Zeneca portfolio tops $20m – and has ‘2021 vibes’ again: NFT collector

Roy Bhasin, a former professional poker player for 15 years – known in crypto as Zeneca – will be in 2021. He developed a large following on X as the spreadsheet guy who tracked the daily price of NFTs in Mania.

Zeneca boosted its NFT portfolio to eight figures at one point, but then came crashing back down to earth. He then turned himself into an NFT creator by launching ZenAcademy and The 333 Club in November 2021.

After enduring a brutal NFT bear market, Zeneca has been all over Fantasy Top lately. The new game, built on the Ethereum L2 network explosion, is similar to a fantasy sports league, but with Crypto Twitter personalities replacing the athletes and the sports scoreboard with X participation dimensions.

As disturbing as it may seem to some, the timeline has been taken by storm, and Zeneca has come up with a patented spreadsheet.

“My mojo is definitely back. I'm jumping out of bed in the morning because I want to check prices and make sure my team tweets. “I feel like others are doing the same thing, and it's kind of created this energy that I haven't felt since 2021 for me. It's giving me a lot of 2021 vibes.”

Decomposition of Pro Poker Player to NFT

Zeneka, an Australian living in Dubai, started playing professional poker around 2005 and says the skills he learned helped him navigate the murky waters of crypto and NFTs.

Although he plays most of his poker online, he has a lot of experience at the tables in casino tournaments. It wasn't unusual to be completely immersed in online poker for 14 to 16 hours a day, which reflected the lives of many professional crypto geniuses glued to their screens.

“As a professional poker player, you learn to have a healthy relationship with money. You don't care about money so much that you're sitting at the poker table looking at a pot, or a bet, or a bluff, and you're thinking, That's a week's rent, that's a car, that's a vacation. Is that a new iPhone or something.

If you think like that, you will never make rational and rational decisions. But on the other hand, if you don't care enough, you start spitting out chips. You don't care about the results. So neither extreme is good. You need to check that needle and have a healthy separation with money.

Round-sliding crypto portfolio and NFT trading

Zeneca raised $20 million on paper at one point from a $50,000 cost base in 2021, but as is the ritual for many people in crypto, it pulled back 80%–90% of its portfolio. In the year 2021 will be the second time the Aussies ride the bags.

In the year In 2017, when he first got into crypto, he was a bit more passive – nothing on chain, instead he bought and sold on exchanges.

“In 2017, I probably put in $5,000 to $10,000. “I think at my peak it was worth around $200,000 buying ETH and buying Ripple, and just buying random coins on the BTC markets,” he says. Not offered. In percentage terms, driving was very similar on both cycles.

The weight journey can leave mental stress and pain prioritizing how crypto degens think about selling, and Zineca feels he could write an entire book on the subject.

“At the top level, I'm still not doing well in selling. I have improved a lot, but I still struggle. I think the number one reason is portfolio fatigue, having too many tokens in too many chains, too many wallets, and not being able to track them all and keep them all in mind.

He's been trying to lower his profile from thousands of NFTs over the past 12 months, but he says it's a “huge undertaking”.

“I think there's such a thing as diversification, and in many cases it's less, so my aim is to get to the portfolio that's probably the most feasible. […] I can only keep track of 10 to 20 things. I might have a better idea of ​​when I want to sell. “It's not too bad that I'm making a mistake by bagging up to zero,” he said.

Crypto and poker are similar.

Zeneca draws parallels between the two worlds of poker and crypto, highlighting the competitive nature of both banks' management and the often overlooked psychological side of both endeavors.

“You don't want to sit on a table with all your money, the same way you don't want to put all your money into one random memecoin. You need to allocate your bankroll appropriately and take calculated risks, calculated bets at a reasonable percentage of each of your bankrolls,” says Zeneka.

He says crypto and poker are jobs where you can “work” for a month and still lose money. Despite the similarities, the 36-year-old thinks crypto may have an edge over the madness.

“Crypto is another level. It is a global playing field. Instead of thousands of poker tournaments or poker tables, you play with millions of people.

Making money in crypto, to NFTs, to true believers

Known for his in-depth blogs and insightful X-threads, Zeneka has been very clear about his approach to this bull market, admitting that most people's motivation is just to make money, but now he has another motivation.

“I think I've come full circle. Most people come to space to make money. I am here to make money in 2020 and 2017.

“In 2021, I also fell in love with NFTs. I became an art collector, and that's true. I still love art. We recently got an apartment and hung some NFTs as art, and it brings a lot of joy to life. I am so grateful to crypto and NFTs for bringing that out in me and allowing me to experience it in my life.

He says he fell in love with the idea of ​​digital collecting, games and online communities, and then the potential of DeFi and blockchain technology.

“As soon as I came for the money, then I fell in love with the many positive, truly constructive and revolutionary things the place was doing.”

Zeneca is still about the love of NFTs and Web3, but his new persona arc is nothing to support to admit that many crypto online casino, where the winners can change and adapt to new narratives.

Crypto and NFT projects rarely succeed

Having seen what life is like behind the scenes of the project founder through ZenAcademy and being privy to hundreds of calls as an angel investor in crypto startups, Zeneca said that although there are many incredible projects, most of the ideas are still born.

“Most of these projects and ideas just fall through. You struggle in the market, or you've built this cool thing, but no one really wants to use it. It's just that it's not enough to build something interesting.

But if you want users, if you want to build a big successful company or app, project or whatever, you have to understand your market, you have to understand marketing, customer acquisition, all these things.

“Right now I see it on two levels where you have a macro zoom view of where crypto is. We're miles away from where we were in 2021, which is miles ahead of where we were in 2017. Fuel costs are down. We have all these Layer 2s and alternative Layer 1s. We have wallets. They just got better, you can now create wallets with an email address.

“On a day-to-day time scale, it's really about making money. “That's what most people are going around to do,” he said, adding that the gambling side of the casino “isn't for everyone.”

“I can also see it as a downside because it paints the whole crypto space in a negative light for a lot of people. Vitalik had an article a while back about how to remake crypto cypherpunk, and I think there's a lot of truth to that.”

NFT trading with the NFT community

In the year During the frenzy of 2021 and the crazy NFT period from January to April 2022, it was common for project founders to promise the world (or meta version) to owners and deliver very little as prices continued to rise, setting expectations in an endless upward trend.

But ZenAcademy and The 333 Club have improved the expectations of the process, so in 2010 The difficult decision to scale back the projects in the midst of the bear market in 2023 was not accompanied by the backlash many other founders were struggling with.

“We've tried a lot over the last two years, and basically, the realization I had at the end of 2023 was that I didn't want to run a company. “I wanted to lead a community, and a lot of NFT projects struggle with trying to build a profitable business while keeping the community happy,” Zeneka says.

“Every decision seems to result in one loss or another. If you're trying to do something for profit, the community as a whole isn't going to be that exciting. If you are trying to please the community, it will generally cost you money.

“I don't enjoy trouble and stress. Like the paper, the admin, there are a lot of things about running a business that I'm not really good at.

But I love the community aspect. I love chatting with people in Discord. I love sharing my thoughts and alpha. I like that every week, we do a couple of calls with the community, and I'm still doing all that. Finding it late last year helped me accept that the business was not going to work out.

A rapid-fire Q&A with NFT collector Zeneca

Favorite NFT in your wallet?

“I call it Fidenza or my Meridian. We got a large print of this meridian and hung it on the wall in our new apartment and it brings so much joy.

Favorite one-on-one art class?

“There's a piece of Hakatao that I won a raffle for doing the first ever PUNKS comic. I love their art style. I've been in love with him for a very long time. Much of my collection is like generative art, one of a kind in limited collections or editions. My Meridian also has many art blocks that I love.

Are Ethereum NFTs Coming Back?

“Yes and no. 99.9% don't come back, but there's a small fraction that blows everyone's minds. They've got your autoglyphs, your squiggles, your punks. There's a lot of other sets, but most of them don't come back. Maybe Pudgy Penguin blew everyone out of the water again because they're killing him.” But we won't see it again until early 2022.

Who are your top three followers for NFTs on X?

B-Cheque: “He is very good and highly popular.”

OSFand Sam, Aka NFT Stats: “ Let me break OSF and NFT Stats together. I love them because they are active, they tweet a lot, they are in the hole. They have a very good pulse on the market, and I feel they can be up to date with what's happening across NFTs and memecoins and even macro. You can also classify Mando into that category, basically the FOMO watch crew.

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Greg Oxford

Greg Oakford is Head of Development and Partnerships at Upside DAO, Australia's leading crypto and web3 collaboration hub and investment fund. He is an avid NFT collector and founder of NFT Fest Australia. Prior to crypto, Greg was a marketing and sponsorship specialist in the sports industry working on professional events.

Follow the author @GregOakford