategies to choose from harness the power of alchemix at alchemix.fi that's a-l-c-h-e-m-i-x dot f-i follow alchemix on twitter at alcomixfi and join the discord to keep up to date with alchemix v2 and to get involved in governance hey gmaddie how's it going hey how are you how you doing thanks for having me fantastic i'm i'm a huge fan so so glad to finally make it on the podcast yeah you are going to be the the first

uh pseudo-anonymous person on layer zero and for those that are actually watching the the video there is an animated uh crypto punk monkey with the knitted cap which of course is g-money's famous uh ape uh crypto punk uh how how did you get this animation how does the animation work um this was actually made by uh crypto novo uh and a couple people that he works with that when uh it was like in january or february when um i bought the ape and you know i was i was talking about punks uh a lot

at the beginning of the year um he is a fellow punk holder uh he owns a tassel and he was like hey like let me get you a snapchat filter that you can use on zoom calls and i was like that sounds amazing and uh i've been using it ever since i love it yeah and so again for the people listening to this the mouth gmoney's mouth actually moves and it looks like the eyes actually blink too which is pretty crazy and also if you turn your head it looks like it's very 3d so yeah it's a 3d 3d rendering of the the ape

that's fantastic okay this is like this is super cool because i also saw scooby troubles from alchemics do this with like an anime character and i is the this is a perfect moment in time to really be injecting some of these snapchat filters because we're all talking about the metaverse and now we get to like layer on these new like virtual representations of who we are as we are on these zoom calls really enabling like the pseudo-anonymous people on crypto twitter and around to still be on camera but still also be be anonymous i think this is really

fantastic yeah i think it's it's super cool and i think we're probably going to see more and more of this going forward right like when i got into nfts i understood them right away because of fortnite um and you know the way people the way kids will change their skins every 15 to 20 minutes like i wouldn't be surprised if you know you have multiple lenses where you know i want to be an ape on this on this call and i want to be a unicorn on the next one right like i think it's i think this would be really cool and in opening up a whole new world of uh

personalization right right i'll put on my ape while i'm gaming i'll put on my suit and tie while i'm on zoom and yeah it's really like choose your own adventure choose your own identity as the time comes for it exactly g g money where did the name g money come from so my name begins with the g and uh it's a very ethnic name so a lot of people couldn't pronounce it growing up in the tri-state area of new york city and people called me g as a nickname and i got uh g-money because i always had a

knack for making money so uh like that that's one that stuck throughout high school and college and i definitely want to pick up on that knack as we go through this story so let's let's go all the way back when did the knack of making money start when did you realize that you had a knack for this um well let's see i first started following the stock market when i was 12 years old uh okay so very extremely early yeah and you know i for some reason when i was little when i was like five or six uh like on

the dow jones it kind of tells you or on the nightly news it tells you oh the dow jones went up or down today and i remember asking my f my dad like what's the dow jones and he was like that's gambling don't ever do that and obviously naturally i was drawn to it and so um when i was 12 my grandmother bought me the wall street journal guide to investing uh and that like kind of taught you how to read stock tables and like what a bond is and you know what a stock is and it was super super basic

is this your grandma going around your dad uh no i mean they can get into you this was like one day we're like at barnes and nobles and i'm like you know can can you buy this for me and obviously like it's a book like you're gonna buy that for a kid if he's asking for it right and so uh i was uh you know like i hadn't really i was always i guess curious at that point but i hadn't really done anything with it until i was like 12 around there and then when i went to high school i got an academic scholarship to go i went to a private school and i made a

deal with my parents that uh the money that they would have spent on my tuition they they let me invest and that was in like 96 97 so um i was able to take that money which obviously at the time was significant to me and i invested in the stock market uh i made a bunch of money and was it was that a hard thing to convince your parents it's like hey uh give me money so i can go invest in it no i i it wasn't because like it was i think they saw it as like

education and they saw that it was already like really into the stock market like i would like get the night i would get the newspaper every day and i would like check stock quotes right like this is like like as the internet was evolving right like i mean i'm in my late 30s so like the internet wasn't prolific at that point right like my first internet experience was on a 28k modem uh so this was like before you could check stock quotes it from from your phone and stuff like that okay so with regards to your parents this was definitely like beyond

a phase for you now this was very much a part of like what you were really interested in yeah it was it was probably one of the things i was the most interested in um at that time like more so than than sports or or anything else is like really just being enamored with the market right and uh and so like i invested i invested the money i wrote the dot-com bubble you know made a bunch of money didn't sell anything and wrote it all the way back down right so that was obviously like a super valuable experience for me that

became super important later on as i as i got into crypto and uh you know i went i went to college uh one of my best trades uh bef until literally uh this year uh getting into nft is was i remember i was interning in the city going into my senior year of college and i was in new york city interning i'm on the subway and i look around and i was like wow like everybody has these white headphones in their ear right right and

this is back when the mp3 market was massively fragmented and i just noticed like you know businessman high schoolers like everybody on the train consistently had these white headphones in and that was the original ipod the original ipod for listening to music i remember i remember thinking way back then or somebody else thought this thought i was too young to think of myself but somebody said apple did a very very good job making all of their headphones white yeah yeah because it was differentiated right because everyone else had your classic black headphones and it didn't

stand out and so i remember sitting in the subway and being like oh wow like let me buy some apple calls and i don't know what it is split adjusted now but at the time it was like ten dollars a share i bought the 20 calls for 49 cents or 62 cents and then i sold them for 49 uh within 18 months and you know i was like wow like that like this this is cool like i can make a living out of this right um were you at the time uh i was 20 i was either 20 or

21. i was going into my senior year of college right right okay yeah so very very rare for somebody in college to be to have a sort of windfall yeah and like to me it's like i was like wow this is definitely what i want to be doing um in the future but uh i'm an only child and my father uh is an immigrant and he had a business that i was set to take over and so i went and i worked with him for three years in that business and then he called me into his office one day and said listen

this is what you're doing you're doing this for me um and because of that i love you for it i really appreciate it but like you're you're not going to succeed because you're not doing it for you you're doing it for me this is my dream it's not yours and so he told me he's like go like find a job on wall street because that's what you're passionate about and so at that point like because i had experienced success with like that apple trade and a couple of other things i was like all right i can go and at this point i'm like 24 25 and i'm like all right i can either i can go to a bank and like try to work my

way up the ladder and get my own book and kind of like have my own pad by the time i'm 30. or like i had experienced a ton of success already i just need to learn how to trade and make money in the shorter time frame and you know because my investments generally would play out and so i was like all right like let me go put money up and i put money out up at a prop firm and i learned how to trade right and that was in um i started in like july of 2007 so it was right before the financial crisis like you know in like i

i was before that like i was short country-wide i shorted bear stearns like i like saw the writing on the wall if i knew what cbs was i probably wouldn't be here at this moment because i would have made a ton of money off that but i had no idea what it was wow you shorted the housing market before it crashed yeah i mean i would dude i had country-wide puts when it was at like 35 bucks oh my god that's epic bought apple calls and shorted out of the market in 2007 that's that's insane

and and yeah and like you know a lot of it was just kind of just being just understanding like what trends we're doing right and like understanding like the macro of things and and how that affects the micro and you know in in in 2008 in september 2008 i i went long like a ton of silver and gold and like i i did great off the bottom uh i admittedly like didn't know about bitcoin if not i probably would have bought some you know i i think it was like in 2010 i don't know exactly when

but i remember uh finding out about bitcoin around that time 2010 2012 time frame when bitcoin was around 27 and i was on i was on zero hedge and it was posted on zero hedge for the first time and i was like wow this is really cool and i was like all right like i was trying to figure out how to buy some i couldn't figure out how to buy it and then like i just kind of gave up and then like i saw it started running and it went to like a thousand bucks and then it pulled all the way back to 200 and i was like okay that like that's

that was the bubble right like that was it and then i didn't really look at bitcoin for for a couple years after that okay i i definitely want to get into the bitcoin story but i also want to back up and go go all the way all the way back so um we definitely have like a grasp on like your early interest into markets and and definitely having having a knack for that uh i want to talk a little bit about uh your education were there any like classes in school high school or college that really really resonated with you like any kind of subject matter specifically

um i mean i majored in finance uh so like i was always i always liked like valuation stuff so i'd say probably uh in high school there was only really one business class there was an economic class which i took which i loved and then in college like as i'm sitting here thinking about it probably uh a tax class which i took which you know was just like really boring but like super informative and practical and then also like um a private uh evaluation of private businesses which

was basically like you know how to value companies through cash flows dcf and all that kind of stuff which i think is super relevant to uh like even just publicly traded companies but to me i was always i was always very interested in uh the market side of things the publicly traded stuff right so i'm going to go ahead and guess that your education really happens hands-on right in a live environment more than it did actually like in a classroom does that sound about right yeah like i mean i think those two classes that i mentioned are probably

the most relevant classes where i learn stuff and you know it's like understanding price action and psychology it's like that's like mass psychology like you learn all that stuff like on the job right like you only learn it by feeling it like i can tell you like like oh like when the price moves against you you should do this or it goes in your favor take profits here but like you really don't know until you live it right like you've been in crypto now for a minute like you understand that like you're you're when you're like when you're feeling the most ecstatic about

your position you should be selling some and when you're feeling the most depressed about your position you should be buying some right because that's just the nature of human psychology no matter what market you're in right that that is the markets right like if you are feeling depressed so is the market when the market is also depressed right and so like you can take your own internal cues and apply them and apply them to the market absolutely um so when you were again in the the younger phases of your stock market finance uh education career be it in university or being hands-on

you said you said you looked around and you you saw everyone wearing white earbuds and so you got into apple then then you saw the writing on the wall with the housing market and short of that and then you got into gold was there for me like i didn't really care about anything in finance until i discovered a bitcoin crypto and so that was my thing but it sounds like you are a more broad you don't have actually no like personal interest in any one sector be it like tech or housing or gold or whatever was there any so what like part of before

crypto any part of like the the financial markets that really resonated with you as a sector or is it really just playing the game as a whole so i mean i think like as i think about it i very much understand and i like i like consumer discretionary in general like as uh as a tech as a stock investor and market participant i'm generally a generalist uh but i understand consumer trends the best right so it's like the apple made sense to me because literally i'm just sitting on a subway and i saw it a

couple years later uh i don't know the exact year but like maybe 2005 2006 like true religion jeans i don't know if you remember that fad i do i do that was a publicly traded company and i remember riding it from like four bucks up to like 20 because like everybody that was fashionable was wearing them right and there was this huge boon and so like to me it's like i very much just like was just paying attention to data and just being cognizant of these things that happen um again like i think to me a lot of it

the way i see it is like that's very all these things are very consumer focused and obviously at the end of the day i think the gold trade is you know the gold silver trade is why we all end up in crypto right where it's like hard money and not like money printing is uh ended up what kind of drawing me into to crypto in in the first place while you were going through this like early phase of your uh um finance stock market life were you doing this alone or did you have friends like-minded friends doing like-minded activities

so for the most part like in high school it was definitely me on my own in college it was still like me on my own uh when i started trading full-time obviously i was trading at at a prop firm with a lot of people who are also like-minded trading their own money so you know i feel like when you have your own money on the line it's very you treat it very differently than if you're running somebody else's money um and so like to me i very much uh i guess i kind of started finding my tribe um around like 25 you know and like my business

partner on the equity side we've been working together since you know 2007 which is i don't know about 14 15 years at this point before we get into how going with somebody uh change your your uh disposition how did you as an individual everyone has their own like risk tolerance everyone has their own like personal interest and risk or not how did how did that part of your financial life come come into play like when did you learn that you were where on the risk spectrum um i think i was always pretty far out

on the risk curve and i think that's pretty evident with you know the the play i made in nfts at the beginning of the year and i very much like manage like i think as a trader as anybody that's dealing with uh like financial assets in public markets like you're a risk manager right like that's your entire job right like you need to size accordingly you don't want to be too big you don't want to be too small you need to be just right and so you know i think i'm further out on the risk curve than most but i also

understand that because i have so much leverage in let's say my trading life like i will like buy a house with no mortgage right because i understand that like that's not somewhere where i need leverage right like if i was working a nine-to-five job making an annual salary of course i want that leverage because i want to appreciate i want to uh participate in the appreciation of the asset but i know that me personally like i don't need like something that necessarily is safe where if everything went to hell you know i still have a

place to sleep right and that's kind of the way i see the world very much is like okay what's the risk in this what am i risking you know what what am i what do i realistically think my risk is in this and size accordingly right you know like because and i think i i was doing it a lot on a day-to-day basis obviously training where it's like okay like i think like i'm risking 25 cents but if i'm risking 50 cents it's like double the risk right and like that messes up the entire risk reward so to me i always always always focus on

position sizing and what i think my initial risk is and and what i think i could lose in any given moment and that helps determine like what i want to do with regards to the position most people who are into crypto and likely most people in coming into into crypto don't come from finance like you do but most people don't actually like cognitively think about risks they just kind of do their thing and then risk maybe comes for them or maybe it doesn't when did you start like cognitively thinking about risk was that like very

very early on in your your finance career or like we did it come around later it didn't start really coming around until i started trading professionally because i think like in order to be successful uh like i mean listen trading markets is probably i'd say probably the hardest job in the world it's you know you're it's emotionally taxing you have to be very very disciplined like you know i've trained a lot of people throughout the years and i will say the number one thing that determines whether you're successful in in publicly traded markets is your

discipline right because like if let's say you're risking a hundred dollars and and this was like a lesson i always tried to teach kids when like they were starting it's like you know let's say you're risking 100 and you lose 120 okay cool that's not that big of a deal right it's an extra twenty dollars you're still gonna be able to eat tonight but you know let's leverage that up like you know 100x right and like if you're risking a hundred thousand dollars and you lose a hundred twenty thousand dollars like that's a that's that's a big drawdown that's significantly more than you were risking and that messes up your upside scenarios

right that messes up all your risk reward on any trade that you might take so to me it became very very evident very early on uh especially from the people that taught me is like you need to be disciplined you need to have a system and you know you need to understand that like you're not you know going to always be right and you don't you know there's a difference between training to make money and training to be right right and you're not going to make money if you're training to be right did you learn this the the whole just risk management behavior from taking a big l at all or did you did you just

kind of learn a bit just from just from time yeah like i mean i think i took taking big l's throughout my career right like i think uh really young uh making a ton of money in the dot-com bubble and not selling anything because i didn't want to pay taxes it's like you know you know i went up from like five or six x down to like you know losing 90 right so it's like to me like that was a like a very valuable lesson early on that you know especially as you know you make it a professional career like i'm never

necessarily married to a position right it's like this is a trade and if i'm wrong like i have to get out right or you know like i when i hit my risk limit like i have to get out right and and that's to me is probably the hardest part about trading right is you know if you the more conviction you have in something the harder it is to let go and it's against human nature to like take that loss and kind of regroup and rethink about it from a clear head you know i i was actually just talk chatting with somebody uh over the weekend where they were telling me

that like i guess in the march bottom last year of of crypto where they sold the bottom and then bought it back like you know a day or two later like at a slightly higher price and i'm like that was the right thing to do oh that's that's i did that that was exactly me but that's the right thing to do right like that's the beauty of like a very liquid market right like if you if you did that with real estate you wouldn't be able to get back in but like the beautiful thing about things that trade 24 hours all the time is that you could literally you could buy it and

they'd be like oh no that wasn't the right decision you could sell it and it cost you like you know 50 bips like it it costs you like nothing and and so to me it's like there's nothing more important than having a clear head when you're making these really important decisions and that was something i learned like on the job uh thankfully through the people that taught me and and my experience so when in your in your timeline did you cross the one million mark um uh it was i it was at some point in my twenties um

you know it was i did really well obviously um off the bottom in in uh in march of 2000 into the well in in september 2008 march of 2009 i did really well um and then you know i experienced like a hard time in my trading career in like 2014 2015 maybe uh where i gave back a lot of what i made uh just because the market was just very hard to trade at that time and then okay so i think it's time to go

into uh the bitcoin crypto story so where we left this off is you stop bitcoin around 20 you wanted to buy it but it was too hard watch it go to a thousand watch it drop to 200 where does it where what happens next and so like i just wasn't paying attention to it afterwards right like i was just like i would pay attention to it whenever like it popped up on zero hedge or the news like i knew what it was because like i remember the first time i read about it i i was like going down the rabbit hole for like two or three hours i couldn't figure out how to buy it i was like oh like that was it

tulips and then uh in mid 2017 early 2017 bitcoin starts getting back above the thousand bucks and i'm like oh like me as a security yeah me as a student of price action like there's something here right like if if price gets back above there and it's holding like this would be something that i'm paying attention to so i decided to do a deep dive and from that deep dive i find ethereum and i'm like wow this is even better than bitcoin right because like there's

programmers on here and like i want to go where the devs are because that's where the talent is going and then i started going down the ico rabbit hole and you know i caught let's say like the mid to late stage cycle of that and i remember in like q1 of 2018 being like this tech is really good it's gonna change the world but i was i still remembered my experience back back in high school right where uh obviously the internet was gonna change the world but every all valuations got ahead of

themselves so i sold anything that i had that was liquid in q1 and i was like i'll be back and i'm like it's gonna take like seven to ten years to build out blockchain tech right because i was using the dot-com uh parallel right where the the 90s came like you know the the bubble popped in 2000 and then the internet that we really used today didn't come about till like 2010. so i was like all right tech is going to move a little faster so maybe seven years and you know i sold anything that i had that was liquid and i was still keeping an eye on it from

from afar and um you know when when jerome powell said in march of 2020 that he was buying everything i wired a bunch of money over to coinbase did my first uh rebuy of crypto in in like three years and i started going back down the rabbit hole and i was like holy [ __ ] like they built some really cool stuff like very fast right like the first time i used ave i was like this is going to change the world and so you know i start listening to as many uh podcasts as i

can like that's where i found you guys and started listening to you guys as i was starting to get reacquainted with everything that i missed and you know i was yield farming and you know kind of like trying to figure it out and i found nfts in like august or september uh late august early september and immediately they start making sense to me because i started playing fortnite at the beginning of quarantine so we are actually um uh uh in the classes of the same era we came into uh crypto around 2017. i came in i

started really paying attention in like june or august or something and then went all in in like september but uh where you had the uh the the dot-com bubble in your belt i had nothing and so your.com bubble lessons was my crypto 2017 lessons where uh you know went all in on ether at 300 dollars at in like uh yeah the first half the middle of 2017 goes up to 1400 i'm like wow this is insane like i'm a psych student i had no

idea that this would be like i would have this money and then it goes down to 600 and i'm like all in and then it goes down to 400 i'm like all in and then it goes down to 200 i'm like all in and then it goes down to 80 i'm like well i'm out of money uh and so like it's it's funny and this is why like everyone talks about like oh class of 2017 class of 2013 now we have the class of 2020 in 2021 and like it's kind of just like this rite of passage for so many people that don't know about money and finance to buy the top have an