How much money do you need to go full time in Crypto?
Ditching the screen to stare at more screens
Spoiler alert: It’s not $10 million.
The interesting thing about Crypto Twitter is that it's heavily dominated by the strangest collection of hyper-competitive financial market enthusiasts the world has ever seen.
Couple this with the fact that ¾ of people are pretending to be cartoon characters and optimising their tweets for engagement, and it's easy to see why these insane statements go so viral.
As a result, most of the financial targets you see on Twitter are ridiculously warped for any normal, non-mega-wealthy, private jet-flying, trust fund-receiving human beings.
Even in the more low-key areas of Crypto Twitter, the general description of "success" is usually beyond the comprehension of anyone outside of the top 0.1% of people on the planet.
For the vast majority of humans in the world, even in affluent European countries, earning an entry-level salary at a tech company in coastal America would put you in the top percentile of earners in your homeland.
(average, not median earnings, so heavily skewed to the upside).
Most people, even if they worked every day of their lives, would never get close to earning $10 million, let alone having that figure liquid.
It would take the average Canadian 169 years to be paid 10 million inflation-adjusted dollars if they paid $0 in tax.
Assuming this person is a god-tier frugal FIRE advocate who lives in a van, owns one pair of clothes and showers using a bucket and sponge so they could invest 50% of their salary in the S&P each year.
It would still take them 46 years to hit that 10 million figure.
So saying you need $10 million to go full time in Crypto is like telling your 7-year-old son, who just wants to join his local football team and play with his mates, that there is no point unless he's already as good as Lionel Messi.
So how much do you need to go full time in Crypto?
The answer to this is that there is no one-size-fits-all guidebook.
Every individual is different, with varying goals, lifestyles, cost of living, job satisfaction and career opportunities.
If you're a 25-year-old Machine Learning MIT graduate being offered a $300k a year package to work at OpenAI, leaving to yolo trade jpegs in Crypto is probably a very foolish choice.
If you're a 21-year-old call centre worker from Spain earning €21,000 a year with no savings or qualifications and who spends all day getting verbally abused by angry customers but has had moderate success in Crypto and has lots of on-chain knowledge, you should probably consider looking for a job in Crypto itself.
If you're a 30-year-old middle manager for a logistics company in the UK outside of London earning £39,000 a year with a horrible boss, unmotivated team, and poor career prospects but has had success trading before and has built up a savings buffer of three years' living costs, taking a year-long sabbatical to try Crypto full time might be a wise choice.
Everyone is different, and trying to write down a number that everyone should aspire to have before going full time would make me just as foolish as those saying you need a six-figure pfp to be taken seriously.
My choice to enter Crypto full time
For me personally, my choice was made for me when I cashed out a few years' worth of living expenses and determined that my upside by focusing full time on Crypto was an order of magnitude higher than I could ever dream of earning working in any full-time job in my home country with my qualification level and career history.
It also helped that I absolutely love markets and game theory, so spending every day studying Crypto doesn’t feel anything like a job to me.
I didn't have remotely close to 8 figures, and had I waited until years later when it was "safer" for me to do so I would have missed out on SO much free money and opportunity in the last bull market.
Even in the "Bear market" we've just all experienced, there have been so many opportunities for those who stayed engaged, focused, and treated working here as an actual business or full-time job.
It was certainly possible to earn a top percentile salary from airdrops and trade opportunities alone, with minimal risk.
Could I possibly have captured them all while still working a full-time job?
Maybe? But I would have had to give up sleep, time with friends, probably my mental health, and any ounce of free time I had left. I highly doubt I’d have performed as well and my overall earnings would probably have been lower if I tried to do both at once.
However if I’d quit my job with $0 in savings it would have made for a very uncomfortable year when prices went down 90% and maybe my mental state wouldn’t have been good enough to make the high conviction trades required to profit in this space.
So for me, going back to a traditional job doesn't really make much sense right now, especially after the recent events with Blackrock joining the party and the SEC embarrassing themselves against XRP.
There's a good chance opportunities are about to become abundant again, and risking missing out on them to have a guaranteed salary when the incremental earnings wouldn't impact my day-to-day life (for the next few years at least) doesn't seem like a good bet to make.
Final remarks
A wise person once said that money and confidence are interchangeable. I tend to agree.
[Source: "Money and Confidence are Interchangeable" - Mr. Money Mustache]
If you have no confidence in your abilities, then you'll always want a ton of money before you feel comfortable taking on something new.
If you have a ton of confidence, then you need zero money before trying something new. But you might be be making life significantly harder for yourself.
The balance, as usual, is somewhere in the middle.
Some amount of money saved so you don't starve to death if the first six months go worse than expected, but not so much that you save for 20 years doing something you hate just in case the thing you really, really want to do doesn't work out so well.
If you spent those 20 years working on something you loved, almost anyone with a good work ethic and half a brain can make that thing a success.
The first few years might suck, but if you keep on keeping on, you'll make it work.
Doing something truly unique with massive upside will never feel safe or comfortable because if it was safe or comfortable, everyone would be doing it, and there would be no upside.
I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.