Well, what a year it has been for Crypto already! We’ve seen some intense market action, and one thing we’ve noticed is the role that influencers have in directing the space. From a unique point of view inside the machine so to speak, we’ve been looking to speak with somebody in the know, and to get their scoop on their journey and the market in general.

With that in mind, we set out to find somebody who fits the bill. In our research, we found CryptoRand. He has over 288k followers on Twitter, he is a trader and a fund manager with a tier 1 VC firm, working right in the heart of the crypto space. He needs no further introduction, and very luckily he joined us today for an exclusive interview!

So, CryptoRand! Great to finally meet you after so much messaging! Let's start off with your journey - where did it start and what choices made your journey turn out the way it has?

It’s my pleasure to be here! All started around 2014 thanks to a friend who was studying Electronic Engineering and had a teacher heavily involved in Bitcoin. He was deploying Bitcoin ATM’s and mining BTC for a year at that time, and preaching everyday about the technology behind. After a while my friend and I decided to buy a whole bitcoin each, at that time the price was like $500 If I’m not wrong. We stored it on a Xapo wallet and forgot about it, we didn’t consider it an investment, we were just curious.

Then after a couple of years, at the end of 2016 I saw some news about Bitcoin price rising on Twitter and I was like “Hey I have that thing!”. Recovered my Bitcoin from the wallet and this time started to research it heavily, reading the first Satoshi paper about BTC, researching blockchain, reading about altcoins on BitcoinTalk, Reddit, Twitter…etc. This time I managed to understand the potential behind it, so I decided to buy some Bitcoin every single month no matter the price. After some months I’ve discovered Poloniex…and well, that’s the exact moment when I went full crazy about crypto. Bought tons of books about trading, investing and started to trade like a maniac all day long…Stellar, Ripple, Monero, Litecoin…after that everything was like a cascade of opportunities, projects, experiences…a full journey that I continue enjoying.

You are mainly known by your role as influencer on Twitter, but I’ve been told that’s far from being your main line of work. Could you tell us more about your other projects?

Absolutely haha, most of the people only know me from Twitter and think I’m 24/7 tweeting or thinking about the next post. Actually Twitter takes like 1 hour of my whole day at most. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing tool to connect with great people, track projects and learn from really wise people, but it’s also really time consuming and lately full of noise.

Besides my “Twitter activity”, I’m the Co-Founder of RR2 Capital Fund, manage two mining factories (both Asics and GPU) and funded an amazing Crypto Trading Community. All those activities are really time consuming and they motivate me way more than tweeting.

How has your journey in crypto changed as you have grown in popularity?

Popularity is a double edge sword. At the beginning it was pretty complicated to deal with, because every single word, trade, investment was absolutely under the scope and exposed to tons of people, the good and the bad. Twitter is probably the most harsh social network, but also rewarding. I had to adapt, and learn from the constructive feedback and forget about the plain hate. Maybe after a trade I was getting like 100 positive replies and just a couple of negative ones, but those two were the ones stuck on my mind.

With time, I learned to change that and stick to the positivity, focusing myself on building, building and building no matter what. Popularity opened tons of doors to meet amazing minds, awesome projects and learn like I’ve never imagined. At the same time, the rise in popularity has pushed me to improve and be more professional. I was feeling the weight of the responsibility on my back haha, out of nothing had to held to account with tons of people. It was stressful at the beginning but I think it pushed me to grow, mature and reach new highs.

Amir Bakian
Amir Bakian Amir Bakian

We heard on the grapevine about your involvement with RR² Capital - what’s the story there, what sort of projects are you guys getting on board with,what’s the mission!

Over the years I’ve invested in early stage start-ups as I’m being introduced to these teams through my well established networks in this industry fairly often. It became obvious that I needed to create an investment vehicle that offered advisory services to these projects while still being able to introduce them to my loyal communities which I consider very important and valuable. RR2 is the result of that thought process.

We always adapt to the market trends while maintaining our mission and vision. We are flexible but we don’t flex on random trends. We strongly believe there are some pillars which are unalterable over the time, but at the same time, we are always reading between lines to anticipating the market trends. The Web3 narrative is playing out really well and includes exciting projects in DeFi , GameFi, including Metaverse, NFTs (with special focus on marketplace and launchpad), Gaming Guilds, Socialfi and we always look for innovative newcomers in the Layerone blockchain space.

Last year, YouTube cracked down on crypto accounts claiming violating of their terms and conditions; there were more talk of scammers in Twitter and Facebook. What’s your take on this? Are investors to be blamed or crypto influencers are, as social media giants partly claim, part of the problem?

As usual there are several ways to read the story. From my humble perspective I think those “influencers” carry 75% of the responsibility and investors the other 25%. Most of the people tend to blame retail investors and I really get their point. But at the end of the day, even if you have to develop your own criteria. Some influencers abuse their following and are increasingly losing the trust of retail investors.

In the same way, I don’t want to exempt investors from responsibility, because part of the learning process is to understand that you are the only one responsible for your decisions. Easier to blame third ones about failures and take credit for profits. But at the end each individual needs to be accountant on their decisions. No matter who you are taking advice from, at the end, when taking the final decision, the responsibility relies on yourself.

To sum up, most of the influencers need to be more responsible about the content they post. But the overall public, need to also learn the basics and understand the risks behind every move. On a side note I think YouTube is the least reliable source of information and Twitter the most solid one along with Reddit.

What would be the Top 5 tips for someone getting started into trading or investing?
Woah that’s a great question! Pretty complicated to condensate everything in just five tips…but I would go for these:

  • Patience and modesty: It doesn’t matter how amazing your Technical Analysis is, or how many books you have readed. The patience and modesty is something you need to grow with the experience. Will play a key role on your decisions, without discipline you are lost. Controlling your ego gives you a huge advantage on the market. Don’t be afraid of being wrong, flow with the market.
  • Don’t stop learning: Nowadays, the market, as the society and the world, changes quickly. It doesn’t matter your knowledge or experience. You are going to be exposed to whole new trends, so you need to have a flexible mindset. Always open to learn and challenge everything you know. Of course it’s great to have a personal criteria, which remains static, but you need to adapt that criteria to the new trends.
  • Diversify, diversify and diversify: Sometimes you will find a project/altcoin which is like the holy grail and you are going to be tempted to go all in…don’t. Diversification is the key for success in the long term. Sometimes can be stressful because you are going to feel like having not enough exposure to X skyrocketing project, but will be the same to those sinking. Diversification can be applied, by the length of the investments, by the industries, the sectors…never ever put all the eggs in one basket.
  • Security and risk management: Don’t underestimate how important is to have all your accounts and investments properly managed. We are dealing with a new technology, full of opportunities but also full of security breaches. Don’t let all your effort go down the drain because you went for a comfy setup without 2FA protection or because you joined public WiFi signals…etc. It’s really important to use dedicated email and password addresses for each exchange, always with 2FA and changing the password every 6-12 months. Not having your private keys on cloud services…etc. Nothing beats a good notebook.
  • Life balance: Both trading and investing are quite emotional tasks. It’s really important to have a proper life balance along with it. Sleep properly, eat well, train yourself, and develop the right mindset. These things might sound like those useless self help books. But they are really important, if you are not motivated, if you are not emotionally stable, if you are not dedicated, concentrated…you are going to face tons of challenges associated with your trades and investments. Because they will challenge your emotions like nothing else. A relaxed mind will help you to grow your portfolio more like any book.

With the industry gaining ever-quickening momentum and innovation, what do you think will happen this year?

Hard to explain with limited space but will try. Indeed we wrote a whole research talking about "What’s Coming for Crypto on 2022" with more than 60 pages haha. But this would be the summary:

We are now seeing use cases for crypto everywhere, which is a big change from 2017 so I think there will be a number of areas that will see continued growth in 2022. We are seeing NFTs and Gaming continuing to grow and innovate, especially with the emergence of GameFi and Play-to-Earn which is showing no sign of slowing down. Web3 and dapps around DeFi, NFTs and Games themselves are seeing record levels of usage on all Layer 1 blockchains, and this looks set to continue

It also seems that decentralised assets such as Bitcoin and DEXs could continue to grow in popularity and adoption as we see increased authoritarianism from many global governments. Without becoming political, the situation in Ukraine has highlighted the need for citizens to have decentralised access to wealth and we have seen the practical use of Bitcoin. Many countries have seen increasing censorship and the need for decentralised exchanges is only becoming greater.