“I was a fuckwit.” Losing it all with NekoZ

It's early evening in Vegas as trader, entrepreneur and friend of Gen-O NekoZ dials in for our conversation. As I fumble with the audio set up, he tells me he's been grappling with X over an account that got shut down for one of the projects he's been incubating. "Dude, let's rearrange", I offer up. NekoZ' world moves fast. Minutes matter. In the past few weeks, one of the projects he is most closely involved with, Eric Schmidt-backed L1 Keeta, has been on a meteoric rise. It's life-changing money, even at NekoZ' level. And that's not his only recent win, his incubator Tempo Labs has a number of other high profile projects under its purview, including $MIXIE. NekoZ insists we sit down and talk anyway, and for the next 45 mins he is generous with his attention. Dressed in baseball cap, leaning close in over his mobile, NekoZ starts by telling me about his past. He is self-aware and reflects candidly on his crypto origin story, the highs and lows, the industry's stagnation since 2017 — and to some extent the future of his own place in it.

I don't shy away from my past." I bought $2,500 of ETH at $100 in 2017, and then 3X'ed it in two weeks. I was like wow, this is crazy. Is there more of this out there? A lot of people were talking about decentralization and new systems and whatnot, but for me, honestly, it was only ever about the money." Many of the people he met on Facebook groups and Reddit in the early days are still his friends today, some following similar trajectories. Trader_XO, among others. The second coin he ever bought was Golem on Exodus, then IOTA, and TRX. From there came self-learning and the recognition that his personal brand as a trader could be of great value to others.

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Meet NekoZ at our event during the Formula 1 Grand Prix this November

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I had an edge. People viewed me as a good trader

“I always encourage people to get into crypto,” he says. “Because there's no other place in the world where you can make such quick money. Like anywhere. You don't have that turnaround in any other industry, right?I had a paid group. I started doing paid shills and whatsoever. In 2021, I did several zero-to-million-dollar challenges. I had money, lambos, watches."

I was cocky. I was a fuckwit. I lost it all, more than once. I'm glad I lost 90% of my portfolio. If I didn't I would have just continued being this jackass.

These days, NekoZ isn’t flexing — he’s quietly trying to uplift. “I think my immediate purpose is that I'm just trying to give back and try to uplift people around me that I care about. If I have alpha or I have some sort of trade I'm very confident in, at least I can give that to the people I care about so that they can uplift themselves and they can finally get to where I am." I've had some pretty big incubations recently. I helped Keeta, and Tempo Labs my incubator is starting to really catch steam with much larger projects. I'm meeting the right people, and the expectation levels are really high. Sometimes it's kind of scary, but exciting. It's a turning point in my career, and the next few months could go really big. Even as he critiques the space (“Since 2017, we really haven’t done shit, except amplify Bitcoin a bit more”), NekoZ is learning anew and diving into new territory — quietly building in AI. "I'm looking very closely at AI right now. It's kind of funny because I'm actually starting from ground zero. Where no one knows who I am. I'm not NekoZ. I don't have a big following." It’s in this reset that he’s finding new meaning — and maybe, new freedom.

We're here for NekoZ. Trading, learning and using his influence to uplift others.