Investors
1 Curated Dialogues
Taiki Maeda
Key Views & Dialogues
Taiki: $1.5M ETH Short, Market Sentiment, Bull vs Bear and More | TG Podcast
Taiki made roughly $500,000 shorting ETH, viewing treasury buying as temporary support and farmers’ withdrawals as an early warning for falling TVL. October 10 destroyed much of the retail demand for an alt season. Perp DEX farming may offer a better retail entry, but ETH could take two to five years to make new highs and Lighter requires due diligence.
View summary (7)
- Taiki made roughly $500,000 on an ETH-led short by treating digital-asset-treasury buying as temporary price support rather than durable demand. After being burned by ETH repeatedly, he concluded it was “really good technology, but the token itself is not that great”; weakening onchain activity and the October 10 liquidation reinforced the trade. He began shorting alts in late September and had already been raising cash after ETH reached roughly $4,900 in August.
- The core framework was to identify the marginal buyer and seller before reported fundamentals fully deteriorated. DATs had been the major marginal buyer of BTC and ETH, while experienced farmers withdrawing capital foreshadowed falling TVL, stalled stablecoin growth, and negative reflexivity. October 10 also destroyed much of the retail demand expected to fund an alt season: “We literally burned all the marginal buyers.”
- Taiki sees crypto’s central problem as good products attached to unprofitable, overvalued, and weakly defended tokens. Projects routinely launch pre-product near $3 billion FDV, while fee competition trends toward zero and challengers can erase an incumbent’s moat, as dYdX’s decline illustrated. Hyperliquid’s rise from roughly $3 billion to around $30 billion shows “good tokens can go up,” but he regards those outcomes as rare and research-intensive.
- This downturn feels like a crisis of belief because usable technology has improved while confidence in owning its tokens has deteriorated. Taiki’s summary was: last cycle, “the tech sucks but the coins pump hard”; now, “the tech is pretty good but the coins are terrible.” Investors may be underpricing even a sub-10% possibility that new highs take two to five years—or that an asset such as ETH trades sideways “like oil.”
- His tactical SOL purchase was a relief-bounce trade, explicitly not a bottom call. Being invited on specifically as the market’s bear felt like peak attention on bearishness, so he bought SOL around the low-$120s “for the culture,” while still expecting lower prices. His rough downside references were ETH near $2,500, Bitcoin’s approximately $60,000 200-week moving average, and potentially Michael Saylor’s roughly $74,000 Bitcoin cost basis.
- Farming remains Taiki’s preferred retail strategy because public-market buyers often inherit inflated launch valuations. He expects perp DEXs to be the next year’s strongest farming category: five launches averaging $1 billion FDV and distributing 15% would imply about $150 million of value per protocol. Lighter might be attractive at TGE, especially amid capitulation, but he stressed that he did not yet know its tokenomics and that farming demands serious due diligence.
- The survival playbook is patience, cash retention, diversified information, and learning to sell. “Don’t buy the dip too early,” avoid deploying everything at once, hold stables, follow bears as well as bulls, and continually ask who the marginal buyer and seller are. Taiki rejected the pressure to “make it” within a few years and warned against copying him blindly: “I’m going to be wrong at some point.”