Nansen Interview with Fiskantes: Entering the Heart of an Ape

Original: 《Inside the Mind of an Ape: Fiskantes》

Editor: Claire, Carole, Maxwell, Diamond, D_TigerResearch

The Nansen team interviewed one of the top traders in the crypto space and analyzed his wallet.

For months, they have jokingly referred to themselves on Twitter as "and other investors" (a jab at crypto media listing well-known venture capital firms while relegating new companies to the status of "and other investors"). The venture capital firm Zee Prime Capital emerged as a leading investment group during the latter half of the 2020-2022 cycle, with a portfolio that includes early investments in various Layer1, infrastructure, DeFi, and P2E projects.

Zee Prime's rise is largely attributed to the increasingly well-known Fiskantes (one of the founding partners of the project). This pseudonymous individual, who calls himself a "risk communist," is a typical representative of crypto Twitter, effortlessly blending junk posts, market analysis, and social commentary behind the anime clown Hisoka's avatar.

His achievements include correctly predicting that high-throughput blockchains would eventually experience congestion, foreseeing the explosion of NFTs, and contributing to Zee Prime's ongoing success. The firm currently manages multiple funds, including its flagship fund Zee Prime II, which closed in 2022 with a cap of $35 million.

However, Fiskantes's journey has not been smooth sailing. Before achieving his current success, he was a prolific poker player and nearly became a cheese merchant, but faced bankruptcy after a failed investment in Gouda cheese. After rebuilding his funds through real estate investments, he ultimately made his fortune in the cryptocurrency space with a cautious, interdisciplinary approach and methodology.

During our interview with Nansen, we were surprised to discover that Fisk's extensive expertise is largely a result of his good reading habits; Zee Prime is the driving force behind the famous Smart Money NFT wallet; and successful cryptocurrency investing requires a certain emotional detachment.

Continue reading to gain deeper insights into Fiskantes's investment methods and a detailed categorization of the Zee Prime wallet.

How did you start investing? Did you receive any formal training?

I remember when I was in college, I tried to work as much as possible to save money, like doing security work at events and even working in a warehouse at IKEA. I also read some books about not working for others, like Kiyosaki and some other very basic stuff. Studying law was very boring for me, and I started to feel like I needed to do something else.

I discovered a challenge when some stock brokers were promoting their services at our university. They gave you $100,000 for simulated trading, and you could buy some stocks. A year later, they would pick the best-performing portfolios and give out some monetary rewards.

I come from a small town in a very small country, so I didn't even know that random people like me could buy stocks or equity in companies. This realization hit me, and I understood that I could also open an account and buy shares of some American companies. I randomly bought some stocks I didn't know much about, and in the end, I got a better-performing portfolio—purely by luck, as I knew nothing. At that time, I said, "Okay, now I need to save money to start investing."

At that time, I was reading some articles about investing online, one of which was about poker. It was a PR article published by a company called PokerStrategy.com, which stated, "Oh, anyone can become a professional poker player online, and everyone can make money this way." Interestingly, this article was written by Pavel, who is now one of my business partners and was working at PokerStrategy.com at the time.

I personally went to Gibraltar to meet these people because I wanted to work with them. That was a long time ago, probably 12 or 13 years ago, but that's how I met some people who still work with me today.

I started accumulating from a $50 promotion I got from playing poker for free, and after playing professional tournaments for five or six years, I built up a considerable fund, but I also treated investing as a side job, trying to understand the meaning of investing in the stock market.

Around 2011, I started studying value investing. This was very different from the massive returns that most cryptocurrencies or stocks have gained over the past 12 years. The PokerStrategy.com team also created another project called Tradimo, which was dedicated to trading and investing. I didn't get very deeply involved, but I helped build the community in its early days.

They were talking about Facebook's IPO and similar growth tech stocks. I was the one trying to promote more content on value investing there, but no one really cared about it. Everyone wanted to chase tech stocks, and looking back, that was indeed a better strategy. After all, since the bubble burst, it still outperforms most of the value investment returns recommended by Benjamin Graham or Warren Buffet.

I remember I tried all these crazy Fukushima trades, and then you know, Japan was almost "bleeding." I played with fire and lost badly, and then I turned back to study and asked myself, "Okay, so what is the best investment method?"

At Tradimo, a Dutch guy bought Bitcoin, and that was my first exposure to Bitcoin. He said, "This is something new, we should pay attention to it and write articles about it." I wasn't a real decision-maker on that platform, but I said, "That's silly, let's focus on something serious, shall we?" So my first exposure to Bitcoin resulted in me ignoring it for three years.

Later, I played poker in some online rooms that accepted Bitcoin payments. This way, I slowly entered the crypto space, initially as a very pessimistic conspiracy theorist about everything until I met some hackers from these crypto anarchist movements. After interacting with them in 2016-2017, my understanding of the crypto industry became very ideologically driven; for me at that time, crypto was more of an ideology than a way to make money.

It sounds like you were learning various skills in different fields at the same time. Do you think this helped or hindered your development? How did you coordinate all of this?

In fact, sometimes I feel anxious because I know there isn't enough time in life to learn everything I want to learn. My interests in learning are very broad, but I am very unfocused—I really can't spend a lot of time just learning one thing.

In contrast, my friends from the poker world are all very obsessed with playing poker, almost like autistic individuals. They know every possible situation that can occur in poker. All the numbers are useful to them. But they are completely useless in other areas; they might even get lost trying to buy a chair at IKEA.

When poker stopped being profitable, these people had little opportunity to switch careers, except into crypto. Many of them are currently in the cryptocurrency field because it is also a very interesting game. It's different, but it also allows you to delve into certain things. But I always want to do more. I always want to do business, to break the status quo and do something more valuable than just playing cards.

After I gave up law, I studied applied psychology for three years because I just wanted a university degree. Additionally, figuring out how human thought processes work is very interesting to me. Especially when I faced pressure while playing poker, sometimes I would get angry, which would prevent me from focusing. I wanted to understand this better.

For me, learning as much as possible about different things and exploring my life's path is crucial. I think to have an advantage, you either need to be very grounded, like investing in real estate, where if you are very familiar with the area you are investing in, you understand the prices and the future development plans for that space, that is certainly very useful. Or you invest in some very new, not fully planned frontier fields.

Before entering the crypto industry, I tried to figure out virtual reality (VR), which experienced a small bull market or hype cycle in 2016, but it wasn't very feasible for me. It was just a hobby for a while. But I tried many things, and just as I entered the crypto industry, I invested most of my money and the money I earned from poker into a company, which was almost all my bank savings.

This is a story I might have never shared, but it's very interesting. There was a company in Eastern Europe that basically bought cheese and then exported it to another country at a high premium after aging it for several months. Because the price of Gouda cheese aged for 12 or 24 months is much higher than that of fresh Gouda cheese. So all you need is some secure infrastructure to store this cheese, and then you just need to distribute it to supermarkets, wine shops, etc.

The numbers on the company's books looked fantastic. So I invested a lot of money in this company. I knew the founder, but maybe I should have gotten to know him better. Because later, it turned out he was doing many shady things privately, and he had a large amount of undisclosed debt. Eventually, the company basically went bankrupt, and I lost a lot of money because of it.

Around 2016, I became increasingly fond of cryptocurrencies. I was not just a poker player using Bitcoin; I was someone who read white papers, made some trades, or bought some cryptocurrencies. Looking back at that time, trying to invest in some physical or real-world businesses, doing something in the food industry seems very crazy and unimaginable to me now because the food and these physical industries are hard to penetrate.

That cheese company quickly went bankrupt. When I studied cryptocurrencies, of course, I felt it wasn't as easy to develop as in previous years. But determining direction in this space is still more convenient than in real life.

Did you gain any insights from the failed investment in the cheese company?

The biggest lesson I learned from it is, of course, risk management. Although I had some lessons before, clearly, I spent more money on this than I should have. Secondly, there is a huge difference between ideas and numbers on paper and actual execution. This is the first conclusion I drew from it.

I am very sure that if this business were run by someone else, perhaps with more resources, a better distribution network, and better organization, I think it would quickly make a lot of money, 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 those trying to build a team, I could have discovered this sooner, but I didn't. This is obviously different from investing in stocks or playing poker.

It seems your early experiences provided you with a perfect lesson for entering the cryptocurrency field. You learned psychology, gambling strategies, and studied poker psychology and market analysis. You entered the cryptocurrency space with these skills that others would envy.

To some extent. I think I was better prepared than some of the people I know who are lawyers or from other industries and are now trying to invest in cryptocurrencies. However, crypto was still an "untamed beast" in its early days, and I made many mistakes.

After the cheese company, I never made such serious mistakes again. I no longer use leverage or invest too much in one project. But when I saw super early ICOs that promised huge potential market caps, I would invest. At that time, I was still impressed by things like founders with backgrounds from Google or having Vitalik Buterin as an advisor. I was very optimistic about some of those projects, even though they ultimately failed.

In my view, my personal experiences and background, especially from a mindset or psychological perspective, indeed make me more suited to invest in cryptocurrencies than most people. I don't mind market fluctuations, and I don't mind losing money. For me, that's normal. I don't spend too much time staring at price charts, agonizing over the future of Bitcoin. That's an advantage for me.

We talked earlier about early lessons, so are there any early successes that shaped your current perspective?

My stock valuation investment strategy is okay, but it has never produced any huge returns, so I basically gave up and joined the ETF passive investment camp. So even if it performs decently, I wouldn't say my stock investments are outstanding. But I think my biggest early success might be buying an apartment in 2014.

At that time, buying a house was a huge investment for me. I paid 50% of the purchase price with a mortgage and the remaining 50% in cash. At that time, I thought, "Okay, this might be the biggest deal of my life, I need to make it meaningful and be careful with my decisions." Compared to now, that money doesn't even match some of the recent businesses I've done, but for me back then, it was a lot of money.

In fact, I spent a lot of time doing due diligence with my advisor. I hired an advisor who used to work for a building inspection agency, responsible for conducting private investigations for those looking to buy property. So I would pay him a reasonable salary to accompany me for site visits. He would bring his tools to measure the extent of wall leaks, check the soundproofing of windows, he would investigate everything and then give me advice on how much I should negotiate. He played a significant role in my process—I looked at at least 30 apartments and then bought one that initially looked very bad.

It was in a good location in town, but the rooms looked terrible. For example, if you were someone who made decisions based on feelings or appearances, you wouldn't buy it. But my advisor said, "Well, this is the best-positioned house we've seen so far. I know it looks terrible, but rebuilding and renovating is easy. Overall, it's good. The surrounding facilities are convenient, and the price is reasonable. You should buy it right away." So I did.

After buying it, I hired some workers to plan the reconstruction, and five years later, I sold it for a price much higher than the average return in the real estate market at that time. This was something I could see being rebuilt in real-time in the real world. That felt really good, and I thought maybe I could do more real estate investments this way. But later, with the boom in the cryptocurrency field, I basically gave up that idea, but this might be my biggest success in non-crypto investments, which was not just luck, but more the result of my due diligence and reasonable allocation of work.

As we continue this interview, I've been hearing a recurring theme from you about talking to experts. When you first started playing poker, you went to Gibraltar. When buying a house, you found an advisor. Do you still hold this belief? Do you bring in industry experts before investing in Zee Prime? How do you conduct due diligence now?

It's a bit different. The cryptocurrency industry is a rapidly evolving new field, and there aren't really any so-called experts like in other industries. However, for example, since last year, we have started focusing on gaming, although it hasn't performed well now due to being overhyped. Mainly because of some of our partners, especially Pavel, whom I mentioned earlier, who came from a poker company in Gibraltar and established a large gaming company that not only operates poker but also other games. He has been a gaming expert in the core leadership for 11 years. So he understands gaming and knows how to make games fun and profitable, more than most venture capital firms investing in crypto games today. So having someone like him on our team is both an opportunity and a coincidence. He also has connections in the esports field, so we can hire more talent.

Thus, we have built our small team, now focusing on the gaming track. Besides that, we have also recruited some, I wouldn't call them experts, but they are a group of very smart, young, and eager-to-learn minds from traditional finance who are now analyzing some DeFi opportunities. Initially, they were more like a group of people from different backgrounds, but now as we grow, we are trying to systematically build a team or gather a group of people to focus on the various fields we invest in.

Maybe we are lucky because we are earning substantial returns. We don't want to completely change direction, but we might expand our investment areas into other fields that we believe are necessary for advancing human civilization. Rather than hiring some external experts and consultants to help us invest, or being in a more passive situation, we prefer to research the cryptocurrency field ourselves. It may take the next three to seven years, and we will consider it… I don't want to disclose too much here because it's just an idea in our team's brainstorming. But what we are thinking about, as you know, is some sort of nuclear energy or alternative energy, especially with the current relationship with Russia. When it comes to other available energy and heat sources, we feel Europe needs some sort of revival. Therefore, if there is enough funding, we could help achieve that. That said, we are not experts in this area and will never be. So we might need some external help and investment funds.

This is something you've mentioned multiple times during the interview, and I've seen you talk about it on Twitter. Investing with a higher purpose seems to be your motivation.

Yeah, tossing coins is fun. I've done what I should do, especially with NFTs. It's fun, but that has never been my main motivation for being in this business. After a while, you realize that if you buy a bigger yacht, if your screen shows you have a lot of money, or I don't know how others spend money, you won't necessarily be very happy. What you need to do is stop focusing so much on your career and investments and start paying attention to your health and relationships, or at least set some higher goals about why you can accumulate so much wealth and how to use it in the future.

I want to balance both. My partner and I both feel that we either need to give back or find out the areas that are truly driving human progress, which may not be fully developed, or where capital has not been allocated correctly, or where there are inefficiencies. Then we try to solve these problems from different angles, figuring out how to allocate funds to reasonable places so that everyone can benefit.

It sounds a bit cliché, but I think at the end of the day, that's the purest motivation. You need to have something more powerful than yourself and try to help those who may have more experience or have existed longer than you.

This will be the path for the development of the cryptocurrency industry. Interestingly, many people have become very wealthy at a young age. Their wealth accumulation no longer requires spending 20 years building a company. I think we will see more and more people with this kind of thinking because we are all still young, and we want to live another 50, 60, 70, or 80 years. We don't want to see the world burned to the ground when we are old. Therefore, I think shifting the mindset from purely "growing assets to a certain level" to living in a greener, more pleasant world is more meaningful.

With so many geniuses in the cryptocurrency industry, do you think some people are born with trading potential? Is this ability something that ordinary people can cultivate later?

I think everyone first needs to have basic logic before they can trade, and of course, a lot of logic comes from training—if people haven't been trained from a young age or can't bear risks, they naturally can't handle relationships with numbers well.

Especially for traders, the job really requires you to constantly stare at the screen and make quick decisions with large amounts of money in a noisy environment. This really requires something… indescribable. I don't want to describe it as cold or cynical, but the fact is they may lack some emotions inside.

Your inner self needs to be missing something, or you need to keep your inner self calm. Some people get very excited when they think about money. We poker players have a game where we play a coin toss with a bartender, and the rule is that if we lose, we pay three times the amount, but if we win, we don't pay a penny; he pays for us.

Although these bartenders know this is a very favorable bet because they can bet one to win three with a 50/50 chance, they still don't want to take such a big risk.

So actually, most people are risk-averse because they feel that the pain of losing far outweighs the joy of winning. And this illustrates that traders need to be less easily influenced by emotions and also shouldn't have a gambling tendency, as many ordinary people become addicted to the thrill of rapid price increases and decreases, which actually accelerates dopamine secretion.

For me, numbers or prices aren't that interesting. I remember that playing poker used to be a torment for me; I could only sit and play for a few hours a day and then had to do other things to keep my mood pleasant. But some people really get stuck on it, so when a person has a strong desire, they need enough self-control to manage their behavior.

So what is painful for you? Are there certain things in trading that really "tear" you inside?

I don't invest for hasty reasons, nor do I miss opportunities due to careless analysis. In fact, when everything changes rapidly, I feel overwhelmed by countless opportunities, and even for someone with my experience, I can feel pain from hasty wrong decisions, even if I haven't actually lost money.

But from an investment perspective, another painful thing is that I sympathize with the Builders who are under immense pressure, carrying the burden of creating something truly important, interesting, and innovative. However, these Builders are often misunderstood and face hostility from users. Because even for me, sometimes I want to give up, but they are genuinely trying to make something happen, while most of us users are just speculating and trading coins back and forth.

When I see some very good projects with well-meaning teams struggling just because their tokens are declining over time, and the community piles all the blame on them, it is indeed a bit painful. So this is also why I want to step away from this field and take a break, and many times it's related to the things mentioned above.

I consider myself neutral in chaos; sometimes I hope things happen in strange ways and create a stir, preferably making headlines because I want to see what the limits of hype in this industry are. But I have a preference for those who dare to try new things and make moves in new fields, even if the development fails or the direction is wrong, but their original intention and process are still worth exploring. I feel that this field is moving forward. So when I see certain things realized in an unexpected way, and it makes people's lives better, I genuinely feel happy.

I was a bit surprised while checking Nansen because there aren't many wallets marked as Zee Prime. Is this for security reasons?

Speaking of operational security, I might be the most public-facing person on our team. Personally, besides my own fund, I don't even control any substantial funds. Sometimes I use small amounts to test new things and have played some NFTs, but I don't even directly connect to other wallets, maybe because I support multi-signature functionality, but I'm not very proactive in signing and other operations. I know I am a target for hackers, so being cautious is not too much.

Talk about NFTs. I checked your personal account history and noticed a peak in activity around October 21. Did you start playing with NFTs around that time? Does this mean there was something particularly attractive in the market?

In my team, my attitude towards NFTs has always been unconventional. Almost everyone says, "This is just a nonsensical trend; who cares about owning a pixel image?" I say, "Well, I might dig deeper to see if there's something more interesting." This has also been a very interesting process for me because in the exchange market, you can only use bots for arbitrage, but on Opensea, you can do various interesting things in the slow-moving order book.

I remember back when I was playing poker, there was a proprietary trading department in Eastern Europe hiring traders, promising employees opportunities to work at the Warsaw Stock Exchange and the Vienna Stock Exchange in the future. However, the reality was that the liquidity of stocks on these small exchanges was very poor. You could try to manually implement what market-making algorithms do, or you could earn a lot of money in a foolproof way. So as a poker player, I was hired for a trial there, and I learned some order book operation skills.

I worked there for three weeks, realized I didn't want to wear a shirt and sit in an office every day, so I quit, but I still learned some skills there. Last year, I found that certain NFTs in the market had very poor liquidity and were difficult to automate, so I could do some tricks. Later, I did just that; initially, I wanted to buy some lottery tickets and see what happened, or at that time, I could buy a CryptoPunk and some other things for very little money.

The order book strategy isn't that complicated. It's just that when you see a large price gap when buying and selling certain assets, you can engage in arbitrage trading. For example, with Parallel's main key, there was a time when you could buy in for $10 and sell for $12. You could operate simultaneously and earn a few spreads each week. By the way, you could actually do these things on Kraken in early 2017 or late 2016.

Fiskantes realized gains dashboard Fiskantes's realized gains record

I rarely did these arbitrages until recently when I realized this was a viable strategy. If it weren't for Ethereum's extremely high fees, it might be the best place to learn how to trade, so this strategy also has its thresholds.

If someone accidentally lists a highly rare NFT on the market, I would quickly buy it. There are also operations like sniping floor prices.
I'm actually not very interested in such operations of monitoring and picking up bargains; it's something I've been doing for five years in poker, and for the rest of my life, I want to do something else.

Now I feel the market has approached saturation or even gone a bit over, mainly due to the infiltration of the NFT market. Just think about it; now there are a lot of imitators, and it's no longer as exciting as when I played before. However, after playing a round, I returned to my team, and now I can persuade them not to directly buy a bunch of low-quality NFT products. Instead, after carefully observing some NFT game projects or NFT infrastructure projects, I plan to write an overview article for overall judgment.

In the crypto space, there is a feeling that powerful market participants like you are manipulating most of the industry behind the scenes. What do you think about that?

I'm not the kind of so-called insider who appears in many private group chats. If there are chat groups in the market that are important enough to move the market, I definitely wouldn't be in them.

Unfortunately, I think this is a double-edged sword because there are certainly behind-the-scenes trades, insider information, and other types of gray areas in the market, but I don't think it's any different from other industries. Because the current market is an emerging industry, its overall exponential growth is not mature, so it is easier to exploit the asymmetry of information than in some very traditional industries.

Now I feel a bit weary and am not as blindly optimistic and naive as I was four or five years ago. In fact, I used to be more inclined to believe that all crypto projects or tracks had equal opportunities for development, making everything look more decentralized and democratic.

To some extent, the market is still moving towards equality. Because anyone in the world can build a smart contract, which is equal for everyone. So the key point is that everyone needs to figure out how to play better in DeFi/MEV trading skills without any support. The game itself is global; it can happen anywhere. You just need your computer to be part of it. You can even earn six figures in a basement in Pakistan.

Wallet Analysis

As part of the interview, Fiskantes discussed some of Zee Prime's most successful investments, including early bets on Synthetix and Solana, as well as buying LUNA at $1.

However, Fiskantes also revealed that Zee Prime is rapidly evolving and becoming complex, with multiple entities joining in. This includes Sigil, a protocol focused on DeFi liquid staking, and a new member Devmons.gg.

Active NFT traders should be familiar with the name Devmons, which is a wallet address active in the GameFi and NFT space.

Devmons.eth realized gains record

Devmons owns over 1,600 Parallel cards and has successfully promoted series like Goblintown and Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult.

Their current portfolio mainly consists of Parallel, along with a large number of Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult derivatives, Loot, and Pudgy Penguins.

Devmons.eth NFT portfolio

In recent months, Devmons.eth has been increasing its Loot holdings and attempting to accumulate many top-tier Frontier Game items, although most have failed.

Devmons is also a major airdrop participant, having received a large number of token rewards in multiple airdrop events and has been marked as Smart Money. We can clearly observe these operations on Opensea, where they collected over 20 NFTs from the Forgotten Runes Warriors Guild project, worth at least 5.5 Ethereum.