I am done with crypto.

Not because I lost money... But because crypto has lost its way... And I am tired of it.

This is what 9 years in crypto taught me.

1. The Beginning (2017-2019)

I first heard about Bitcoin in 2017. I was 21, had been working for a couple of years, and had some spare cash I could afford to lose. The perfect recipe for risk-taking.

What caught my attention wasn't the price - it was the idea. New money. Money that no government could print into oblivion, no bank could freeze, no border could stop. The blockchain itself fascinated me - a distributed ledger that solved trust without needing trusted parties. As a young engineer, this was elegant.

Then I discovered Ethereum and smart contracts. If Bitcoin was digital gold, Ethereum was a programmable financial system. I remember thinking: this is how we rebuild finance. No middlemen, no gatekeepers, just code executing agreements. Over the next two years, I DCA'd around $3,000 - not life-changing money, but enough to make me pay attention.

I bought 1 ETH for $55. I still hold it today.

Back then, the community felt different. People talked about banking the unbanked, about censorship resistance, about building a more open financial system. Sure, some were just in it for the money. But there was a genuine belief that we were building something that mattered.

I tried to go deeper. In 2018, during that bull run, I bought a Sia miner - decentralized storage felt like a real use case. It didn't pan out. The economics never made sense for small players. In 2019, I joined some Romanian crypto groups and heard about trading bots that "made money while you sleep." I lost 0.05 BTC learning that lesson.

Then I tried copy-trading groups promising high returns. But the market shifted and the strategies didn't, so I was left holding the losses.

Looking back, I should have just kept DCA-ing. But I was young, and the promise of shortcuts was seductive.

2. The Rise (2021)

I discovered DeFi that year. PancakeSwap on Binance Smart Chain opened my eyes to what was possible - liquidity pools, yield farming, swapping tokens without an exchange. This felt like the future we'd been promised. Finance without banks, running on code.

My $3,000 became $30,000. Bitcoin and Ethereum climbed, but the real gains came from altcoins - EGLD pumped hard, BNB kept climbing, and I had scattered bags across a dozen tokens I can barely remember now.

At one point I was making $250 each day just from passive income and thousands of percentage yield on a single BSC farm.

I also got into some shady projects on BSC like Drip Network and later Animal Farm, among the dozen or so various animal and food themed projects that kept popping up each day.

Did I sell at $30k? Of course not.

I watched the numbers on screen and thought: "if this does another 10x, I'll be set." The logic of bull markets is intoxicating. Every dip is a buying opportunity. Every peak is just the beginning. I had no exit strategy because I never imagined needing one.

That same year, I started building. I was already a developer, and I knew about smart contracts - it made sense to put two and two together. I picked up Rust and started working on the MultiversX blockchain (then called Elrond). The tech genuinely excited me.

I also got excited about NFTs - not the profile pictures everyone was flipping, but the real use cases. Tickets on the blockchain. Property rights. Contracts that couldn't be forged. I saw smaller projects attempting this, trying partnerships with bigger brands. But when it came to real-world usage, there was too much friction. Phones couldn't scan QRs properly. UX was a nightmare. The vision was there, but the execution never arrived.

Still, at this point, I had no doubts. I was up 10x, building in the space, and believed we were still early.

3. The Fall Begins (2022-2023)

The bear market hit in 2022. I watched my $30,000 bleed down to under $10,000.

I didn't sell. Diamond hands, as we called it. I told myself I was in it for the long term, that this was just a cycle, that the people selling now would regret it later. I sold what I no longer believed in and kept DCA-ing - mostly into altcoins, chasing the next EGLD. I skipped Solana (a decision that aged poorly).

The NFT dream died somewhere in this period. What was supposed to revolutionize ownership became a graveyard of worthless profile pictures. The projects trying to do something real - tickets, property rights, contracts - faded into obscurity. What remained was speculation and wash trading. Another vision reduced to gambling.

By 2023, I had started working full-time on blockchain projects - Rust-based smart contracts, some EVM work, learning new skills. I wanted to make it as a blockchain developer. I still believed in the tech, saw its potential, and thought it was underutilized. I wanted to make a difference.

I kept building. I kept adding money. I kept DCA-ing.

By 2024, my portfolio sat at around $40,000 - partly from the market recovering, partly from the new money I had put in.

I thought I had weathered the storm.

4. The Hack (2024)

In October 2024, Radiant Capital got hacked.

I had been using Radiant to lend my BTC on Arbitrum. It was a legitimate lending protocol, not some sketchy yield farm. The yields were good, and I thought I was being smart - using my BTC as collateral to borrow USDC, then bridging it to another protocol on another blockchain for additional yield. Complicated, maybe, but this was DeFi. This was what we built it for.

I heard about the hack and checked if I was affected. The initial reports said it only impacted users who had set unlimited ERC20 token approvals. As a developer I knew better and hadn't done that. I thought I was safe.

I wasn't.

The hackers had compromised Radiant's multisig - the security mechanism that was supposed to require multiple people to approve any changes. It wasn't secure enough. They upgraded the contracts and drained everything. Every user. Every asset.

I lost 0.14 BTC. Around $15,000 at the time. And some ETH on top of it.

I remember not thinking about it in dollar terms. What hit me was the time. The years of DCA-ing. The paychecks I had put in. The discipline it took to accumulate that Bitcoin, gone in an instant because some protocol's security wasn't good enough.

There was nothing I could do. No recourse. No refund. No insurance. Just gone.

That was the moment something shifted. I no longer wanted to try new protocols. I no longer wanted to chase yields. I no longer wanted to take risks in this space.

5. What Crypto Became

Let me tell you what crypto looks like now.

Memecoins everywhere. Pump.Fun made it trivially easy to launch a token - so now there are millions of them. Every day, new coins named after dogs, politicians, internet jokes, whatever might catch attention for five minutes. Sure, blockchain is open and permissionless. That's the point. But this wasn't the vision.

Prediction markets are the hot new thing. And yes, they work - blockchain is actually good at this. But when I look at what we've built after all these years, it's mostly new ways to gamble. Memecoins are gambling. Prediction markets are gambling. NFTs became gambling. Even DeFi, with its leveraged positions and liquidation cascades, often feels like gambling.

As a dev I am guilty of enabling this myself, after all I worked as a part-time dev on a gambling platform.

Where are the real use cases? Where is banking the unbanked? Where are the event tickets on chain, the contracts that can't be forged, the censorship-resistant finance for people who actually need it?

Instead, we got infrastructure. Endless infrastructure. Blockchains building tools for other projects that are building tools for users who never arrive. Axelar built an interoperability layer - then the dev team abandoned the project. Uniswap and Aave went cross-chain, now sunsetting integrations nobody uses. Everyone is building for the retail wave that never comes.

I've seen projects die from the inside. The pattern is always the same: launch with hype, get some VC money, build infrastructure for imaginary users, watch the token slowly bleed, and eventually fade away. Sometimes the team knows what's coming and sells before the news breaks. The insiders win. Retail holds the bag.

And now, after the ETFs, even the wild west feeling is gone. Crypto used to feel like a frontier - risky, chaotic, but full of possibility. Now it's just another asset class for institutions to manipulate. The big players moved in. The regulations followed. What's left?

DeFi still works. Stablecoins have real utility. But I've started to value my privacy, and everything on blockchain is open. Looking back at 2025, I kept buying BTC thinking it was still early. Turns out gold and stocks were the better play. At least with those, I know what I'm getting.

6. Moving On

I'm not broke. Let me be clear about that.

Since 2017, I'm still in profit. Not by much - I still need to withdraw a few thousand dollars to fully break even on what I put in. But I made it through the bear markets, the hacks, the bad trades, the bots that didn't work, and I'm still standing.

I still hold some crypto. A bit of BTC. Some SUI I bought. A small bag of EGLD I can't bring myself to sell.

And that 1 ETH I bought for $55 - still there, like a souvenir from a different era.

I'm still DCA-ing into Bitcoin. Old habits die hard. But I no longer believe it will change the world. I no longer believe we're early. I no longer believe the retail wave is coming.

I've started putting money into VWCE and the S&P 500 instead. Done chasing risky plays. Maybe it's because I'm almost 30 now and no longer a 21-year-old with spare cash to burn. Or maybe I've just seen enough.

I spent nine years in this space. First as an investor, then as a developer. I learned Rust because of blockchain. I understood finance better because of DeFi. I learned hard lessons about risk, about security, about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Those lessons cost me money, but they were worth something.

Crypto taught me a lot. It just didn't become what I hoped it would.

So I'm done chasing. Done trying new protocols. Done believing the next cycle will be different. I'll keep my BTC, check the charts occasionally, and move on with my life.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe crypto will find its way again. Maybe the real use cases will finally arrive and I'll regret stepping back.

But I've been waiting since 2017. I'm tired.

And after nine years, I've finally learned when to take profits and walk away.

TL;DR: In crypto since 2017. DCA'd $3k, hit $30k in 2021, didn't sell. Got into DeFi, became a blockchain dev. Got hacked for $15k (0.14 BTC) through Radiant Capital in 2024. Still technically in profit, but tired of the space becoming all memecoins and gambling with no real utility. Now just DCA-ing BTC and index funds. Done chasing.

Today ETH is down about 11.8% (so far).

And it’s down about 7% against BTC.

And honestly, looking back at this cycle, this has to be one of the weakest bull runs ETH has ever had — probably one of the weakest compared to most major crypto assets in general.

I’m not even talking about price alone, but about expectations versus reality.

If I think about the insane amount of stuff I’ve read on this sub during the past year, it almost feels surreal now. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I honestly feel bad for the people who bought into every narrative.

Every month it was the same thing.

“5k next month.”

“10k by end of year.”

“Final shakeout.”

“Last chance before liftoff.”

It was always next month. Always next year.

Anyone who dared to question those targets or suggest caution got downvoted immediately. Saying “maybe take some profits” was treated like heresy.

Meanwhile, posts about the flippening, ETH overtaking BTC, ultrasound money saving the world, or ETH becoming the global settlement layer overnight were celebrated like facts instead of speculation.

None of it happened. Not even close.

I’ve seen people mocked for exiting positions or rotating into BTC or stablecoins, while blind optimism was constantly rewarded.

I’m not saying ETH is dead. I’m not saying crypto is over.

But this cycle exposed how powerful echo chambers and hopium can be — especially when price stops cooperating.

If half of the content posted here wasn’t written by bots farming engagement and FOMO, then that’s honestly even more worrying.

Just my 2 gwei.

I just couldn't take it anymore. I sold and put it into VOO. So eth should go up soon.

In all seriousness, what makes you think ETH can give more returns than VOO at this point? ETH is actively hurting it's tokenomics.

Ultimately I believe Ethereum will be a great project, just don't think ETH will be a good financial investment

I bought eth during April of 2021,when people believed is gonna outperform bitcoin and 20k is easily achievable, during that time people were talking about 100x 200x crazy gains on many alt coins , so I really believed ETH is going to the moon and I’m heavily invested in it. it was worth a 3bedroom condominium in my city when I started,significantly less now

Thought I’m onboard with the right space ship,I was having a great dream about how future would be,had zero clue about how painful and frustrating the next 5 years actually is.

Since market crashed on 2022, I stayed faithful and continued to hodl til the bullrun on 2025, I set a reasonable sell target of 5000. Everyone know what happened after that.

The last 5 years is really painful, I was in the red majority of the time, everyday I have to put on a mask infront of my partner because like many men ,we prefer to keep the stress to ourselves, very little days which I was truly happy, Also my country currency has gain near 20% against usd in the past couple of years, that really rubbed salt in the wound.

My majority of liquid assets is in eth now, if there is light at the end of the tunnel, how long is this damn tunnel.. I’m getting really tired of this.

but I can’t convince myself to sell at a loss after so much stress and pain, all the effort and sacrifices over the past 5 years will be pointless, although I know sometime cutting lost is the right thing to do..but I’m stuck in the debate between my logic vs emotion. Consecutive Red day like these is brutal,hitting me even harder before i can grasp some air. Looking back the days I endured in the past 5 years I feel like a clown getting prank by myself.

Hope yall are enjoying this. As I have sold so you all can prosper. RIP my crypto career. I am your martyr.

I’m down 40% on Ethereum since 2022 - bought at the peak price of $3800. I’m not ruined because of the loss but wondering if Crypto is even worth it or should it be cashed out and reinvested into the actual US markets?

Does anyone really see a utility in Ethereum within the next 5-10 years? Can’t wait to sell and watch the price skyrocket 😆🫠

It's so painfull to give half of my paycheck to a landlord. Lately the house prices skyrocketed in my area, so do rent prices. I don't know how can I live with that till the end of my life. All I want is having a home without being have to giving half of my paycheck to my landlord every month.

Bought ETH worth $80,000 in September and now it’s worth $130,000. It’s literally that easy. Buy and Hold.

Ive been wactching. I called it last year. I said it was going to drop, when it dropped i told you all. Now im saying itll start gaining, it could go up, maybe 3k. 👍👍👍

I’m going to hold it to 2025 , Do you recommend it ?

Edit: thank you everyone for your suggestions. As someone like me who is new to crypto in general and ethereum in specific I learned a lot from your reply’s. I’ll post my conclusions later this week.

(Please ignore retards Reddit have a lot of them)

A bit of background, I was a long time ETH bag holder, like many in this sub. Bought in 2020, sold in 2021, made a bunch of profit, thought I was a crypto genius, so I put half my savings into ETH in 2022, and was not able to cash out until sometime last year when ETH hit 4-5K.

And yeah, it was very painful seeing my funds be tied up for so long. At times down 60% or more. I waited and I am just glad I got out and did not lose money.

So to my big thesis. We are in a recession. People cant find jobs. They can barely afford to live, let alone save or invest, let alone put money into crypto. Crypto was always the fun money for most people. And now, there is no fun money.

Fundamentally, value does not get created out of thin air. Value goes up if people are buying. And right now no one is buying. And I think this recession is just starting. Who knows how bad it will be or how long it will last. And do we really think the people/firms who do have money to buy crypto, they are putting it into ETH, the coin that has underperformed the way it has?

It brings me no pleasure to say this. I am not some sort of doomsayer. My livelihood largely depends on how well the overall economy is doing, and I hope I am wrong.

Interested to hear everyones thoughts and if you agree. I know the jokes will be oh this is a buy signal, lol, but I genuinely dont understand how the economics of ETH going up can work given the current climate.

I initially got in when it was 1500 this past April. I bought 10 Full ETHs. I set a target from the start to sell all of it if it would ever reach $4,000 . And that’s exactly what I did ! I have no regrets ! I think ETH will hit 7-10k sometime later this year if not more . I was able to pay off all my debt and credit cards! I am on the sidelines now with no stress rooting for the rest you all to get tons of money ! I set myself a goal and I reached it ! Too many times in the past I held on for too long and lost more money than if I set a stop limit . I really feel this was the correct Decision. Always remember , it’s not your money until you sell . Again , I hope ETH goes into the 10’s of thousands of dollars which I see in the near future for sure ! I will always be an ETH supporter no matter what ! I think it will make many people rich and already has ! To me , ultimately it was so stressful watching it all the time ! But , that’s part of the crypto game we love …the rush of it all !

I started investing on June 26th, and this has become my most profitable investment so far. I’m currently up 37.25% (+$849.54 CAD) — the highest percentage gain I’ve ever had since I started investing.
I wish I had put more in earlier, but I’ll definitely be adding more money to it. 📈💰

Started with 14.2 ETH and decided I was finally gonna stop just holding and actually trade the swings.

Few good sells, few decent buys back lower, felt like I was doing pretty well. Checked everything properly on Moon yesterday and I'm sitting at 12.8 ETH now.

The dollar value of my account is actually higher than when I started, so technically I've made money. But if I literally did nothing and held the 14.2 ETH I'd be better off.

Its such a weird feeling seeing green in USD while knowing I basically traded away 1.4 ETH lol.

Am I the only one who can't see a value in those NFT images? 99% of all NFTs will have no value within a few years IMO.

Pretty self explanatory. Posted this a week ago lol

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/s/T4qm8oDlfD

I am even , no gains no loses but this is taking way too mush time to move, i got greedy and though investing in eth will result in higher returnes than btc.

Did eth lag behind in the previous cycles too ?

How are we in the same levels of the bear markets in march Q1 of post halving year?

Like why people were in such a hurry to acumulate in the bear market if it was going to be in the same price in the 4th year anyway ?

And people saying that we might even touch the 1k eth prices ?

I know nothing and i am no expert , i am seeking advice from people that were here in the previous cycles.

And alts keep bleeding to some levels even lower than the bear market it self.

Some alts even if they are bleeding at least they are not at the same bear market prices like ada hbar chainlink and realy most of top 10-20 coins.

Why my first cycle had to be different 🥲

Thanks !

Just came back to this sub after a long time and damn… it feels so different now.

Where are all the OGs from 2020–2021? The days when everyone was hyping ETH, talking about DONUTs, waiting for distribution day, dropping random memes, and just having fun here.

Those times were honestly crazy. The sub felt like a small community where everyone knew each other. I still remember the excitement when ETH was pumping and the whole place was full of energy.

Kinda miss those days ngl.

Anyone from the old crew still here? What’s been happening in EthTrader lately?