Axios Crypto: Meet Darragh Grove-White

Today we’re doing something a little different, talking with one of our readers, someone who has come out ahead through crypto investing — though not without some stomach churning reversals along the way.

Why it matters: Crypto is often spoken of as a democratizing opportunity, yet regular people seldom see the stories of non-professionals placing bets in the space. Here is one.

Details: Canadian marketing technologist Darragh Grove-White is ahead, but not without taking some painful hits.

“I made a lot of mistakes, for sure. He tells Axios that he’s had cryptocurrency exchanges take his money.

He was one of many Canadians out of luck when the founder of the exchange QuadrigaCX, Gerald Cotten, died (?) India.

State of play: Grove-White is one of the fortunate ones. By his account, since the Quadriga loss he’s turned around. He’s up around 11x on his principal, though there have been wild oscillations in that number recently.

Axios has verified the success of his portfolio.

Scoreboard: He invested in more than 180 coins. His first three purchases were bitcoin, Monero (a privacy cryptocurrency — that trade is still down), and Verge, which has shady affiliations.

He said, “I’ve had some that did really well and even less that I thought would do well.”

The biggest loss was a token that was the right idea (blockchain finance), but the wrong company at the wrong time. His biggest win was a lucky guess about which solution to fix Ethereum’s speed problems would click with users first.

Context: Although he only became interested in crypto during the bear market year of 2018, he did have some advantages. Given his day job, he’s considerably more technically sophisticated than most people.

It has worked in his favor. He explained, “I’m just super curiosity.” In crypto, it’s not enough just to read and watch charts. A person needs to get in to understand it, he contends.

Be smart: Having been in for four years, he sees new arrivals come in waves. You can spot the new investors on Twitter and Discord — they are always looking to make a quick buck.

“This most recent cohort of noobs, their on-ramp was the Wall Street Bets experience,” he said. “A lot of the n00bs go for meme coins. They invest like it’s a bit of a joke.”

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