Dialogue with Zee Prime Capital Founding Partner: Unveiling the Mystery of the "Top Player" in the Crypto World

Interview and Article by: Nansen

Interviewee: Fiskantes, Founding Partner of Zee Prime Capital

Translation: Amber

After moving past the early stage where they referred to themselves as "And Others Capital" (a common practice in crypto media to only mention well-known VCs while omitting lesser-known institutions and shortening it to "among other investors"), Zee Prime Capital emerged in the latter part of the 2020-2022 crypto market cycle, establishing a comprehensive investment landscape that spans various fields including layer one blockchains, infrastructure, DeFi, and gaming applications.

Zee Prime's rise is largely attributed to the influence of one of its founding partners, Fiskantes. This self-proclaimed "risk communist" has made sharp critiques of market and social phenomena on Twitter using very cool language, and has thrown out some quite brilliant viewpoints. He once correctly predicted that high-throughput blockchains would eventually become congested based on an energy consumption paradox proposed 200 years ago, and foresaw the explosion of the NFT sector, both of which have become key to Zee Prime's continued success. The firm currently manages multiple funds, including its flagship fund Zee Prime II, which recently raised $35 million.

However, Fiskantes's journey has not been smooth sailing. He was once an obsessed poker player and an unsuccessful cheese merchant, who faced bankruptcy due to business failures but later rebuilt some assets through real estate investments, ultimately achieving considerable success in the cryptocurrency field.

During the interview, we learned that Fiskantes's substantial knowledge base largely stems from his long-standing reading and self-learning habits, and Zee Prime is a well-known owner of a Smart Money wallet monitored by Nansen, emphasizing the necessity of mastering one's emotions to succeed in cryptocurrency investments.

Here is the transcript of the interview:

Nansen: How did you start investing? Did you receive any relevant training?

Fiskantes: I remember in college, I tried to save as much money as possible, working summer jobs, like being a security guard at events. I worked in an IKEA warehouse. I was also reading some books about how to achieve financial freedom. Studying law became very boring for me, and I started to feel that I needed to do something else.

I discovered some challenges initiated by stock brokers who, to promote their services in college, would give you a simulated trading account with $100,000 in virtual funds, and the participants with the best performance over a specific period could win some prizes.

You have to understand that I come from a very small country and a very small town, so before participating in that event, I knew nothing about the stock market. I just randomly bought some stocks based on luck and ended up with decent results, even though at that time I had no deep understanding of the market. But once I realized that money could be made, I was determined to save and start investing in finance.

At that time, I read a lot of articles about investing, one of which was a PR piece published by PokerStrategy.com about how to become a professional poker player online and make money. Later, I found out that the article was written by Pavel, one of my current business partners, but that's not the focus of the story. After reading that article, I flew directly to Gibraltar to consult with them, and from there I began the path of accumulating money through poker tournaments. After about five or six years of professional play, I had saved a decent amount of money while also investing.

Around 2011, I started researching value investing, which is very different from most cryptocurrencies or stocks that have generated huge returns over the past 12 years. At that time, the PokerStrategy.com team established another project called Tradimo, focused on trading and investing. I wasn't deeply involved, but I helped with community building in the early days.

They were always talking about the prospects of Facebook's IPO and other growth tech stocks. I was the one trying to push for more content on value investing methods, but no one really cared about that. Everyone wanted to chase tech stocks, and looking back, that was indeed a better strategy. After all, since the bubble burst, tech stocks have far outperformed the returns of most value investments advocated by Buffett.

In the Tradimo team, a guy from the Netherlands bought Bitcoin, and that was my first exposure to Bitcoin. He said, "This is something new, we should pay attention to it, and we should write some articles about it." At that time, I wasn't a real decision-maker on that platform, but I thought it was foolish. Let's focus on something serious, shall we? So after my first exposure to Bitcoin, I ignored it for three years.

It wasn't until later when I participated in some poker games in online rooms that accepted Bitcoin payments that I slowly began to enter the world of cryptocurrency. It was a very interesting transformation process, from being a big skeptic who was pessimistic about everything to meeting some hackers from the cryptocurrency anarchist movement. After communicating with them, my judgment about this matter became very consciousness-oriented around 2016 to 2017. For me, the value of cryptocurrency at that time was more about ideological change rather than making money.

Nansen: It sounds like you were learning multiple skills across different fields simultaneously. Do you think this helped your growth? How did everything organically come together?

Fiskantes: In fact, sometimes I feel anxious just because I know I don't have enough time in my life to learn everything I want to learn. My preferences in learning are very broad, but I really don't specialize in one thing because I feel like I can't spend too much time just learning one thing.

In contrast, for example, I have some friends in the poker world who are very deeply focused only on poker, almost like autistic individuals, knowing every possible situation that can occur in poker, but in other aspects of life, they might be like "idiots." They might even get lost just trying to buy a chair at IKEA.

So for these people, when poker stops being profitable, they basically have no opportunities to turn to other fields, except for cryptocurrency. Many of them are now in the cryptocurrency field because it is also a very interesting game. I always want to do more. I always want to do business. I always want to go out and try more things, maybe something more valuable than just playing cards.

After I gave up studying law, I studied applied psychology for three years because I wanted to have a university degree. Moreover, it was really interesting for me to figure out how the human mind works, especially when I was playing poker under pressure; this knowledge helped me.

So for me, the priority is to learn as much as possible about different things and to explore a path that suits me in life. I feel that to have an advantage, you either need to be very knowledgeable. For example, if you invest in real estate, if you invest in places you are very familiar with, you know the prices, you know how that space will develop further, it is certainly very helpful. If you can't do that, you can only invest in some super new, poorly planned frontier fields.

Before formally entering the cryptocurrency field, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out virtual reality (VR), which had a small bull market or hype cycle in 2016, but for me, it wasn't something truly actionable. It was just an interesting hobby. During that time, I tried a lot of things, but after I formally got into cryptocurrency, I invested most of the money I had for investing and all my savings from poker into a company that might sound a bit "strange" to you.

This is a story I may have never shared, but it's super interesting. There was a company in Eastern Europe that focused on the cheese market, producing aged cheeses like Gouda, and making considerable profits by exporting them after aging for a few months. At that time, it seemed to me that all you needed was some kind of secure storage infrastructure, and then you just needed to distribute it, selling it to supermarkets, wine shops, etc., to make a lot of money.

The numbers on paper looked very good for this company. I invested a lot of money in it. I knew the founder, though I might not have known him that well, as I later found out he was doing a lot of shady things on the side, had a huge debt that he never disclosed to anyone, and the business basically went bankrupt, causing me to lose a lot.

Around 2016, as I became more interested in cryptocurrency, no longer just a poker player using Bitcoin to exchange chips, I read the Bitcoin white paper and engaged in some cryptocurrency trading. Looking back, trying to invest in physical or real-world businesses, genuinely trying to do something in the food industry, seems crazy to me now. It's hard to imagine because these physical industries represented by food are very hard to penetrate.

That cheese company went bankrupt quite quickly, and when I started to understand cryptocurrency, I certainly thought it wouldn't keep growing at such a rapid pace. However, finding direction in this space is still much easier than doing things in the real world.

Nansen: What do you think you gained from being scammed in the cheese company investment?

Fiskantes: The biggest lesson, of course, is risk management. Although I had already learned some lessons before, this one was more "profound." Another is that there is a huge difference between ideas and numbers on paper and actual execution.

I am very sure that if this business were run by someone else, perhaps with more resources, a better distribution network, and better organization, it would have made a lot of money quite quickly, even comparable to some tech industries. But it all comes down to the team and execution. If I had been more experienced in dealing with people and discussing business with the team I was trying to build, I could have spotted this earlier, but I didn't, and it is very different from investing in stocks or playing poker.

Nansen: It seems your early experiences were a perfect course for entering cryptocurrency. You studied psychology, you studied gambling strategies and the psychology of poker, you studied the market. You entered the cryptocurrency field with the exact skills you hope others have.

Fiskantes: To some extent, I think I was much better prepared than some of the people I know who are lawyers or do other things and then try to buy some cryptocurrency investments as a side job. However, cryptocurrency was still a wild beast that was hard to tame in the early days, and I made many mistakes.

Of course, after the failure of the cheese business, I never made any critical mistakes again. I never used leverage, nor did I let my butt get burned by investing too much in one project. But I also went through the ICO craze, where those beautifully packaged projects attracted me, and I participated in investments, but ultimately most of them failed.

Yes, I believe I absolutely have a better knowledge base for participating in the cryptocurrency market than most people, even from a mindset or psychological perspective. I really don't mind volatility; I don't mind losing money. It's normal for me. I don't spend too much time glued to price charts, agonizing over where Bitcoin will go next. That's also an advantage.

Nansen: We talked about early failures and the lessons learned from them. Are there any successful experiences worth sharing?

Fiskantes: My stock value investment strategy was decent, but it never really generated any excess returns, so I basically gave up and entered the ETF passive investment camp. So even if it did well, I wouldn't say my stock investments were particularly successful. However, one investment was indeed the right choice, which was when I bought an apartment in 2014.

At that time, buying an apartment was a huge investment for me, and I paid 50% of the purchase price through a mortgage. For me, I thought, well, this might be the biggest investment of my life, so I need to make it really important and pay attention to it. Now, compared to what I have now, that number isn't large, but at the time, it was a significant amount.

In fact, I spent a lot of time using my advisor to conduct due diligence. I hired an advisor who was from a building inspection agency to do private inspections for those wanting to buy real estate. So when I went for site visits, I would pay him to accompany me. He would bring his tools, measure the humidity of the walls, check if the windows had good sound insulation, and everything, giving me advice on how much I should negotiate. He played a significant role in this process; I looked at at least 30 apartments before I bought one that initially looked quite terrible.

The location of this apartment was fantastic, but the condition of the house at that time was very poor. If you are someone who decides based on emotions or the badness of things' looks, you wouldn't buy it. And this person told me it was the best place we had seen so far. I knew it looked terrible, but it would be very easy to renovate, and structurally everything was fine. The location, community amenities, and price of this apartment were great, and I should buy it immediately. So I did.

Then I started the renovation, and five years later, I sold it for a much greater increase than the average real estate market return at that time. The entire renovation process made me very comfortable, and at that time, I thought maybe I could do more real estate investments this way. But then cryptocurrency surged, and I gave up that idea, but that might be my biggest non-cryptocurrency investment victory, which was not just luck; it was actually the returns I gained after doing thorough preliminary research and preparation.

Nansen: I noticed that in several stories above, you really like to find experts in the field for direct communication. When you first got into poker, you went to Gibraltar. When buying a house, you brought in an advisor. Do you still do this? Before investing at Zee Prime, did you invite experts in the corresponding fields? How do you conduct this due diligence now?

Fiskantes: Cryptocurrency is a fast-developing new industry, and you don't really have the kind of experts from other industries. However, last year we started focusing on gaming. Mainly because some of our partners, especially Pavel, the guy I just mentioned from the Gibraltar poker company, built a huge gaming company that includes not only poker games but also some other games. He has been a gaming expert for 11 years, so he understands games and knows how to make them fun and profitable. His knowledge surpasses that of most venture capitalists investing in crypto games today. This is a fortunate coincidence; we successfully recruited him and leveraged his network to hire more professionals in this field.

To this end, we established our own small team, which is now focused on the gaming sector. In addition, we are hiring some people whom I wouldn't call experts, but we have hired some quite smart, young, and hungry brains from traditional finance who are now analyzing some DeFi opportunities. The early team was more like a group of people from different backgrounds coming together, but now as we scale, we are trying to systematically build specialized teams that focus directionally on the various fields we invest in.

Maybe we are lucky; we are earning substantial returns. In the future, we might expand our investments into other areas that we believe are necessary for advancing human civilization. Therefore, we may hire some external experts and consultants to help us with investments, perhaps more passively, not as hands-on as we are with cryptocurrency, but maybe in the next three to seven years, we will consider this… I don't want to reveal too much about this because it's just internal brainstorming. But we are seriously discussing this. If there is enough funding, we can help realize some dreams that seem unattainable now. That said, we are not experts in this area, and we will never be. So we may need some external help and do more passive investing.

Nansen: This is something you've mentioned multiple times in this interview, and I've seen you talk about it on Twitter. Investing with a higher purpose seems to be a motivation for you.

Fiskantes: Yes, I mean, flipping coins is fun, and I've done what I should do, especially with NFTs. It's interesting, but it was never the main motivation. After a while, you realize that if you buy a bigger yacht, if there's a bigger number on your screen, you won't be happier. I don't know what others do with their money, but what you can do is either stop being so focused on your career and investments and start doing other things, like focusing on your health, or at least have some higher goals for why you accumulated all these numbers and what you want to do with them in the future.

I'm trying to do both. My partner and I feel that we need to give back or find those areas that can truly drive human progress, areas that may be underdeveloped, or where capital is misallocated in some way, or where there are inefficiencies. We will try to figure out how to think about them differently and how to shift them to places that may benefit all of us more.

It sounds a bit cliché, but I feel that at the end of the day, this is the purest form of motivation. You have to have dreams bigger than what you already have and try to help something that may transcend you.

And this is exactly what cryptocurrency is doing. Interestingly, so many people become very wealthy early in life without waiting 20 years or more after building a company. We don't want to see the world destroyed when we are old. Therefore, I think the shift from a purely "how far can we push our assets" mindset to, say, living in a greener, more pleasant, and meaningful world.

Nansen: In the crypto world, many "prodigies" have emerged. Do you think some people are naturally suited for trading? Is this something that can be learned? Is it a skill that can be cultivated through training?

Fiskantes: I think you need to have some knowledge base to do this. Of course, a lot of it needs to be trained. If people are not trained from a young age or are not used to taking big risks, it is hard to accumulate wealth quickly in the crypto space.

Especially for trading, where you are really glued to the screen, trying to make quick decisions with large amounts of money in a noisy environment. You need to have some kind of quality… I don't know how to describe it, but I feel you need to let some things "die" deep inside you.

Nansen: Specifically, what needs to "die"?

Fiskantes: There needs to be something in your heart that is dead, or in other words, you need to make yourself indifferent to some things. You know, some people get very excited when they think about money. We have this game with poker players where we go to a bar, have some drinks, and then we propose to the bartender to flip a coin. If we lose, we pay three times the price. Or if we win, we pay nothing, and he has to pay with his own money.

For the bartender, even though this is clearly a value-added strategy because you are risking 1 to win 3 with a 50-50 chance, the fact is that most bartenders would not accept that condition.

Most people are very averse to risk; the concept of loss is much more painful for them than the vision of winning more money. Therefore, I feel you need to be someone who perhaps doesn't feel the risk is too great, but at the same time, you shouldn't be addicted to gambling. After all, there are indeed many people who are addicted to the dopamine rush brought by the crazy rise and fall of numbers.

So for me, the numbers aren't that interesting. I remember playing poker; it was just a grind. I just sat there, played for a few hours every day, and then happily went off to do other things. And some people are really addicted; they can't leave the table at all.

Nansen: For you, what is painful? In trading, there must be things that have really "torn" your heart. What is painful?

Fiskantes: For example, I missed a successful project due to carelessness, or I missed something due to carelessness. When everything is rising quickly, these opportunities make me feel a bit overwhelmed. And yes, making careless mistakes is painful, even if I didn't actually lose money because of it.

But another thing, which is more from an investment perspective, is that I feel sympathy for those builders under immense pressure. They are the ones who are truly creating important, interesting, and innovative things. And these people receive so much hatred and so much pressure. I feel these people are working very hard for it. And our thought is merely to sell their tokens for profit, and that's it.

So I think it's a bit painful when I see very good projects and very good, well-meaning teams struggling just because symbolic things fell apart due to timing issues, and the community piles all the problems on them. It can be overwhelming. Every time I think about leaving this field or taking a long vacation, it usually relates to such things.

We are willing to support those founders or developers, even if they may have quirky personalities or their designs may be flawed, and they may need to address these issues more proactively. But I have always favored those who can make a noise in some innovative fields; sometimes even if things don't succeed, but they are very well noticed, I feel like the world is moving forward.

Nansen: I noticed that the Zee Prime wallet marked by Nansen is very few; is this for security reasons?

Fiskantes: Speaking of OPSEC, since I might be the most public-facing person on our team, aside from my own funds, I personally do not control any other funds. Sometimes I might test some new projects and buy some NFTs; I also back up some multisig wallets, but I never proactively sign anything, and I am very careful about that.

Nansen: Let's talk about NFTs. I looked through the on-chain interaction records of your personal account, and there was a huge activity peak around October 21, which was also when you started playing NFT games. What is particularly attractive about this market to you?

Fiskantes's personal account on-chain activity record

Fiskantes: To be honest, in our team, my judgment on NFT assets has always been quite unique. Almost everyone says it's just a nonsensical fashion trend, but I have always encouraged them to dig deeper into this field and look for opportunities.

When I was still playing poker, there was a proprietary trading platform in Eastern Europe hiring traders, and they would do high-frequency trading on small exchanges like the Warsaw Stock Exchange and the Vienna Stock Exchange, where the liquidity was very low. You could manually do what market-making algorithms do now, and you could make a lot of money in a very straightforward way. In the process, I learned some tricks on how to "play" the order book.

I stayed there for three weeks, and I realized I didn't want to wear a shirt and tie to the office every day, so I quit, but I learned some skills. So last year, I actually discovered that you could implement similar operations in NFTs because these markets have low liquidity and are hard to automate. So I was doing this, but I was also just trying to buy some lottery tickets to see if anything would pop up.

Order book strategies are not complicated. By the way, you could also do this on Kraken in early 2017 or late 2016. Basically, what you do is look for a large spread between the buy and sell orders of some assets.

Fiskantes's realized profit record

I don't often do this kind of operation, but I just figured out that this is a viable strategy. If it weren't for the super high Ethereum fees, it might be the best place to learn how to do this kind of trading, but because of that, it's not suitable for everyone.

Additionally, when someone unexpectedly lists a very rare NFT, you should buy it quickly. I did that too, and if I really focused on it, I think I could achieve quite good returns in this activity. But at that time, we were already running our fund, and I wasn't interested in just "camping out to pick up leaks" all day; that was something I did for five years in poker, so it shouldn't be something I do for the rest of my life.

Now, I feel the NFT market is saturated. The market is full of knockoffs, and it's not as exciting as when I used to play. Now I no longer recommend everyone to buy NFTs directly; instead, they should research some NFT gaming applications or NFT infrastructure projects.

Nansen: In the cryptocurrency market, people often say that powerful market participants like you control the direction of the entire industry behind the scenes. What do you think of this view?

Fiskantes: I'm not the kind of person who appears in many private groups, the so-called industry insiders. If there are any chat groups that are so important that they can drive the market, I definitely wouldn't join. However, the fact is that behind-the-scenes trading and insider information are inevitable. I don't think it's different from other industries; it's just that the crypto market is new and rapidly developing, which makes those little information asymmetries much more valuable in this market.

Now I am a bit tired and no longer starry-eyed and naive like I was four or five years ago. At that time, I was more inclined to believe that all cryptocurrencies were about creating equal opportunities, making everything more decentralized and democratic.

However, in some ways, it is still moving in that direction. Anyone anywhere in the world can build smart contracts, which is an equal opportunity for everyone. Then the commonality is just pure artistic skill, figuring out how to play the DeFi/MEV game better than others without any background. And if the game is global, it can be played anywhere. You just need your computer, and suddenly you can be in it. You could even earn a ten-digit asset from your mom's basement in Pakistan.

Wallet Analysis

As part of the interview, Fiskantes shared some of Zee Prime's most successful investments, including early bets on Synthetix and Solana, as well as buying Luna at $1. Fiskantes also revealed that Zee Prime is rapidly growing, with multiple other entities operating under the same roof. This includes Sigil, a liquidity staking tool focused on DeFi, and a newly added family member: Devmons.gg.

For active NFT traders, Devmons may be a familiar name, as it is a very active ENS address for GameFi and NFT players.

Devmons.eth realized profit record

Devmons owns over 1,600 Parallel cards and has achieved great success in the hype surrounding series like Goblintown and Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult.

Their current portfolio is primarily focused on Parallel, but they also hold a large number of derivatives from Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult, Loot, and Pudgy Penguins.

Devmons.eth NFT investment portfolio

In recent months, this address has been focused on increasing its Loot holdings and has tried many cutting-edge gaming projects. Additionally, Devmons is also an "airdrop specialist," having successfully harvested a large number of tokens in multiple token airdrops. Just from the Forgotten Runes Warriors Guild project, they received over twenty NFTs worth more than 5.5 Ethereum.