Crypto Confidential

Crypto Confidential is a gripping, fast-paced memoir that’ll place you next to Nat Eliason on his rollercoaster ride through the 2021 crypto hype cycle, from gambling on NFTs to coding smart contracts holding millions of dollars, all while explaining the terminology of this new financial frontier in a simple, understandable way.

Transparency is a key theme in the world of blockchain technology. Everything is public. Every wallet address and its balance, every transaction, and every piece of software. As a result, information spreads extremely quickly. The public can close most gaps within a day.

The consequence of this transparency is that things don’t last. Nat encounters this strange, easy-come-easy-go dynamic time and again in the book:

When Nat first deposits some of his Ethereum to farm a new coin, he makes $110 in a single evening, but the returns diminish so quickly, he must look for another new project the next day. As he publishes his first smart contract—a software application on the blockchain—he makes a mistake and instantly gets hacked. Nat makes some money from the Iron Finance stablecoin launched on Polygon, but as soon as users discover a small pricing error, a massive bank run begins, and the brand new protocol’s 2 coins race to $0 in a matter of hours.

Since everyone can see, copy, and trace everything done by everyone else, the speed of information in crypto is insanely high, and so everything that can fail will—usually within a matter of hours, days, or maybe months, but not years.

This is why, on the one hand, it was easy for Nat to get deeper and deeper into crypto very quickly. On the other hand, it also meant he had to always keep pushing forward. Until he hit his breaking point.

They say that in a bull market, every investor looks like a genius. This happened to Nat, too. Besides his early $35,000 hack, his crypto journey went exceptionally well. Nat sold an NFT at the top of the market for $200,000. Every project he put money into went up. He even learned enough Solidity, Ethereum’s programming language, to get a gig with a gaming startup and pocket one million of their project’s tokens. To top it all off, 3 top tier crypto funds decided to invest into that company. Nat could see the millions already. Unfortunately, he could only sell a small number of his tokens each day. Meanwhile, one of the funds bought more coins in secret to dump them on the public right with the fundraise announcement and cash in twice! Nat decided not to act on this insider knowledge. He kept his vest clean, but he also never saw his million coins turn…