We did not learn this from a book.
We're not career fund managers. We're two operators and researchers who taught ourselves the markets in real time — by being early, by being wrong, and by staying in the game through multiple full crypto cycles. What follows is the discipline we built the hard way.
How we actually decide.
Research Before Conviction
Every position we've ever taken started as a research project, not a tip or a trend. We've spent thousands of hours studying a single protocol before committing meaningful capital. Conviction, for us, is earned through depth of study, not speed of entry.
Contrarian, But Never Reckless
Some of our best calls have come from taking the less popular side of a trade — backing Moonriver when the crowd favoured Acala, or studying Solana and Bittensor seriously when the market had given up on them. We can spot contrarian opportunities because we do the work to know when the crowd is wrong, not because we enjoy being different.
Patience to Let a Thesis Prove Itself
We'd rather miss the first leg of a move than buy a story that hasn't been tested. We watched Terra's UST for a long time and only engaged after it survived its first real stress test. We watch, we wait, and we let a project prove its resilience before we act.
No Emotional Attachment to Any Position
We've walked away from ecosystems we once believed in completely — including a project we were genuinely excited about in our very first year — the moment the data stopped supporting the thesis. We're not married to a coin, a sector or a story. We're married to the process.
Comfort With Change, Conviction to Ride It
Our attention has moved from Polkadot to Solana to Bitcoin to Bittensor to tokenised equities — not because we chase trends, but because we accept that no single narrative stays dominant forever. We'd rather adapt early than defend a position out of pride.
An Instinct That Is Trained, Not Guessed
People sometimes call it a “gut feel” when we back something the market hasn't priced in yet. It isn't. It's a pattern-recognition instinct built over years of daily market immersion, rigorous due diligence, and tracking outcomes against our own predictions — closer to a craft than a hunch.
Five years, three market cycles, told honestly.
An honest, phase-by-phase account of live decision-making — including the calls that worked, the ones that didn't, and what each phase taught us.
Discovery
We entered the crypto markets in January 2021, drawn in initially by the returns everyone was talking about. What kept us there was something deeper — the idea of “value transfer” that Bitcoin and blockchain were offering, and the history behind it. Our first real conviction trade came through Polkadot and Kusama's parachain crowdloan auctions — a mechanism that fascinated us, where bidders locked tokens for a year or more to win a slot. Acala was the crowd favourite; we backed Moonriver instead, a contrarian call built on research rather than a guess. It became our first major win. The same period took us into early-stage IDOs, and into a long study of Terra's UST — we waited, and only engaged after its first de-peg-and-recovery gave us a live stress test of the protocol. We stayed through Terra's collapse in May 2022, which remains one of the costliest lessons of our investing life.
The Crucible
The bottom of the bear market — Terra's collapse, the failure of Three Arrows Capital and other funds, and a brutal macro backdrop. It was also the period we grew the most as investors. When FTX collapsed, Solana — heavily associated with FTX and Alameda — was sold off as if it had no floor. We saw a different story: the developers hadn't left, and real building continued. After years studying the protocol, we leaned in decisively at the point of maximum fear. The same period brought us to Bittensor, long before AI was mainstream — an unlisted, unproven token with two green flags that mattered more to us than the red ones: a dense concentration of serious builders, and a genuinely novel thesis. We found it through a small, vetted Discord community, engaging directly with miners and founders long before any public price discovery existed. This was also when we made our first move into Bitcoin, close to the cycle low. Just as important as what we bought was what we left — we exited the Polkadot ecosystem completely once it became clear adoption wasn't arriving, despite how much we'd believed in the engineering.
Conviction Compounds
Ahead of the first US spot Bitcoin ETF approval, we turned meaningfully more constructive on Bitcoin — a real shift, since we'd deliberately avoided treating it as a core position early on. Our reading of the ETF catalyst convinced us Bitcoin was about to unlock real retail and institutional demand for the first time. Around the same time, we stepped back from Solana at what we judged to be fair value — only to lean back in a month later once pump.fun ignited a wave of retail and meme-coin activity on the network. We don't have a reliable way to value meme tokens individually, so rather than try, we chose to back the platform they were all trading on instead.
Building the Next Edge
Pre-election promises on crypto met a messier reality of tariffs and shifting geopolitics, and the bull run many expected didn't fully arrive. What did arrive was real regulatory progress in the US on stablecoins and tokenised assets, and we built a measured position around protocols positioned to benefit. Our largest focus in this phase was Hyperliquid — we were using the platform well before launch, drawn to its 24/7 perpetual-trading thesis and buyback mechanics. We also grew our attention to Bittensor through this period, watching early miners and validators game the emission mechanics before subnet quality and governance steadily improved — and eventually built a dedicated research practice around Bittensor and its subnets.
The Pivot
By this phase, much of crypto looked expensive relative to genuine product-market fit, while AI was compounding fast with real, visible adoption. Tokenised equities on the blockchain gave us a practical way to get exposure to that growth — engaging with public names like Tesla, Google, Nvidia and Amazon, and private names like SpaceX and Anthropic, through the same access. This phase also included a historic liquidation event that wiped out billions of dollars in hours, worsened by geopolitical conflict and a fresh wave of inflation — crypto broadly still hasn't recovered. What protected us was the earlier pivot into AI and tokenised equities, and a simple rule we now apply across the board: only hold projects with real revenue, real users and real product-market fit. In the early years we bought the promise. Today we buy the proof.
Looking Ahead
We think the extreme volatility we've lived through in crypto is going to spread more broadly across asset classes globally — driven by an uncertain macro backdrop and the sheer pace of AI-driven disruption. Beyond our current focus, we're watching the peptide and broader pharma sector closely, applying the same research discipline we've used everywhere else. Our edge going into this next phase is, we believe, threefold: we've already lived through extreme volatility and know how to operate inside it; we stay close enough to markets — globally and continuously — to catch the few outsized dislocations that drive most real returns each cycle; and we hold firmly to capital protection alongside growth, avoiding leverage and gambling, staying selective about where real conviction is earned.
"We don't have all the answers, and we try to say so plainly when we don't. What we can offer is years of disciplined, documented decision-making across multiple full market cycles, and a genuine, demonstrated instinct for finding the next contrarian opportunity before it becomes consensus."
This page describes our personal research process and investment journey for transparency and educational purposes only. It is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset, and past decisions are not indicative of future results. Turtle Tree is a finance education and consulting company, not a registered investment advisor or fund manager.