🔎A few crypto lessons for 2026
Rayls is building the blockchain for banks. Explore how Rayls unites TradFi with DeFi!
Happy New Year, friends!
As 2026 has arrived, I’ve been reflecting on my crypto journey, and I wanted to share a few lessons I wish I had known when I started.
These are things I've learned over the past 5 years that I hope can help you become more profitable going forward.
Let’s dive in 👇
Attention and sentiment are the key drivers of any token price
If you buy tokens solely based on fundamental research without paying attention to anything else, I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re very likely to underperform the market.
It sounds harsh, but this is the reality. Crypto is an attention economy.
Even today, after the recent market crash, a token like XRP with tech that barely anyone is using still has a market cap above $120 billion, and no one knows why.
Meanwhile, many tokens from projects with great fundamentals are trading at valuations 100 times smaller and are underperforming it heavily.
Why is that? Because the team behind XRP managed to build a very strong community, and Ripple has a very good marketing team.
Now, I am definitely not suggesting buying XRP.
But the point is that if you want to make money in crypto, your main job is to identify the projects that have these two things:
a strong and active community on CT
a likable story or major catalyst that can easily convince other people to buy its token
If you can find a project that meets these criteria and has solid fundamentals at the same time (e.g., Hyperliquid, which performed very well in the last year), that’s great.
Yet what’s really important to understand is that increased attention will have a much greater positive impact on a token's price than any improvements in its fundamentals.
Over the past months, for instance, the hottest narrative has been privacy.
People have become bullish on this narrative as they are not comfortable with all their transactions being exposed on-chain, and they rightfully believe that privacy is a core part of freedom. And privacy has suddenly become a very popular topic on CT.
As a result, we entered a massive bubble in which a token like ZEC (a privacy coin) surged more than 10x to a $7 billion FDV in a short period, despite the fact that, if we're being honest, only a few people are actually using its privacy solution. However, that is irrelevant to the ZEC holders who made a lot of money on their ZEC holdings.
And that’s the power of narratives.
You don’t need to bet on the asset with the best fundamentals, but on the asset with the best story that you believe can attract the most buyers in the near future.
That’s how you can make money by trading narratives.
The goal is to understand human behaviour and predict what people will buy next.
Try out as many things as possible to find what your edge really is
Some people are just meant to be traders.
Others are great at airdrop farming. Others are excellent prediction market traders.
The key is to find what you’re really good at and something that you actually enjoy doing, as it’s much easier to become a master at something you really like.
There are countless ways to earn in this space.
My advice is to try everything from:
trading
NFT flipping
airdrop farming
prediction markets
getting a job at a project you like
narrative trading
yield farming
investing
Find the crypto field where you believe that you could become better than most other people, and direct all your attention towards mastering it.
That’s how you gain an edge. Bruce Lee had a popular saying:
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Before we continue, here’s an overview of Rayls, a key player in the RWA sector:
Together with Rayls
Bringing real-world assets on-chain
Crypto doesn’t need more tokens - it needs more real-world assets.
Rayls, the L1 blockchain built to unite TradFi with DeFi, is focusing on exactly that: providing access to tokenized assets with deep liquidity to DeFi users globally.
To turn this into reality, Rayls team has recently announced three major partnerships:
AmFi x Rayls - AmFi, Brazil’s largest tokenization platform for private credit, agreed to migrate over $1b of its real-world assets onchain to Rayls by June 2027
Animoca Brands x Rayls - As part of this partnership, Animoca Brands will use its expansive network to identify asset classes and issuers, with the goal of expanding the supply side of Rayls’ RWAs
NUVA x Rayls - NUVA, a chain-agnostic vault marketplace, will act as the distribution layer for Rayls’ RWAs
On top of that, Rayls also has a stacked roadmap for 2026:
Launch the public mainnet - Rayls public chain mainnet is rumored to launch in Q1 2026, which will allow institutions to finally tap into public liquidity
Release Enygma - Enygma, a bank-grade privacy feature, will be rolled out to Rayls public chain later this year
Start shipping new RWAs faster - Thanks to the AmFi collaboration, new RWAs will start being brought on-chain on Rayls regularly and at increasing scale
With the help of Rayls, institutions are finally able to tokenize their assets and compliantly connect them to DeFi.
Explore what Rayls is building today!
Surviving is always the number 1 priority
Most people get wrecked because they take excessive and unjustified risks in an attempt to get rich quickly.
But the thing is, if you lose all your capital, it’s game over.
My advice:
Establish a maximum position size and never go all in
Limit your exposure to any platform (don’t hold all your money on a exchange as you don’t want to lose everything if it goes bankrupt or it’s hacked)
Capitalize only on opportunities with a very good risk/reward in your opinion (for instance, don’t invest in something you’re not highly convinced it’s worth buying)
Have a plan for every market scenario (bullish & bearish)
Keep some cash for rough times
Simply survive long enough, and one day you’ll get lucky and win big.
Do less and you will win more
One of the most underrated skills in crypto is knowing when to do nothing.
You don’t need to take every trade and farm every airdrop you come across.
Many people end up overtrading because they spend too much time staring at charts or researching, which tempts them to open new positions for a dopamine rush and to feel productive.
Why is it important to avoid overtrading?
Because every bad trade resulting from overtrading further lowers your profitability.
Don’t jump to capitalize on a trend where you know you’re no longer early. Buy an asset only when you believe that the risk/reward of doing it is exceptional.
Doing this helped me drastically reduce my losses.
If you can’t make money by being long, why not short?
I also shared this data in a past newsletter:
The average ROI of the new tokens listed on Binance this year is 0.25x.
So if there’s no longer an opportunity to make money by buying tokens at TGE as almost all new tokens are going down, why not respect the trend and short them?
Personally, I’ve started shorting a low of high FDV token launches over the past months and made a nice profit.
Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
You can easily get liquidated, as there are a lot of examples of new tokens that suddenly skyrocket 50-100% in minutes due to market manipulation. (including the tokens listed on so-called tier-1 exchanges)
And on top of that, highly negative funding rates can take all your profits.
Still, shorting tokens that are trading at very high FDVs for no reason can be lucrative based on my experience. But you need a good risk management strategy and to establish in advance when to cut losses and when to take profits.
And if you try doing this, make sure you only risk a very small amount of money in the first few months before you hopefully become consistently profitable.
Copy trading almost never works
Monitoring smart money wallets on-chain is not necessarily a bad idea.
But please do not blindly copy trade or follow “alpha calls” from others.
The majority of people shilling you certain coins on X aren’t doing it out of conviction and because they want you to make money, but because they are paid to do so.
On top of that, you have to consider this:
If you lose money by copy trading someone, you learn nothing.
If you lose money from your own decisions, you should at least be able to learn something from your trades that will hopefully help you adapt your strategy and become more profitable in the future.
People are always looking for an easy path to get rich quickly, but I can assure you that copy trading isn’t an effective one.
That’s all for today.
I hope that you found this article helpful.
I wish you a great 2026! I genuinely hope every single one of you will reach their goals.
Lock in and let’s make our dreams come true🫡
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
I broadly agree with your take on attention and sentiment, especially in crypto’s current state as fundamentals alone rarely explain near term outcomes.
That said, I do think there’s an interesting transition underway as TradFi participation increases. Over time, cash-flow durability, fee capture, and treasury balance strength may start to matter more than they historically have.
In the meantime, attention itself often is a fundamental for early-stage protocols, which blurs the line more than in traditional markets.