At the moment the red taillights lit up, Wesley reattached the license plate reading ETH10K. He said with a smile: "Cars can be bought again, positions can be refilled, but dignity must be regained first."
After the Spring Festival, ETH dropped, making him feel cold inside, with market predictions everywhere about hitting "800 dollars." He sold all three cars: a Ferrari used for buying Coke, an SUV for grocery shopping, and a red Porsche with the "ETH10K" license plate. He even let go of the license plate, and sold two properties in Australia, running to a farm to pick fruits, doing physical work during the day and self-studying programming at night, working for a few projects.
On August 11, the day ETH returned to 4350, he didn't rush to add positions or change cars; the first thing he did was redeem his license plate. He said that this small piece of metal was a justification for his past self.
In the interview room at OKX, I sat across from him. He didn't resemble a traditional "trader" but more like an engineer. He spoke logically, didn't chase popular buzzwords, and liked to start from "verifiable".
"I won't sell; I have no plans to sell. When it hits 10,000, I will put ETH into Aave/Compound, borrow a little USD, and still won't sell. Even if there's a retracement, it doesn't matter; just low leverage will do."
He said this phrase "I won't sell" calmly. Like finishing a task that needed to be done.
From 2015 to 2025: a winding yet clear line.
From 2015 to 2016, working in an investment bank in Hong Kong → starting a business (chatbot loan MVP).
Wesley graduated from finance, received a full-time offer in Hong Kong, and worked as a bond salesperson for two years. "Going to work felt like acting; I'm relatively introverted, so I quit and went home to start my own business."
His first "product" was neither an app nor a website, but a chatbot built using the Facebook SDK - a set of online loans targeted at students. "To be honest, I had only been programming for a month or two and couldn't create a complete app or website. For me, the most convenient way was to write logic into the SDK and guide users to complete operations through text." At that time, there was no ChatGPT or LLM, so he used conditional judgments to parse keywords and broke down the loan process into executable dialogues, completing a rough but functional MVP.
After going online, due to the extremely lean team (basically just him and a partner), the product logic was also light, and they broke even in two or three months; the total trading volume was about 10 million, serving five to six hundred users.
"My motivation to start a business was very simple: my family was poor, and I wanted to go abroad but couldn't afford the tuition fees." He rented a place in Wan Chai, paying one month in advance and two months' deposit, with the deposit alone needing 26,000 HKD. The bank wouldn't lend, and the landlord wouldn't accept credit cards, so in the end, a few friends pooled together to help him rent. "At that moment, I thought, for students like me, could there be a more decent way? Uploading student ID and scholarship records could get a small loan?" Among the first batch of borrowers, there were students who used this money to buy tickets to Japan and paid it back as soon as they landed. Fortunately, there were no bad debts. The amounts were very small but surprisingly stable.
Later, after arguing with his partner, he was forced to learn programming himself, "otherwise the company would fail." Not long after, the entire company was sold, and the first original accumulation was realized.
2016-2017, working holiday in Australia: daytime financial analysis, nighttime self-study programming.
After wrapping up his startup project in 2016, he had the thought of taking a working holiday in Australia. To obtain residency, he first went to school, but since his undergraduate degree was in finance, he had to study finance again, as "the work content must be aligned with the professional background".
During the day, he worked at a very small community bank, where his daily tasks even included counting the cash coming in and out of ATMs. Once, a bizarre case was revealed: a gangster from South Africa tampered with the armored car during cash transportation, under-funding the ATMs each time, ultimately stealing 7 million over a year. The bank is a listed company, ultimately backed by insurance, but his position was affected as a result. Later, the bank also faced malicious mergers, and he was transferred to do financial analysis: equity valuation, merger models, Excel reports - the process was solid, but the pace was very slow, with colleagues leaving work by three or four in the afternoon.
After sunset, he dedicated all his "white space time" to programming: casually finding courses online to learn, watching public lectures and PDF materials, filling in materials on data structures, algorithms, and operating systems piece by piece; while also preparing for GRE/TOEFL, planning a path of "going to the U.S. for a master's → obtaining OPT → entering a large company."
Reality is not dignified: after only writing code for a year and without systematic training, the resumes he sent out were repeatedly rejected. To maintain his identity in Australia, he briefly took finance-related courses, but ultimately returned to his original field. After two years, he saved about 400,000 RMB in Australia and became increasingly certain - if he really wanted to write code, he needed to return to the Chinese community to solidify his path as an engineer. So he chose to flow back and officially turned toward the engineering track, laying the foundation for later entry into Web3.
2018-2019, Australia → returning flow.
In the photos Wesley gave us, two are of cars, and one is of the sea in Australia, with the wind blowing across the vast shore. As for the following "room photo," it's not in Australia; it's a small room he rented after returning to his home country. The room is not big but very bright.
"The view is nice, and many friends are willing to come," he said with a smile.
After returning to the Chinese community, Wesley entered a new insurance startup in Hong Kong as a backend engineer. At that time, a crypto exchange collapsed, and eighty to ninety practitioners became unemployed, and the company quickly hired a lot of people, "The language in the office suddenly turned into crypto jargon." This was how he officially entered the field.
In 2019, he began to allocate ETH and Synthetix (SNX) - "the year before DeFi Summer." By the summer of 2020, SNX soared in the DeFi narrative, and he joked, "At that time, there wasn't much money, even if it soared, it was just a flash in the pan." What truly drove him to act was funding rate arbitrage: together with colleagues, he created a spot-contract basis/funding rate arbitrage algorithm. By the end of 2020, it was executed properly, achieving an annualized return of 80%-90%.
"The problem is I have no money." He took a page of PDF to meet old classmates and friends in finance: investment banks, private banking client managers, and some HNW. He didn't talk about "alchemy," but discussed "spot vs. contract basis, holding costs, carry," explaining it in a way that traditional finance people could understand. At that time, the market had already generated interest in crypto, but many people didn't want to bear the volatility. Gaining crypto exposure + stable coupon schemes were very attractive. In the end, he raised nearly ten million USD in a small scale in Hong Kong and Singapore, starting to trade live.
The team size is almost zero - "it's basically just me." He connected the API to the exchange, automated execution, and in the first year, he achieved about 87% with this personal strategy. After making money, he suddenly realized: "I'm running on the API, but I actually don't understand blockchain itself well enough." So he simply quit his job and systematically learned EVM: from the Yellow Paper to Solidity, from reading contracts, looking at bytecode to writing small tools himself. "Some friends are doing core development in leading teams," so he followed them to strengthen his engineering fundamentals, making sure that the ability to run was solidified a bit more.
From 2020 to 2021, during the DeFi Summer bull market, he became convinced of ETH.
What truly pulled him into the center of the Web3 wave was not the noisy stories of sudden wealth, but a "craft in the gaps": stitching together the small difference between spot and contract prices into a path that could be walked repeatedly. The industry calls it funding rate/basis arbitrage - not taking directional bets, not chasing trends, focusing on discipline and patience. During the good market years, he even acted as a "proxy runner" for others, achieving an AUM in the tens of millions of RMB, with an annualized return peaking at 87%. Clients opened accounts at the exchange, connected the API, and in total, about 60 clients went through this process. "I was worried they wouldn't agree to a 30% management fee," he laughed, saying in the end, "the key is in their hands; I could just turn off the API." "It’s like repairing a passage, with cars coming and going, slowly making money."
The impulse to write code also completely took over at that time. He joined a leading project as a "CTO" to write code: publishing, rolling back, changing parameters, receiving price data, and refining settlement rules. The blockchain is not always safe - during his first week, the project was hacked, losing millions; a few months later, it suffered a second hit, with over ten million USD stolen by hackers. These two hits pulled him back down to earth from the bull market emotions, also nailing down a set of orders: key operations use multi-signature and time locks, avoid upgrades when possible; each deployment must match the bytecode; first conduct small flow grayscales, and if something goes wrong, initiate a rollback. "Programs can be verified, and systems deserve to be trusted," he said.
After the second incident, he chose to leave and started his own venture, creating a small system for NFT trading/commission settlement, settling with "fixed fees + 10% commission," with one deal earning him 80 ETH. During this period, ETH truly solidified its position in his mind. It's not about who says Ethereum should reach what price, but it provides a sense of verifiable certainty: being able to see and verify before interacting; lending, exchanging, vaults, derivatives pieced together like Lego, making tasks manageable.
As for the price, he prefers to give the decision-making power to structure rather than emotion - "(Ethereum) is transparent and clear; Solana is relatively like a black box, with nothing visible... it feels more centralized." He said, "At least when I interact with each EVM, I can first look at the (program/bytecode), and after reviewing, I can decide whether to interact with it or not."
This set of "structure-first" simple principles has not been steadfast without regrets. At the most frenzied market times, he was also pushed along by the tide. In 2021, he bought a BAYC with 35 ETH, and the floor price rose to 140 ETH, but he never sold. Because in the crypto circle, as long as you show the monkey avatar, someone will inevitably come up to talk.
At the peak of the bull market - after the Otherside sale, he spent hundreds of ETH to buy the Otherside containing Koda, as well as Azuki. The flip was quicker than flipping a book; the once "blue chip" rapidly collapsed, ultimately nearly reaching zero.
"Later I understood that using these materialized symbols to attract others doesn't suit me." When the bear market came, he almost cleared out his possessions, dragging only a piece of checked luggage, becoming a digital nomad throughout Asia. Surprisingly, he began to enjoy the kind of connection built solely through chatting and interaction - no bragging, no external plugins, just the challenge of communication itself.
In 2022, he returned to Australia and purchased the "ETH10K" license plate.
With the incidents of LUNA and FTX one after another, he slowly withdrew client accounts: "Only running my own money." During the most chaotic months of emotions, he flew to Australia to give himself a justification for his "youth" - a big house by the sea, a yard, a sports car, living very close to the beach, watching the sea at dusk. He even pursued a master's degree in IT to establish his identity, all while thinking about "settling down in life."
It was also at that time that he registered the "ETH10K" license plate in Perth - back then ETH was still around 3000 USD, and his intuition was that 10K was "not far away," so he treated this plate as a bet and a belief.
Reality quickly wore down the romantic edges. A large house of over two to three hundred square meters, only visiting one room in half a year; three bathrooms at home, but only using one. The sports car was hardly driven, while shopping relied on an ordinary SUV. The daytime sea breeze was nice, but the nights felt empty - the rhythm was like a retirement town, with few people and sparse social interactions. He suddenly realized that the symbols he once thought were important - big houses, nice cars, sea views - did not provide meaning.
More pressing was the pressure from his trading system. The trading platform's API was down for seven minutes in the early morning, and he was implementing a "long spot, short contract" funding rate strategy, which, in theory, should hedge each other - but during those seven minutes, a certain coin surged two to three times. At that time, there was no complete cross-margin, and he had to manually transfer the profits from the spot to cover the contract margin; once the API went down, it lost balance, the contract leg was liquidated, and the spot leg fell again, losing once more. That time, three small clients' accounts were breached, and he used his monthly performance share to cover them fully.
He doesn't guarantee capital preservation and clearly explains the risks, charging a 30% performance fee when making money. For many traditional traders used to "2% management fee + 20% commission," this method of "only sharing profits when they occur" feels like binding the interests of both parties together. But after the FTX collapse, he became clearer: if my position is over there, it might just go to zero. With the increasing instability of the API, counterparty risks, and the number of times he was awakened at night, he made a decision - returning external funds and only running his own money.
From 2023 to 2025, he sold the villa to pick apples, regularly investing in Ethereum; buying back the license plate as a belief.
Looking back, he truly made "long-term" decisions starting from that major drop. In 2022, Ethereum fell from 4871 to 880. He watched the market, "When it hit eight or nine hundred, I did consider cutting losses, but in the end, I held on." Afterwards, he handed decision-making over to discipline: starting to dollar-cost average from around 1200, "buying at 1000 and continuing to buy until now. If it drops by 50 USD, I treat it as a crash and add more." With the other hand, he cleared out those things he thought would bring satisfaction - seaside villas and sports cars. He said that during that time, "I felt very empty," so he sold both the house and the car and ran to a farm to pick apples. The more he sweated, the calmer he became: cash flow relies on strategy, and accumulation relies on regular investment.
Starting in 2023, he completely cleared external funds and only ran his own accounts: still using that same low leverage, direction-neutral strategy; simultaneously taking on contract work, writing smart contracts/NFT contracts, settling with "fixed fees + commissions." By 2025, this funding rate arbitrage program could still achieve about 10% annualized return - "I initially thought I would only play for three years, but unexpectedly, it's still running in the fifth year." He assessed that "probability-wise, it will likely get thinner in the future, but small volumes can still yield profits." The methods are not flashy: verify before using, gray out before rolling back, and don’t run naked when hedging.
In the spring of 2025, he bought back the "ETH10K" license plate. It's not about showing off, but more like giving himself a footnote: the choices made in the bear market are ones he is still willing to sign off on today.
Why Ethereum? Seeking certainty in programming.
Yuki asked him, "Why is the license plate Ethereum?", and Wesley gave an engineer's answer: because it can be verified.
His logic is very straightforward - if a contract is non-upgradable, it runs according to the program on the chain, and there's no need to trust anyone; in the EVM ecosystem, you can check the source code or bytecode first and then decide whether to interact with it or not. "For an engineer like me, this is a sense of trustworthiness."
He also talked about Solana: "The performance is strong, but after deployment, it can't verify bytecode on-chain like EVM, which I personally find a bit hard to grasp." This is not a denial, but a preference: weighting places that are understandable and reproducible.
What about BTC? He respects its status as "digital gold" and acknowledges that BTC + ETH in a long-term portfolio is reasonable; however, when it comes to his own position, he almost only buys ETH - "You could say it's a 'professional bias.' In my mind, Ethereum is more like an operating system like iOS/Android."
This summer, he got that "ETH10K" license plate back again. After the interview, he was flying to Bali and then to Phu Quoc. Before leaving, he sent a message to a friend: "When the red taillights light up, the clouds of the bear market are left in the rearview mirror."
We returned to life from the discussion of "verifiability" and "risk constraints": he likes cars and enjoys photographing the red light at the back; he would also roll back for a small bug at three in the morning. On the day when ETH surged, the first thing he redeemed was the license plate - "It's not vanity, it's a justification for my past self."
He doesn't advise people to "go all in" but prefers to share "how to learn." The simplest line goes like this: first use Udemy's Python Bootcamp to get the program running, then use O'Reilly's Introducing Python (2nd) to fill in the basics and details, and finally take Coursera's "Data Structures & Algorithms" specialization to solidify the underlying logic - first be able to do it, then understand why.
This interview belongs to the series of friends from OKX. What we care about is always putting technology and finance on the same table: the market will fluctuate, but methods must be verifiable. Wesley's story is merely a footnote - low leverage, heavy auditing, and verifiability are the foundational rules for traversing cycles.
If Ethereum 10,000 USD will eventually come, that "ETH10K" license plate will remind him: slow down, don't get carried away.