Hey, future me. If you’re reading this, chances are the market is heating up again and you’re starting to feel that familiar itch. The one where everything is going up and you convince yourself it’ll keep going. Before you do anything, sit down and read this.
You wrote this after the last cycle. You learned some expensive lessons. Don’t waste them.
Be ready
When the opportunity comes, be ready. Have your stablecoins ready, have your wallets set up, have your strategies written down before the hype starts. You know from experience that the best entries happen when things are quiet and boring, and by the time everyone is talking about it, you’re already late. So do your homework early and don’t scramble when things start moving.
Take profit. Seriously.
This is the big one, and you know it. You’ve missed taking significant profits on $JUP, $W, and $LIT because you kept waiting for more. You sat there watching the numbers go up, thought “maybe it goes higher,” and then watched it all come back down. That money was real and you let it evaporate.
And yeah, you took profit on $HYPE a bit too fast. But you know what? That’s fine. That’s always fine. Between selling too early and selling too late, selling too early wins almost every single time historically. You don’t know which one will actually hit. You just don’t. So if you’re happy with the number, if you hit your target, take it. Don’t sit there playing the “what if” game because the next opportunity will always come.
This applies to airdrops especially. These are free money. Treat them like free money. Don’t get attached. You did great with $PRCL from Parcl, sold near launch and moved on. That token dropped like 97% after. If you had held, you’d be staring at basically nothing. That’s the playbook for airdrops. Sell, take the money, don’t look back.
Stablecoins are a one-way street
Once you move profits into stables, that’s it. Don’t touch them. Don’t rotate them back into some token because you got FOMO at 2am. The only exception is stable farming with solid, battle-tested protocols. That’s it. Everything else is you giving back what you already earned, and you’ve done that enough times to know how it feels.
NFTs
Think twice. Then think again. NFTs are insanely illiquid and there’s a really good chance you’ll end up being a holder whether you planned to or not. Don’t assume you have some informational edge that everyone else doesn’t. Most of the time, you don’t. The floor drops, volume dries up, and you’re stuck with a JPEG that you paid way too much for.
If you really want to buy one, ask yourself: “Am I okay if this goes to zero and I can’t sell it?” If the answer is no, don’t buy it.
Yield tokens
Be extra careful with yield tokens like the ones from Pendle. They look straightforward but they’re not. There’s always extra math involved, implied APY vs fixed APY, token price decay, expiry dates, and it’s easy to miscalculate your actual return. Don’t just ape in because the number looks good on the UI.
That said, if it’s a less popular pool that not many people are paying attention to, you might actually have a decent chance to farm it. The popular ones get crowded fast and the yield compresses. The quieter ones sometimes have better risk-adjusted returns because fewer people are doing the math.
Case in point: YT-USDS from Spark on Pendle. That one worked out well for you. The pool was relatively new, stUSDS had solid underlying yield from Sky’s borrower fees, and the Spark Points on top of it were a nice bonus before SPK launched. Not many people were paying attention because the whole Sky/MakerDAO rebrand thing was confusing and stUSDS had extra risk that scared off the casual farmers. Less crowded pool, better returns. That’s the pattern.
Now compare that with YT-USD* from Perena. That was the opposite. Everyone and their mom piled into it because of the Petals airdrop hype. The implied APY got bid way above the actual underlying yield, which means you were basically overpaying for yield that was never gonna materialize at that rate. And the airdrop points? Diluted to hell because too many people were farming the same thing. YT decays to zero at maturity regardless, so when you combine overpaying with diluted points, you’re just losing money with extra steps.
Find the moat
This ties back to everything above. Always find the moat. Where is the airdrop opportunity that other people aren’t looking at?
Solana tends to be more retail-oriented, which means airdrops get diluted fast. Too many wallets, too many farmers, too little allocation to go around. A lot of Solana protocols are copies of what Ethereum already has, which isn’t necessarily bad, there’s still innovation happening there, but it does mean the crowd follows fast and your edge disappears quickly.
Ethereum airdrops on the other hand seem to have a bigger chance of being profitable. The gas costs and complexity act as a natural filter. Not everyone is gonna bother, and that’s your edge.
And don’t sleep on the smaller chains. Avalanche sometimes has great projects flying completely under the radar because not a lot of eyes are watching. Less attention means less competition means better allocation.
Another moat: boring, repetitive tasks that not many people can automate. $SKR from Solana Seeker was a good example. You literally had to show up every day, use your phone, do a few on-chain transactions consistently over months. Nothing glamorous, nothing exciting, just grind. Most people gave up or couldn’t be bothered. The ones who stuck with it got rewarded because consistency was the whole point. If a farming strategy feels tedious and you can’t just write a script to do it for you, that’s probably a sign it’s worth doing.
If it’s already heated on X, if people are already making threads about it, chances are it’s already diluted. If everyone is already there, you’re probably too late. Always find the moat.
Vesting and locked tokens
Anything with vesting or locked tokens, be extra careful. If you can’t exit, you can’t manage your risk. Period. The market doesn’t care about your unlock schedule. By the time your tokens vest, the price could be a fraction of what it was when you got in, and you’re just sitting there watching it bleed with no way out.
Big chances you’ll end up as a bag holder. The projects know this too, that’s why they lock your tokens in the first place. Think about that for a second. If you see a vesting schedule, assume the worst case and ask yourself if you’re okay holding through a 80-90% drawdown with zero ability to sell. If that sounds terrible, it probably is.
ICOs and token sales
Here’s a simple rule: if it’s easy to participate, you’re probably getting diluted. When everyone and their mom can join a token sale, the supply is gonna be massive and you’ll be exit liquidity for the team and early investors.
But if it’s hyped and only a small percentage of people can actually get in, that’s a different story. Scarcity and demand in your favor. Those are the ones worth trying for.
That’s it. Nothing groundbreaking here, just things you already learned the hard way. The market will give you another shot. Just don’t repeat the same mistakes.
You’ll be fine. Just take your damn profits.