If you're following the financial market, especially crypto, on 11 October 2025 (or 10 October 2025 depending on timezone), there was an event that became arguably the biggest liquidation cascade ever recorded in crypto. Around $20B was wiped out from the market in a few hours, and some sources even say it might have reached $50B. You can find the details everywhere. Nobody saw it coming.
I am not going to talk about the event itself. What I want to talk about is how it unfolded for me and how it affected me. Cryptocurrency and blockchain have always been fascinating to me, even though I am not really into the pure trading part. But we cannot separate the system from the trading itself. I rarely do the "actual" trading and instead focus more on the risk-managed side of things, like point farming or delta-neutral strategies.
But no matter how good my risk management is, there is always a chance that something goes wrong.
This one was a costly lesson. And the timing was funny because the same week, I happened to read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. The first chapters underline the idea that we must separate the decision from the result. A good decision does not always give a good result, and a good result does not automatically mean we made a good decision. There is always some chance of catastrophe. I admit I did not expect this one.
But that is part of the game. And as degenspartan infamously said:
"Just don’t die. If you are still alive, there’s no other way but to make it."
So I iterate. I tweak my algorithm to be more precise, add more guard rails, retest again, upgrade my server so it can handle more transactions per second, and prepare better for the next cycle.
I did not start from zero (even though it feels like it), but the market only took the money and the time. It did not take the skill.
We go higher from here.