This article details the background, trading philosophy, and market analysis and predictions of GCR, a master of reverse trading in the cryptocurrency field, as well as his past tweets. From articles written by the Arkham research team, compiled, compiled and written by Frank Fu, investment manager of IOSG Ventures .
(Previous summary: A must-read for investments》30 trading tips from the legendary trader GCR )
(Background supplement: A must-read for the bull market "How to seize the next 100-fold coin and when will Altcoin explode? ")
TL;DR
- This week, GCR, the famous "big short seller" in the cryptocurrency circle, tweeted for the first time in a year, encouraging everyone not to "give up" during the recent market crash. The tweet currently has more than 50,000 likes. I believe many people are curious about the deeds of this legendary trader in the cryptocurrency field.
- This article takes this opportunity to introduce in detail GCR's background, trading philosophy, and the market analysis and predictions he shared in his past tweets. GCR is known for its excellent performance on the FTX exchange and its accurate prediction of market trends. GCR’s preference for short operations, investments in meme coins and NFTs, and his bets on the 2024 US presidential election are all reflected in the article.
- Although GCR reduced his social media activity in early 2023, his market insights and trading strategies still attracted attention from the cryptocurrency community. GCR’s final public statement emphasized a positive view on the future of cryptocurrencies, particularly the long-term bullishness on the price of Ethereum. I believe this article will help everyone regain confidence in the future development of the cryptocurrency market in the digital era, and provide valuable experience and inspiration to the public.
introduce
- GCR is one of the most famous traders in the Crypto space. Known under the alias "Gigantic-Cassocked-Rebirth" on the defunct FTX exchange, he is widely known on Twitter for his frequent posts on proven Crypto-related investing tips, multiple successful predictions, and smart writing .
- From 2021 to 2022, he regularly appeared on FTX's top traders rankings and beat many other market participants to become one of the top overall profit and loss figures on the exchange. Although his identity remains a mystery, he claims he started with next to nothing and amassed his wealth through trading alone.
1. Background and history of GCR
GCR has never spoken in depth about his background publicly, but has occasionally mentioned snippets of his life before coming to the world of Crypto. On the
He first demonstrated his predictive abilities through political impact analysis, a practice he mentioned often on the X platform. He also dabbled in sports betting and claimed he spent "probably a thousand hours" researching how to extend his life.
He describes himself as a hard-working man. When the market is good, he takes to Twitter to encourage other traders to devote more than 120 hours a week to perfecting their craft. Although he encouraged his audience to take a break at the end of 2022, he personally stated that he had not taken a day off in nearly 3 and a half years.
GCR is essentially a contrarian operator - he often mentioned a "tree of life" in his tweets in 2021, which is the key to taking advantage of the market. After much speculation from many different traders about GCR’s secrets, he eventually suggested that this “tree of life” was actually just a willingness to bet against consensus opinion. He is a big fan of George Soros and frequently refers to Soros' talking points, discussing the ideas of reflexivity and contrarian thinking
GCR's reverse thinking strategy reflects his deep understanding of market behavior and precise grasp of group psychology. He recognized that in the market, most people's opinions are often wrong, and real opportunities are often hidden in the opposite direction from the consensus. This way of thinking allows him to find profit margins in market fluctuations and achieve success through distinctive trading decisions.
George Soros's reflexivity theory believes that the biases of market participants will affect market prices, and these price changes will in turn affect the expectations and behaviors of participants, forming an interactive cycle . GCR is obviously deeply influenced by this theory and applies it to its own trading strategies, using reverse thinking to find imbalances and opportunities in the market.
He is best known for openly and successfully trading Crypto in the markets of 2021 and 2022, amassing a loyal following spread across his multiple alternate accounts.
However, in early 2023, he became silent and left after releasing "this may be my last tweet about Crypto" on the X platform. Since then, his social accounts have gone silent.
2. Crypto Bull Market – Early 2021
At the beginning of 2021, GCR was not well-known and had only a small number of followers on Twitter, where he would release details of his recent market sentiment and trading activities. He has favored contrarian views from the start, with one of his earliest posts detailing his short position in January 2021 short a retail-driven rise in GME stock prices.
He wrote: "I have always found Reddit culture offensive and I side with the oligarchs and plutocrats."
The content he released in 2021 mainly included the trading principles that have since been widely disseminated on Crypto Twitter, that is, he will repeatedly emphasize the importance of patience and finding areas where he can exert his unique advantages.
Interestingly, he also announced one of his previous predictions, that "if you put 20 Ethereum coins into SHIB and then wait 5 months for the full bull market peak, it might be worth 40 million."
By May 2021, it turned out that traders actually only needed to invest 2 Ethereum in Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB) to make a $40 million profit. This is GCR’s first post highlighting his love for meme coins (an asset class that was particularly viewed with suspicion by traditional traders at the start of 2021).
GCR trading discussion on SHIB currency
During April and May, he issued many bearish warnings, strongly rejecting popular bullish narratives such as the "super cycle" promoted by other popular traders in 2021 like 3AC's Su Zhu. His reasons for supporting his stance are sometimes very simple and simply contrary to the "mainstream market view" in 2021's mass retail trader-driven craze.
Amid the Crypto craze in early 2021, the popular meme coin Dogecoin (DOGE) began to surge in price. By the peak in May 2021, the price of DOGE was up 69,136%, much higher than the 2020 lows. Dogecoin is a “meme coin”, a coin with no utility or fundamentals to back it up.
It unexpectedly reached a market capitalization of $98 billion after tech giant Elon Musk took an interest in it and started talking about it on Twitter. Much of its gains have been driven by the liquidation of short positions held by traders who didn't believe a joke currency could have such a significant market capitalization.
One of GCR's most notable trades in early 2021 was publicly short the top of DOGE on May 9, 2021 - the day Musk appeared on "SNL". More than a year later, he explained: “Coins that are heavily stocked by retailers are often hyped for months due to some ‘future catalyst’… Just when mass retail traders imagine that meme catalysts will make them millionaires, the market does Market makers use the last liquidity waterfall to distribute (chips).”
3. Swimming against the current – second half of 2021
In the second half of 2021, GCR turned bearish, publicly issuing recommendations reminding traders to heed his previous warnings to trade less in adverse conditions and not to have any illusions that "Altcoin can survive on their own and be able to compete with BTC's Swimming in the forest."
On July 15, GCR released his infamous 2022 bear market prediction in a private TG chat group, predicting that there will be a long and profound bear market, and even the most powerful projects will rarely have respite. Chance. “Regional bottom will be around $20,000… Macro/equity top in 2022,… most Altcoin will be down 95% or 99%.”
GCR's bearish attitude does not mean that he will leave the Crypto market - quite the opposite. While remaining optimistic about the remaining opportunities in the market in 2021, his strategy in the second half of 2021 shifted to short positions that took advantage of market liquidity outflows. Since then, he has been heavily short Altcoin that were either weak or strong relative to BTC.
He has also applied his forecasting skills to different assets and sectors. The first is back to the realm of political forecasting, with a successful bet on the rise of dark horse Valérie Pécresse during the 2022 French presidential elections.
Peikres ultimately did not win — but GCR later said he aimed to capitalize on the upside that comes with a fringe candidate gaining mainstream acceptance — as he explained, the difference between 5% and 50% is 10 2x the return, whereas betting on the winner of a dead-end game will only get 2x the return.
In August, GCR began to speculate on NFTs (non-fungible tokens). He was more optimistic about the lower market value of NFTs compared to the meme coins he called "Altcoin 2.0". In addition to trying to buy hundreds of "Pudgy Penguins" NFTs, his address also won a "Sad Doge" NFT in an auction, and a month later he bought it for $2 million in USDC (USD Stablecoin) sold this NFT.
However, he commented that NFTs are a very difficult asset class to gain exposure, saying: "My NFT investment is seven figures but accounts for less than 1% of my net worth and is part of my broader barbell investing strategy. a part of".
By October 2021, he began betting on Trump to win the 2024 election. The size of the trades made it nearly impossible to obtain adequate liquidity on exchanges, and he ultimately had to resort to direct over-the-counter (OTC) trades with Alameda Research. Just over a year later, Alameda Research’s balance sheet was leaked, showing that they still held $7.3 million worth of unhedged TRUMPLOSE tokens—possibly the remainder of the GCR deal.
In October, GCR released his advice to young traders to take the time to look for every possible edge in the market. "Even if you live another 80 years, you will never have the opportunity to obtain generational wealth so easily. " This state of extreme prosperity lasted for about two months - until the end of November 2021, when the Crypto market reached an all-time high.
Soon after, he started recruiting members for a new team - named RebirthDAO. Its stated goal is to form a "decentralized hedge fund" by combining the power of many extremely successful traders in the Crypto market. The team’s first trade was an ETF news trade in October 2021: designed to identify and capitalize on the approval of the Proshares BTC Futures ETF.
According to GCR, the trade was very successful - RebirthDAO was one of the first public traders to receive a news alert that pushed the price of BTC from $57.1K to $59K, which gave them a relative advantage over other news trades The player has a few precious seconds of advantage.
4. "The Big Short" - GCR in 2022
After a busy October 2021, GCR slowed down in November - as the Altcoin market reached a state of extreme excitement, he chose to take a vacation. On November 22, he posted online saying, "I'm back and starting to short."
Two days later, he unequivocally declared that the market was close to the high of the cycle: "I am very confident that we are at the end of the cycle and that the cycle is still here... If you have made money, make sure your gains are safe now." About two weeks ago, on November 10, the price of BTC had reached a cycle high of $69,000. For traders heading into 2022, he has one piece of advice:
Through RebirthDAO, GCR began looking for ways to profit from what he considered an overheated Altcoin market. At that time, the total value of the entire Crypto market exceeded $3 trillion. GCR looked for coins that would have a large number of new coins issued in 2023 and asked his DAO team to collect as much information as possible about the unlocking of token issuance. RebirthDAO did not choose to short BTC or Ethereum, which have the largest market capitalization, but planned to short a group of the weakest Altcoin on the market. GCR said he is most interested in tokens with the largest issuances in the first half of 2022.
The research team used various means to collect this information, not only reviewing files, but also analyzing on-chain wallets, and even directly contacting project team members to understand the scale of their token issuance in 2022.
GCR later mentioned that many of the currencies that DAO considers particularly suitable for short are either projects in the Solana ecosystem, which have received financial support from FTX and have a large number of tokens locked to investors; or are related to the Metaverse currencies, they were overly sought after by the market at the end of 2021.
However, GCR's most famous operation was its public bet with Do Kwon, the founder of LUNA. On March 14, 2022, GCR proposed a $10 million bet to Do that the price of Terra Luna would be lower a year later than it was then. GCR successfully persuaded Do Kwon to stake $10 million of his own Crypto, with a well-known account called @cobie managing the custody of the bet.
Further reading: The one-year bet expires! The collapse of LUNA caused Do Kwon to lose tens of millions of dollars, but is he betting on FTX?
Although GCR successfully persuaded Do to bet $10 million directly against him, he wanted the bet to be larger, so he used derivatives on FTX to make up his balance and short$10 million worth of LUNA perpetual futures. Just two months later, on May 7, GCR revealed that the position had made a profit of $2.3 million.
LUNA is very susceptible to selling pressure due to its unique nature - it is used as an asset to support UST, an "algorithmic stablecoin", and the value of UST depends on the price people are willing to pay for LUNA in the market. During most of the bull market, willing buyers of LUNA were able to absorb all outflows from the UST system—it even withstood a “decoupling” event during the crypto market crash in May 2021. But by May 2022, there are more than 10 billion US dollars in UST in the LUNA system, while in 2021 this number was only 1 billion.
When UST is sold in large quantities in the market, people holding UST rush to exchange it for LUNA and then sell it for real dollars. The large number of queues waiting to redeem UST, claim and sell LUNA discouraged other traders, and no one was willing to buy LUNA in the market - which caused the price of LUNA to begin to fall sharply.
Eventually, the price of LUNA dropped to almost zero. It only cost GCR $0.72 to completely offset his exposure to LUNA, effectively hedging his $20 million worth of LUNA short position for less than a dollar.
As the bear market continues in 2022, GCR foresees more and more cyber attacks, scams and fraud incidents, which may come from criminals or from some special teams. As more and more decentralized finance (DeFi) projects are compromised due to code flaws, exploits and re-entrancy attacks, GCR warns traders to pay special attention to incentive mechanisms as investment decisions during a bear market important basis.
By the end of 2022, GCR repeatedly short the remaining gains of Dogecoin (DOGE) and advised his followers to rest and take vacations when the market situation was less optimistic. With the arrival of the BTC global price bottom at the end of the year, GCR reminds traders that "the overall economy will never give you an advantage; you can never... stick to what you know."
On November 8, 2022, the FTX exchange collapsed due to a massive loss of customer deposits. Mass outflows quickly led to the exchange's bankruptcy after it was discovered that sister company Alameda Research had been using the exchange's user funds.
GCR has repeatedly reminded traders to pay attention to the security of fund custody - during the bull market, a large number of hacking attacks, scams and wallet fund losses prompted him to call on more traders to choose top exchanges for fund custody. Unfortunately, he did not foresee the collapse of the second largest exchange in the crypto space.
When FTX stopped withdrawing funds, GCR wrote: "I hope, for the sake of the entire industry, that the last part of my prediction does not come true." But unfortunately, over the next 3 months, it was discovered that FTX itself had approximately $9 billion in debt and had allowed Alameda to use customer funds to absorb losses for years. What is a line item on their balance sheet? It is a “TRUMPLOSE” token worth $7.3 million. "I always thought they were hedging on Betfair," GCR said in a post online.
5. 2023 and beyond: GCR’s predictions for the future
Following the FTX debacle, GCR permanently stopped tweeting from the @GiganticRebirth account. His alternate account, @GCRClassic, provides fewer updates on individual trades and gives more general predictions for the future.
Perhaps GCR’s most important piece of advice during the crypto market trough of 2022 is this reminder about the value of time: “No matter how much money you have left now, the depth and breadth of market knowledge is invaluable.” Even if he’s on FTX Having lost a lot of money, GCR remains optimistic about Crypto's prospects. "In an increasingly digital world, digital assets are essential," he said. The tweet was posted on November 23, just two days after the price of BTC fell to about $15,476. back.
As the market becomes uncertain about Crypto's future and some startups begin to shift attention away from the industry, GCR puts forward the idea that an "echo bubble" may emerge in 2023, which will be the last optimists in the market. Appears after being completely eliminated. Interestingly, the overall market recovery in January 2023 actually set the stage for BTC’s cyclical bottom.
In early 2023, as the market gradually recovered, GCR took the opportunity to discuss some of his long-term beliefs and predictions for the future of Crypto. In one of his earliest tweets in 2023, he pointed out that the next rally will be led by China: "Many future rallies will occur in coins that no one in your circle knows about."
Within a few months, the first BRC20 currency ORDI has been deployed on the BTC network. By November, ORDI will have a market capitalization of $1 billion -- thanks in large part to its popularity among Asian exchanges and speculators.
We remain optimistic about the future development of Crypto, albeit with some pessimism and skepticism. In a tweet in May 2022, he predicted that humans would become more "desperate, greedy, depraved, lonely, and trapped in the Metaverse."
He has maintained this view throughout the year of 2023, and in the process, the Crypto market has slowly passed through various stages, including casino coins, meme coins, and even a bizarre project involving a hamster race. In 2023, the valuation of RLB, the token of Crypto's top online casino, once soared to a peak of $777 million, but then fell by more than half.
Starting from the end of 2021, GCR predicts that the efficiency of the Crypto market will increase significantly. He believes that there are many reasons for this improvement, such as graduates from top universities joining the field, the regulatory structure becoming more mature, and strict controls on privacy protection protocols and private Crypto. Although in the Crypto field, it is generally believed that transactions can remain anonymous to a certain extent, GCR reminds everyone not to make the mistake of thinking that any behavior on the blockchain is private.
He has shown a strong interest in the 2024 US presidential election - starting from the end of 2021, he has placed a heavy bet on Trump, believing that he will be the ultimate winner. He said: "The stupidest and the smartest people knew that Trump would win easily." The former US president continued to be in the public spotlight with a series of eye-catching feats throughout 2023, including even on August 23 Voluntarily surrendered to the Fulton County Jail in Georgia.
In the first three months of 2023, GCR invested money to purchase more than 300 tokens of the "Milady" NFT project, although some people in the Crypto circle found the project a bit weird. About three months later, when Musk tweeted a meme about the NFT project, GCR sold about half of the tokens it had on hand.
Even so, he still holds over $890,000 worth of Milady tokens in his public wallet address ezekielx.eth.
A month before GCR left Twitter, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. This caused USDC, one of the largest stablecoins in Crypto, to temporarily decouple, with its value falling to $0.88 at one point. This incident did not affect GCR - he exchanged a total of 4 million US dollars in USDT for USDC on the chain.
On Twitter, GCR expressed his opinion that Crypto is bound to be widely adopted in the digital age. "People will look for an alternative, a new path," he said.
His last tweet on the GCRClassic account was positive, saying: " They will continue to print more money ." He also said: " The price of Ethereum will one day rise to $10,000 ."
A week later, he liked a tweet that read, "See you when ETH reaches $10,000." After that, he was never seen again.
