Hey, sookie, what's going on? Hey, hey. All right, before we get started, sookie, do you want to give our audience a quick background to yourself, your origin story, your career trajectory, and then how you ultimately made the jump into Web 3 and the kind of work that you've done in the industry as well? Yeah.
For sure, everyone, my name is Suki. I've been working crypto since 2019 and mostly started by trading. I started building algorithms to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum and a bunch of other tokens back in 2019, 2020.
The amount of performance was really young, really young, and good. So from there, PENTERA recruited me to help them build out the quant fund. So I worked at PENTERA on the investment team mostly under the liquid token fund.
where I helped build out the whole quantum arm to trade cryptosis magically. So there I sourced a lot of different indicators for different cryptocurrencies and build out different models to predict the market and mostly it was pretty high frequency at the time. We tried to trade hourly and
So we also wrote our internal trading execution algorithms and smart order routing system. And we slice up the order to send it to like at the time FDS, Binance and Ember, some of the other prime brokers.
After that, after Pantera, I joined two companies, the first one, the NFT company as Head of Growth and BD. It was a very different role. It was a very web-thru-in-native type growth role and was a lot of working with the communities. After that, I've been working
as a senior product manager building out their crypto compliance software. So, being spending the past almost a year working on a lot of the, how does regulation look like? How is that going to affect crypto businesses? How do we develop a software that effectively protect
credo businesses from potential legal or regulated regulatory risks. So that's the snapshot of my background and yet we're love to talk more, I'll take the conversation to talk about more of the market, why the world drives the market to go
up and down every single day or longer time horizon. We also love to talk about like more operational or more startup web-thruary topics. So yeah, we're super excited to join the space today and we love to share what I know and excited me or
Thank you for the breakdown. That's awesome. Look, I want to start with the algos. You said you built algos to trade Bitcoin and Ether. Can you dive a bit deeper into that? What goes into building an algorithm from someone who is no experience?
at all. I'm not a developer. I've never built an algorithm. Would love to know from start to finish at a high level what goes into that final, that final product that lets you, and I'm assuming let's you automatically trade Bitcoin in ether. I don't know. Would love some insight.
Yeah, that's a really good question. So to understand contouring and we would first need to understand that contouring in aquedies is actually really different from contouring in crypto. And even in today's world, we've seen most of
the trading that happens in the traditional equity space has been more quantitative versus fundamental. There are still a lot of fundamental shops that have some offer that the historically has been successful, but I definitely have seen a trend that's more consolidating to more
quantitative strategies. And the same thing has been happening in crypto as well. Like in the early days, I can give you a deep dive down of how like the trading or slash like quant has worked historically in the crypto space. So in 2017, we've seen a lot of like ICOs
We've seen a lot of different price arbitrage across different countries or even across different exchanges. Sometimes a price difference of even Bitcoin could be like 5% on two different exchanges. So a very simple like arbitrage could be, oh, I buy Bitcoin
at a cheaper exchange and then sell it on an exchange that Bitcoin is more expensive. And some of the other things that you could do early on is crypto is very based on momentum. So momentum strategies has been working for quite some time, even to
Even today, I say momentum is still a strategy that worked for a lot of smaller tokens, although notes to be taken is typically for any strategy, so for any alpha, it doesn't exist forever. So that's why we always have to keep exploring, okay, what's the new
indicators and alpha that's driving the market in today's world. So we've seen, so for example, like in from 2017 to 2019, a lot of the stat-arb means like statistical arbitrage and cross exchange kind of arbitrage or even like cross-country arbitrage.
I'm sure you guys have heard the SPF story where he bought Bitcoin in US and in Korea because it's really hard for some countries to buy cryptocurrencies. From there, after 2019-2021, I would say it was still a really good time.
to try crypto and if you're able to source a lot of the indicators or even if you're just like heavily leaning on one strategy that you have that works well that could be highly profitable and that was mostly the kiss for me in 2020 where even back then a lot of momentum strikes
So I'll briefly explain what momentum strategy means or you know if the odd if you have any questions about like the definition of different strategies I'm happy to like pause a bit and explain what that is and how to do it. Yeah, so that was actually that was actually my next question. What what is a momentum strategy?
Yeah, for sure. So momentum strategy is basically means to put it in a very simple words is once price is going up, it's more likely to keep going up and when the price tanks, it's more likely to tank. So I know it sounds very
It sounds very vague, it sounds very abstract. And what that means is like one, so for example, you can detect the price, it went up in the last hour for 2 to 5%. And based on that, you can basically predict that in the next
the price most likely will still keep going up. Or however you define the frequency, but basically the momentum means that it's similar in the tri-fi world where when something is going up and everybody realized the
the price is going up and everybody is following into it and everybody buys and the price keeps going up. Versus when the price is 10k and it's more likely that people also realize, oh shit, the market is down 10%. I have to like sell otherwise I'm gonna lose all my money.
So it might, it's likely that you will keep tanking. So put it in simple logic. If that's a logic in terms of how you actually code the logic, there's like many tutorials on YouTube on GitHub that you can just search for like momentum strategies for trading. And there's
There's pretty well researched algorithm out there, so it's like, I don't have to dive into the details of how to build the august, but there are tons of tutorials online that you can search like momentum strategies and you'll find a lot of tutorials.
I guess the momentum strategy you explained in the layman's terms, it makes sense for me. My anecdotal experience is very likely at the beginning of a bull market and even through bull market and then at a bear market. It's kind of easy to predict. I'm not
But I would imagine a lot of short traders made a lot of money going from 69 Bitcoin all the way down to 15k. But what about in a sideways, not bull, not bear, but a consolidating market? Is that strategy, is that momentum strategy as dependable?
Yeah, good question. So I've done a lot of research on like market regimes. So basically in crypto There are time there's different market regimes and based on the regime that you're in the strategies that works best might be different. So for example, like during the
strategy called "grace strategy". So that means one price goes up by like 5% I sell. Like there's no excuse for holding it. I'm not counting on the price to keep going up for like another 5% because that's not the market regime that we're in. And one price drops by
3 to 5% I sell. There's no excuse of holding it either. So that's the strategy that's also pretty well established and the larger behind that is you make more stable returns during the market when it's more stable and it's called like stop loss
and also stop win. And it's important to stop win too because when your father is going up, most people don't have the discipline to be like, okay, it went up 5% in the last hour. It may still go up, so I'm gonna hold. And then you know what, the next hour it's probably
not going to rise another 5% and you end up not capturing the volatility or the upside that you could have if you stick to the discipline of trading. And that's what makes that's what why trading is so beautiful right because essentially you're finding against your human eye.
your human intuition or your innate drive to keep making money when things are looking good, you have to be like, okay, I made 5% of past our, I'm selling and it's a price, and it's a price like, drop
and I'm also going to sell my assets instead of hoping that it will go up. So that strategy is more generate more stable return. It has like a better shop ratio, it has better risk management and the drawdown is also controlled better, but I would recommend
not do that manually because people overestimate their rationale almost 100% of the time. You think you'll be rational, you think you can stop loss when you lose money, guess what? Even SPF Caroline wouldn't be able to do that. So I would strongly recommend
recommend if you are not a discipline and experienced trader try to stick to algorithms and if your algorithm work, like give the algorithms to try versus like trusting yourself that you're not going to be emotional about your win or win that loss. Suki for people that want to apply this strategy.
I think you're right on the money when you said people are not rational even though they think they are and they don't stay disciplined the way they should to apply the strategy. What algorithms are rather let me let me replace the question. Do you sell any of the proprietary algorithms that you built or are they just in house?
and you keep them in a closed circle. Yeah, that's a good question. Typically, I'm pretty low key on the strategies that I have or that I run. Although more recently, I've been thinking about how to make, like, I want to share
more of my knowledge and thinking that maybe I can make that. Of course, teaching people or educate people on trading because it can seem really daunting when you put your money into crypto and most people lose money. Like, let me be honest, I think most people lose the cons of money in crypto.
Most people only foam on the top of the market and when the market drops they sell so they end up losing the money and then they're like oh crypto like it's a scam I lost so much money in crypto well what actually happens is it's not different from any
of any of the other market where at the end of day it's a capital market, right? Price goes up and down and if you only buy when everybody is like really passionate and really hyping crypto up, guess what? You're gonna buy at the top of the market and
And if you sell when everybody is giving up on crypto and be like, oh, crypto has no hope. It's going to die. The regulation campaign. I'm just going to sell. And then, and that not only applies to most retail traders and it really applies to a lot of institutional traders as well, even in Wall Street.
Most of Hatch funds, most Trapai funds that invest in crypto, they phomo into crypto when Bitcoin was $60,000. And then they lost the bunch of money and now they're like, "I want to never touch in crypto again." And guess what? That's the opposite of what a
a trader should do, what a long-term investor should do. And so the problem isn't necessarily with crypto being a scam, it's more so like you need to understand the things that you're trading to be able to make like actual return and make real kind of returns on your strategies.
On that front, I will advertise for myself a little bit. If you guys are interested in learning trading for me, feel free to send me a DM. I'm in the process of organizing a lot of my own trading all goals and hoping to launch some course soon. And yeah, stay tuned.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing those courses when you put them out. I'm not a trader and I don't think I'll ever really be a trader. It's just not I don't have the temperament for it or if I'm being honest the discipline and the rationale when it comes when push comes to shove so I would love to get my hands on an algo that stays to
models to predict the market. What are some big predictions that you guys made through the 2021 bull run or even beyond? Did you guys predict the beginning of the bear market? I guess you would say it was December of 2021 through
kind of the the implosion of FTX and the contagion that that caused it. Ultimately, let Bitcoin to go down to 15k to summarize my question. Did you think that Bitcoin, did you predict that Bitcoin would go from 69k to 15k and also what other predictions you guys make major predictions?
Yeah, for sure. I can't comment, I'm afraid I can't comment too much on the exact models that we have built because that's more proprietary kind of assets. I can talk more on high level of the logic of how to how you predict the market and how you go around
building algorithms to better predict the risk or like one to take the risk off. So during the bull market, I think it comes when it comes to the fun. There's two sides that I would be looking at. One is more quantitative manners and the other is more fundamental.
manners. So for example, quantitative, we source a lot of different indicators for Bitcoin alone. I think at the time they had again, I can comment on exempt numbers, but we have a lot of indicators for all the different crypto tokens that we're going to like, you know, the trading side of
things and for the more fundamental set of things it really comes down to the knowledge of the space and the research that go into different protocols or the landscape. So for example like when you see Ethereum has all these
different problems that scalability and at the time the gas fees were really high. So you start thinking, okay, if that's what's going on with thearium, what's going to be the solution. So you think about layer 2s and you think about maybe other layer ones. And once
you start realizing that maybe the solution in a short term is not cognizant in the same to solve the scalability issues. Maybe you should look elsewhere and if you believe in other later tools or other later ones can solve the problem and that means there's financial
outside for those tokens. So that's one of the logic. And it really comes down to first principle thinking of what is worth building in the space, how is this product solving what problems, and why is it important to solve it.
And if it is, then should you invest in the project or should you invest in the tokens? And there's like the primary market and there's the secondary market. The primary market, most people don't really have access to, right? Because it's more venture capital or like small group of enjoy investors that can have access to
access to really good deal flows. But then on the second remark, I think most people have access to. And one of the fundamental use case and why crypto is here to stay is because it does provide that sort of liquidity for a lot of early stage companies and for a lot of projects.
to be able to have capital efficiency and liquidity from early days versus in traditional equity market, we don't see any liquidity for venture investing or for any investors to invest in a project until it goes public or IPO.
And even then, you can trade their stocks, but their stocks may or may not be like a perfect indicator of how the company is doing stuff. So yeah, I think my thoughts around going back
to your question of how do you decide when to take risk off? There are different indicators that I would personally look at that works pretty well. I personally, fortunately, I can't speak for Pentera, I can't speak for like Pentera's performance, I can't speak for their
strategies, but I can speak for myself is, you know, when everybody is really excited about crypto and the price is like through the roof or you're like, oh my god, even like my mom is talking about crypto and you sell and you know, when everybody is like, oh no, crypto is dead.
regulations coming like I'm never touching this thing again like people are leaving and I buy so and it has worked out it's been working out for me for I guess at least for now but yeah I think a long-term strategy is like true
I hope that I try to hold a more long term horizon and I don't recommend it. Now if you want to invest in a risky asset class, I highly recommend that you should definitely do it.
own research unless you are like okay I don't want to do the research I want to invest in a hedge fund for people who know how to invest professionally and then you know you could do that but if you are going to trade or invest in cryptocurrencies it's extremely
high risk, I would not recommend you going into a space putting your money there and without knowing what's going on. So that would be my general sentiment on retail investors and yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good, I think it's a good point to highlight.
I'm not a trader and this is not financial advice for me, but my strategy for the last five years has been to DCA and to Bitcoin and then over the last I think three years more DCA. These didn't make as much sense to me until about like 2019. That was a bit behind the pack as far as
is really getting an understanding of its value prop, but that's DCA hold long term never sell unless you do want to sell. In which case, the time to sell a Suke said is when your mom and your cab driver and the gym instructor and everyone else is telling you that they're buying the Bitcoin.
Sookie, you gave a good example of just looking at a one component of the market and then making a prediction. You said that when you see ETH gaspies being that high, obvious answer is, "Okay, ETH gaspies are through the roof. I should probably start looking
looking or potentially investing in layer 2s or even alternative layer 1s that have EVM compatibility. What are some trends that you're noticing right now? What are some indicators that you're noticing right now that you could paint the same example with? Or paint a similar example with, excuse me.
I think right now the market is under a very different condition compared to 2021 and the indicators that largely worked back then may or may not still be working for the market right now. I think right now it's under
too many macro impact. So for example, if there's any risks that are being exposed or affected by the macro market, all the crypto basically tanks, there's not that much point in diversifying your portfolio right now.
Because when it goes up everything goes up when it goes down almost everything goes down So unless you're high frequency trader unless you can You can predict the percentage difference change between one token and another I would not
recommend you like trying to like diversify your portfolio hoping that one thing will raise one thing will increase and while another token drops I don't think right now that's the case I think right now crypto market is under a lot of pressure from the
macro environment and like if anything happens to any crypto companies or banks or macro environment in general, it's highly correlated between crypto market and macro market. So, you know, unless
you have some really inside information on a project like launching something or doing something different. I think right now it's highly, yeah, like I said, it's really correlated to what's going on in the macro environment.
Fair point. Suki, after Penter, after there you went to an NFT project called MDD as the head of growth, am I correct? Yeah, it's called hype. Okay, and tell us about that experience. I would love to hear more.
Yeah, that was a really fun experience. So I worked there as a health growth MBD, leading partnerships, integrations and work on product strategies. It was during the NFT hype when everybody was aping into buying NFTs and there's
many stories where oh my god I bought a boardade for like one Ethereum and now it's like a hundred Ethereum and and then they they were show like their their profit on like those NFT trades and that was a that was a really interesting time I think the time that I got in was like probably at the
peak of the NFT market and after that the market has been cooling down quite a bit since then. It was a very different environment because I think the NFT space, the only proven product market fit is either you build an NFT exchange, NFT marketplace like OpenCMM.
or you start your own NFT collection where you would launch an NFT and then everybody buys it and you play the game of whitelisting and eardrops and all of that and hyping out the floor price and only those two.
Looking back from today, I think around that time, people were really excited about this because NFT, I think, is a true invention. I do think it's a true invention by InCrypto because it is something that doesn't exist elsewhere.
outside of crypto. Like most things in crypto already exist somewhat in the traditional tech or traditional finance versus NFD is one of a kind that only existed and still only exists in crypto. So if you think about it anything could be an
NFT. You can make any asset that's non-fungible to be on chain and have the ownership and that's of value. Something is valuable because people deem value for the thing and people are willing to trade or willing to buy.
A lot of people say cryptocurrency don't have any value, but that's not true because US dollar has value because we all believe that it has value. If you give other people like US dollar, they're willing to pay for it. Like your stocks has value because people demand as valuable. And the same thing
as for Bitcoin and Ethereum as well. If you don't think Bitcoin is valuable, then feel free to send any Bitcoin to my wallet address. I'd be more than happy to accept it. So yeah, the end of the experience was very, very interesting. I would put it that way.
way. I'm really excited to see how NFT evolves in during the current bear market and I'm pretty confident it'll come back at some point with a lot more sophisticated market structure, a lot more sophisticated things you can do with NFTs and I'm pretty excited for
the current people who are building in the NFT space, they're still building, they're still coming up with things that's very creative and I'm excited to see one day when the main, when the real adoption happens, what that would look like. Yeah, Sukey, let's, let's expand upon that a bit.
Because I find the topic interesting, what are some ways that you see NFTs evolving? And what are some legacy industries that you see NFTs truly disrupting? I know one that we are currently seeing in the beginning of this gaming or even music, as well as I keep hearing
the collateralization of real estate through NFTs and giving people fractionalized pieces of real estate that they can be invested in and earn dividends on or royalties on. But we'll left to hear your thoughts as to how you see the NFT landscape evolving over the next year or two.
Yeah, I don't think I'm the best person to comment on how the NFT market is going to evolve, but I could see, I could talk about some of the observations that I've made. I think in the future,
The whole NFT experience would be more seamlessly and you may or may not even realize this NFT. I think we'll be more plugged into the real applications or even in our daily lives. You would not realize that, oh, this is an NFT.
I think the whole experience or like the adoption with membership or like the real utilities that come with NFTs will really take off. Like that's what I hope for and I also think it's going to happen. So I think in the last bull market,
the explosion of NFTs was more similar to the ICO days where some project launched a token or some project launched an NFT and everybody buys it and everybody gets rich and a lot of people get rug and pulled. That happened in the last
bull market and then over time crypto market has been more like has been figuring itself out now we don't see any ICOs anymore if you launch a token and just hoping that like people will buy and you will get rich by launching a token I don't
I don't think it's going to exist anymore. I don't think it'll happen at the same level to the SEO days or some of the NFTs. I think that's bull-round. It wouldn't be like, oh, this collection launched some NFTs and the floor price went from like
0.01 eth to like 1 eth or 2 eth. It that could still happen, but it would just be like a lot more sophisticated mechanisms and a lot harder to do compared to the last bull market. And I hope to see more real utilities plug into NFTs and more
Or is it overall a seamless user experience to have the main NFT adoption? I love that comparison. It's actually one I make quite often. Basically, I sum it up like this. The NFTs today are what I
I don't know what the next kind of nascent revelation will be. The next and the bull run whenever that's going to happen maybe in 2024 or 2025. But I do remember in 2018, 2019, people saying that we'll never see a
bull around like we saw in 2017-2018. We ended up seeing one in 2021 and you know part of 2022, excuse me. So I'd be curious to know before we move on to your time working at Cerca, I'd be curious to know what you...
I guess it's hard to predict these things, but what you see the next bull run looking like and what you think the next big thing might be. I know that we're going to be in a more mature market and hopefully a market with more utility, but let's hear your thoughts, Sukey.
Yeah, I think the next boat round may or may not be, I don't think it's necessary to be this year. I sometimes part of me even hope that the bear market can stay a bit longer to shica all the noise and to shica all the people that don't actually
believe in crypto. And it's already been happening. Like a lot of people has left crypto or stopped building crypto projects. A lot of investors no longer invest in crypto and it's really a time of awakening and shaking up the people who are not true believers.
terms of what the next bull market looks like, I think it would have, I really hope that the bear market is long enough that people build out everything that needs to be built out. And so the next bull market when it happens, we can see real
adoption and we can see like a different level of infrastructure, a different level of things that you can do with cryptocurrencies and you'll see a lot more projects that's servicing different needs in the industry. So yeah, I'm pretty excited in terms of the time
I can't really comment on that, but I do think it's going to happen sooner or later. >> Sukie, you mentioned that you were working at Syracite as a crypto compliance manager, elaborate on what that experience
was like and what some of your responsibilities were? Yeah for sure. I just before I dive into it do have a hard stop in a few minutes so I if there's you know other questions feel free to DM me I track my Twitter really often
In that case, so if you do want to just kind of highlight the working at Syritix, I did want to ask your opinion on excuse me, I wanted to ask your opinion on how regulation is going to affect crypto businesses and some of the softwares that you want to
want to build to protect businesses from risks and also just kind of what do you think? Well, we kind of talked about what drives the market to go up and down over a longer time horizon, but I kind of want to highlight those three before you head out and they have the hard stop soon here. So if you wanted to give us a quick overview of each
Sure, yeah. On the regulation side, I've been building so certain it's bread and butter is auditing businesses. So over the years, we've accumulated a lot of hacks and scams incidents data, not just data, but
very extensive database to that tells you different wallets and that's involving different incidents. So as a product manager, I've worked on a data risk data API. So basically, without API, you'll be able to track all of the scammers
and hackers in the space. And on the compliance fund for the compliance product, it is more so focusing on different risks that is either sanctioned or that is like the regulator be like, "Hey, or like preventing you from money laundering."
risks and it's really hard to do that in crypto historically because a lot of the like people that use crypto are not QIC you don't know who the other person is you don't know if a money go into some kind of a smart contract or a mixer and then when a money comes out
you don't know if it was being laundered or if it was a normal kind of swap or when you use uni swap for example. And what that means for crypto companies, especially more recently with regulation tightening up, a lot of crypto companies are really
of regulatory risks. I have no company that has raised money and they were shutting down because the other SEC came after them or some regulator would knock on their door to and ask them, "Hey, why did you
allow this user to be on your platform or just things like that. Like I think in the past when the regulation hasn't caught up as much crypto was able to grow in a more kind of risk-free environment where but a lot of that was also regulatory kind of arbitrage and I
think as US regulators get more and more educated on the topic. It is interesting to see how they're handling regulations with different crypto companies and especially if you're handling money transfers. Right? I think right now anything custodian is
pretty tricky to do. Anything centralized is pretty tricky to do too because you're basically taking people's money and you're either allocating that somewhere or you're buying or trading for your clients money. So all of that are still
pretty tricky to deal with from if you're a centralized exchange, if you're a prime broker that's custodian. And I still think that leaves us with more broom for DeFi, although DeFi is kind of stalled.
under the similar risks in the United States but you don't need to have as many licenses comparing to sci-fi. So yeah I don't know if that answer your question Noah. No yeah it certainly does, Suki and I know that you have a hard stop so I want to be respectful of your
time and thank you so much for coming on with us today. If you ever want to come back and expand on some of the topics we discussed today or talk more about a specific topic that interests you, you're always welcome to come on our podium and join the podcast. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Thanks. Cheers. Yeah. A well-quin talk community. Thank you for joining.
Remember that everything you hear on this broadcast meant educational purposes only nothing is financial advice. We have a Twitter space coming up at 4pm Eastern Standard Time with the cadana team that coming back to talk about their Kuala Wallet and some of the other stuff they're building so stay tuned for that. Take care.