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HODLing

Notes and principles after the market crash: I’m still holding

HODLing
2–4 min read

This morning a little after 6am I casually checked the price of $blue — it was only 0.07. I figured it had just been sliding these past few days. I still had conviction in the coin, so I didn’t care much — let it drop. Then I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I saw $sui had fallen to just over $2. Scrolling the news: yep, I had just lived through the largest liquidation event in Bitcoin’s history. $20B in derivatives wiped out. I don’t trade leverage, so while I did lose money, oddly I didn’t feel bad — it actually felt like a good time to add.

About the crash, I noticed a few things:

  1. Yesterday afternoon, there were mentions of an ancient whale shorting ETH.
  2. At night I saw the S&P 500 plunge — it seemed markets already knew tax hikes were coming.
  3. Someone shorted on Hyperliquid 30 minutes before the crash and ended up netting $1.3B; notably, the account was new and on its first day of trading.
  4. Trump made remarks, and markets tanked.

A few more things:

  1. Aster did a $100M buyback before the crash.
  2. Binance had outages during the crash; many couldn’t close positions.
  3. I saw posts today saying Trump wants CZ to return to Binance.

I don’t like conspiracy theories either, but it’s hard not to suspect Trump was pulling strings behind the scenes. It barely feels like they’re even trying to hide it. As for why I think Aster’s $100M pre-crash buyback was part of this: Aster is something CZ pushed hard recently to build up, so letting the Aster token blow up would be bad. Better to spend more to keep it propped up. I truly don’t think this was a coincidence. Indirectly, this suggests Aster eventually reaching $4 is pretty much a given. (We can check this later, but so far CZ’s past statements have tended to play out.)

As for why I’m still holding: policy shocks amplify short-term volatility, but they don’t negate the long-term value being built in blockchain. And yeah, I’m just grateful I wasn’t playing with leverage.