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2) NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE

3) Well, at the beginning, I was fucking stoked. A few weeks before I was grinding away on arbs. All of a sudden, people I hadn't met were willing to pay me $6m for 15% of the tokens that got 33% of the revenue... ...from a project that didn't even exist those few weeks ago!

4) But then, just as we finished the first round of the presale, something started to dawn on me: people were really eager to buy FTT at $0.10. Maybe _too_ eager.

5) See, on the one hand, it was $6m for 15% of 33% of something that didn't exist! But of course our pitch deck said something different: FTX will be well built, and liquid. What are the odds it can get to the top 5? If it does, how much will it be worth?

6) When phrased that way, apparently a bunch of strangers did the same calculation I had: It seemed like there was a ~20% chance. And if it did... well, maybe FTX would be worth billions. See, maybe $0.10 FTT wasn't crazy! Maybe it was even too low.

7) Somehow I hadn't internalized my own argument until then. I had sold myself short. I had sold our team short.

8) In general, the early days of FTX were a big success. Most exchanges clearly fail early. FTX didn't. Instead, FTX started growing. Nothing was guaranteed, but it sure seemed like FTX was starting to take off.

4:47 AM · Jan 7, 2021Twitter Web App

9) FTT had launched with much hype, running up to $1.50 from the initial $0.10 seed sale. And after that? It stalled out. FTX's daily volume grew steadily from nothing up to $300m. But FTT stalled out around $1.50.

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10) Some people were surprised by this! We weren't. Because we had long since realized what we failed to at the beginning: that from July through November 2019, about 60m FTT tokens were unlocking from presale investors, with a cost basis as low as $0.10.

11) At market prices, that was $90m of FTT unlocking early on in its life. So, yeah, FTT didn't keep up with FTX's growth. It stagnated. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. FTT was dormant, so people lost excitement in FTT, so there weren't buyers, so it was dormant...

12) It was deeply frustrating, seeing the costs of having sold our potential short; seeing that take the wind out of our sails. And for a long time, that's what FTT was to me. A disappointment.

13) Over the next year, FTT slowly started to get some life. It certainly didn't jump off the screen. But it was, slowly, grinding up. The acute selling had ended, and slow inflows and buy/burns caused slow appreciation. But I wasn't excited. I was, still, disappointed.

14) Because FTT wasn't what I wanted it to be. FTX had a meteoric rise, going from nonexistent to a top 5 exchange in a year. FTT didn't. FTT was slow, and small, and illiquid. Sure, it was up 2x from launch; FTX had grown 6x.

15) Slowly, at least FTT started becoming _useful_. It's stability, combined with an increase in liquidity, meant that it was trusted by institutions in crypto, and that trust had value. I was grateful that FTT was there, grudgingly, though still mostly I was underwhelmed.

16) And I was frustrated, as always, at the sellers: at the steady trickle of people who sold FTT below what I thought it was worth. And when push came to shove, sometimes I'd buy from them; something I later learned to be glad for.

17) A few months ago that I spent an afternoon pacing around the office, blasting TSwift through my headphones, and meditating on FTT. And, finally, I guess I realized that I had been thinking about it wrong. (Not _as_ wrong as selling it at $0.10. That was dumb.)

18) I had wanted FTT to immediately become a powerhouse, and instead it was a slow excruciating grind upwards filled with constant sell pressure. And, sure, we wall want the best imaginable outcome! But the FTT sellers -- they weren't really the problem.

19) Everyone who sold FTT from $1.00 to $5.00 was just letting me buy back below what I thought it was worth--a good trade!

20) And it meant that the people who had no interest in FTT or FTX exited early, and the remaining holders were those who believed in us. FTT wasn't stagnant, it was maturing. And it took time: time which, fortunately, we were fine giving it.

21) I tried, and unfortunately sometimes succeeded, to trade away batches of FTT for other things. Then sometimes I'd have to buy it back 25% higher later. My mistake was wanting FTT to be a cash cow that I could sell. That's not what it was, and that wouldn't be healthy.

22) That's not what FTT was, or is, or maybe ever will be. And that's ok. When you have a child, you don't hate them for what they're not; you love them for what they are. And when you have a coin, you appreciate it for what it is.

23) I had tried, helplessly, to push on lockups so that seed investors didn't sell early. That was silly: FTT had bad, fucked up tokenomics, so it wasn't going to go up for a while. I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

24) Instead you let them sell, if that's what they want. And you give it the time it needs to mature. You don't try to sell it, because it's cheap. You let others sell, and you watch it grow up. And you don't try to hype it up when it's not ready. You wait.

25) And then, finally, one day, it's ready. It's grown up, and ready to enter the world on its own terms. The past isn't totally gone. It remains, a sort of shibboleth; a club for those who saw it for what it _could_ be, and held, and gave it the time it needed to get there.

26) Anyway, in about 4.5 hours, most of the SOL in the world will unlock. For the last year, 2020-01-07 has loomed large. And lots of attempts to build out the Solana and Serum ecosystems have been felled: “sure it has 50k TPS, but LOL have you seen its tokenomics?”

An Ultimate Vision for Serum

27) And I’ve been frustrated by this: it’s about the tech, guys! And the potential to change the world! Wouldn’t you like to see what it’s like for one billion people to use DeFi?

projectserum.medium.com

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Everything has strengths and weaknesses; what matters isn’t rattling them off or proving you know of…

28) But, again, I was thinking about it wrong. January 7th, 2021 has always been a part of SOL. There was no escaping it, or pretending it wasn’t coming. I wanted SOL to be something it wasn’t, or at least something the community wouldn’t let it be.

29) But today is beautiful. Because today, finally, SOL will unlock. The sellers will sell, or at least those who haven’t already; and the buyers will buy.

30) Solana has spent the last year building the most ambitious and powerful blockchain in the world. Most of the community has spent the last year shitting on its token unlock schedule. Who are you gonna pick?

31) Today is the day that Solana becomes free of its ever-present headwind. It took me too long to learn to love SOL for what it was. But today Solana grows up, and becomes free to be itself, and to live--and die--on its own terms.

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