To pull off the trade, he says he assembled a smattering of part-time crypto researchers, ranging from a professional poker champion to a medical student.
GCR says he shorted nearly 30 different tokens across multiple exchanges at the height of crypto fervor last November.
But in the notoriously volatile world of cryptocurrencies, timing these rapid market cycles has proved far trickier.
The crash that started in late 2021 and extended through January sent the total crypto market capitalization plummeting from a high of $3.1 trillion in November to $1.7 trillion in late January, nearly wiping out half of its value.
To corroborate the key elements of GCR’s story, a CoinDesk reporter talked to him and several of his collaborators via phone calls, Telegram messages and Discord chats.
With faint echoes of “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis’ book about Wall Street misfits who bet against the frothy U.S.
ET, a web-scraping bot pinged the Discord group as soon as an announcement went up: A new SEC filing had just been posted regarding the Proshares Bitcoin ETF.
The bot notification gave the group enough time to buy bitcoin before much of the world had time to process the bullish news.
Alpha refers to the excess returns that some investors seek to pocket above and beyond typical market returns, known as beta.
“GCR had told me early on that DAOs were going to change the industry,” Discord user fungible0x, a member of the group who acts as liaison between GCR and the moderators, told CoinDesk in a Discord call.
The leaderboard is not only a scorekeeper for the FTX exchange’s 100 most profitable trading accounts, but also doubles as a who’s who of the crypto industry’s top traders; making the cut is considered an impressive feat.
On Nov.
In addition to perceiving a gloomy macro climate, GCR also had strong conviction in seasonality.
26, GCR put out an open call to his legion of Twitter followers: He was hiring researchers to look into the distribution, unlocking and vesting schedules for dozens of tokens.
“It became really clear during the ETF project that there were some superstars,” said fungible0x, who said the DAO closed to new members due to capacity constraints.
CoinDesk was granted access by GCR to the group’s Alpha chats .
“Token unlock schedules are surprisingly public, but very vague,” said Pxeo, who contributed to The Big Short project.
The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies.
Tracy Wang is a senior reporter at CoinDesk.
As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period.