Interview and writing: Nansen
Interviewee: Fiskantes, Founding Partner, Zee Prime Capital
Compile: Amber
At the end of the early self-proclaimed "And Others Capital (And Others Capital)" (generally speaking, media in the encryption field like to list only well-known VCs when reporting financing news, while omitting unknown institutions and abbreviating them as "among other investors After the 2020-2022 encryption market cycle, Zee Prime Capital has established a comprehensive investment in many fields such as the first-tier public chain, infrastructure, DeFi, and game applications. territory.
Zee Prime's rise is largely due to the establishment of the influence of one of their founding partners, Fiskantes. The enigmatic self-proclaimed "risk communist" slashes the market and social phenomena with cool text on Twitter, and throws out some pretty cool points. Based on a paradox of energy consumption proposed 200 years ago, he correctly predicted that the high-throughput blockchain would eventually be blocked, and foresaw the outbreak of the NFT track, which has become the key to Zee Prime's continued success. The firm now manages multiple funds, including Zee Prime II, a flagship fund that just raised $35 million this year.
However, Fiskantes' journey has not been easy. He was once a poker player obsessed with poker tables and an unsuccessful cheese merchant. He was once on the verge of bankruptcy due to business failure, but he has since re-accumulated some assets through real estate investment and finally achieved his current status in the field of cryptocurrency. Pretty impressive results.
During the interview, we learned that Fiskantes’ substantial knowledge base largely stems from his long-term reading and self-study habits, and Zee Prime is the owner of a very famous Smart Money wallet monitored by Nansen, and To succeed in investing in the cryptocurrency market, you must learn to control your emotions.
The following is the transcript of the interview:
Nansen: How did you start investing? Have you ever received relevant training?
Fiskantes：I remember being in college trying to save as much money as I could and taking summer jobs like security guards at events. I used to work in an IKEA warehouse. I am also reading some books on how to achieve financial freedom. Studying law became very boring for me and I started to feel like I needed to do something else.
I found a challenge from some stockbrokers, in order to promote their services in college, they will give you a demo account with $100,000 of simulated funds to trade, the participation with the best performance in a certain period of time Winners can win some prizes.
You know I'm from a very small town in a very small country so I didn't know anything about the stock market before I went to that event, I just randomly bought some stocks by luck and ended up with good results by accident, knowing that At that time, I actually didn't have any in-depth understanding of this market, but after I found out that it could make money, I made up my mind to save money and start financial investment.
At that time I read a lot of articles about investing, one of which was a PR from PokerStrategy.com about how to become a poker pro online and make money. I later learned that the article was written by one of my current business partners, Pavel, although of course that's not the point of the story. After reading this article, I flew directly to Gibraltar to ask them for advice. Since then, I have embarked on the path of saving money by playing poker tournaments. After playing professionally for about five or six years, I have accumulated a small deposit. Invest while saving money.
Around 2011 I started looking at value investing, which is very different from most cryptocurrencies or stocks that have produced huge returns over the past 12 years. At that time the PokerStrategy.com team built another project called Tradimo for trading and investing. I wasn't deeply involved, but I helped build the community early on.
Back then they kept talking about the prospect of a Facebook IPO and a bunch of growth tech stocks like that. I'm the one trying to push more content on value investing methods, but no one really cares about that. Everyone wanted to go chasing tech stocks, and in retrospect, that was actually a better strategy. After all, the return on technology stocks since the bubble burst has far exceeded the rate of return on most of the value investments that Buffett advocates.
On the team at Tradimo, a guy from the Netherlands bought bitcoin, and that was my first exposure to bitcoin. He said, “This is something new, we should pay attention to it, we should write about it.” I wasn’t really a decision maker on the platform at the time, but I said it was stupid. Let's focus on something serious shall we? So after my first exposure to Bitcoin, I ignored it for three years.
It wasn't until I played a few hands at an online poker room that accepts bitcoin that I slowly started to get into the world of cryptocurrencies. It's been a really interesting transition from being a big skeptic who was pessimistic about everything until I met some hackers from these crypto-anarchist movements and after talking to them, I arrived in 2016 Around 2017, the way of judging this matter became very ideologically oriented, and for me, the value of cryptocurrency at that time was more about ideological change than making money.
Nansen: It sounds like you are learning multiple skills in several different areas at the same time. Do you think this has helped your growth? How does it all come together organically?
Fiskantes：In fact, sometimes I feel anxious simply because I know I don't have enough time in my life to learn all the things I want to learn. In terms of learning, my preferences are very broad, but I don't really specialize in one thing because I don't think I can really spend a lot of time learning just one thing.
Compare that to, let's say I have some friends in the poker world who play only poker very deeply, almost like autistic people who know every single situation that can happen in poker, but in the rest of life On the other hand, they may look like an "idiot", they may even go to IKEA to buy a chair and get lost.
So for these people, when poker is no longer profitable, they basically don't have much opportunity to move to other areas besides cryptocurrency. Many of them are now in the cryptocurrency space because that is also a very interesting game. I always want to do more. I always want to do business. I always wanted to get out of the house and do something more, maybe something more rewarding than poker.
After I gave up legal studies, I studied Applied Psychology for three years because I wanted to have a university degree. Plus, it's been really fun for me to figure out how the human mind works, especially when I'm playing poker under pressure, and that knowledge helps me a lot.
So for me, the priority is to learn as many different things as possible and find my own path in life. I think that to have an edge, you either have to be very knowledgeable. For example, if you invest in real estate, if you invest in some places you are very familiar with, you know the price, and you know how this space will develop further, of course it is very helpful. If you can’t do this, you can only invest in some super New, poorly planned frontiers.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out virtual reality (VR) before jumping into the crypto space officially, this technology had a small bull market or hype cycle in 2016, but for me it wasn't really something actionable. It was just a fun hobby, I tried a lot of things during that time, but after I got into crypto officially, I took most of the money I used to invest and the money I made from poker, which is almost all I have Bank deposits, invested in a company that may sound a little "strange" to you.
Here's a story I probably never shared, but it's super fun. At that time, there was a company in Eastern Europe, which basically focused on the cheese market. It would produce aged cheese like Gouda, and earn considerable profits by exporting it after aging for several months. It seemed to me at the time that all you needed was some kind of infrastructure for secure storage, and then you just distributed it, sold it to supermarkets, wine shops, etc., and made a fortune.
The company's numbers look pretty good on paper. I invested a lot of money in it. I knew the founder, of course I probably didn't know him that much, because it turned out he was doing a lot of shady things on the side, he had a huge debt that he never disclosed to anyone, and the business was basically bankrupt , I lost a lot because of it.
Around 2016, because I became more and more fond of cryptocurrencies, I stopped being just a poker player who used bitcoin to exchange chips, and also read the bitcoin white paper and did some cryptocurrency transactions. Looking back at that time, trying to invest in a brick and mortar or real world business, really trying to do something in the food industry, is crazy to me now. This is hard to imagine, because these physical industries represented by food are difficult to penetrate.
That cheese company went out of business fairly quickly, and when I was learning about cryptocurrency, of course I didn't think it would keep growing like crazy. However, it is still much more convenient to orientate in this space than to do things in the real world.
Nansen: In the process of investing in a cheese company and being cheated, what do you think you have gained?
Fiskantes：The biggest lesson is of course risk management. Although I have experienced some lessons before, this time the lessons are more "thorough". Another is that there is a huge discrepancy between ideas and numbers on paper and actual execution.
I'm pretty sure if this business had been run by someone else, maybe with more resources, a better distribution network and better organization, I imagine it would have made a lot of money fairly quickly, rivaling even some tech industries. But it's all about the team and the execution, I could have found this earlier if I had been more experienced with people and talking about the business with the teams I'm trying to build, but I don't, it's not the same as investing in stocks or playing poker very different.
Nansen: It looks like your early experience was the perfect course to get into cryptocurrency. You study psychology, you study gambling strategies and the psychological aspects of poker, you study markets. You entered the crypto space with the exact skills you wish someone else had.
Fiskantes：In a way, I think I'm much better prepared than some people I know who are lawyers or something and then try to buy some crypto investments as a sideline. However, cryptocurrency was still a wild beast in its early days and I made many mistakes.
Of course, after my cheese business failed, I never made a critical mistake again. I never used leverage or hurt my ass by investing too much in one project. But I also went through the ICO craze, and I was attracted by the projects that were packaged very carefully, and I participated in the investment, but in the end most of them failed.
Yes, I think I definitely have a better store of knowledge to participate in the cryptocurrency market than most people, even from a mentality or psychological point of view. I don't really mind volatility, I don't mind losing money. For me, this is normal. I don't spend too much time glued to price charts wondering where Bitcoin is going next. This is also an advantage.
Nansen: We talked about early failures and the lessons learned from them. So are there any successful experiences worth sharing?
Fiskantes：My equity value investing strategy was alright, but never really produced any excess returns, so I basically gave up and went into the ETF passive investing camp. So even if it did well, I wouldn't say how successful my stock investment was. But one investment that was really right was the condo I bought in 2014.
Buying a condo was a really big investment for me at the time, and I paid 50% of it through my mortgage. For me, I'm thinking, okay, this is probably the biggest investment I've ever made in my life, so I need to really make it count and focus on it. Now, that's not a lot compared to what I have now, but at the time, it was a lot of money.
In fact, I spend a lot of time using my advisors to do due diligence. I hired a consultant who was a building inspection agency to do private inspections for people looking to buy real estate. So pay him to accompany me when I go on field trips and he'll take his tools and measure the humidity in the walls and check the windows for good soundproofing and all that stuff and give me advice and tell me what I should How much to negotiate. He was a big part of the process, I looked at at least 30+ apartments, and I bought one that at first looked pretty scary.
The apartment was in a great location, but the condition of the house was terrible. If you're someone who makes decisions based on emotion or how good something feels and looks, you're not going to buy it. And this guy told me it was the best place we've seen so far. I know it looks horrible, but it will be super easy to rebuild and structurally everything will be fine. The location, amenities, and price of this condo are great, and you should buy it right away. So that's what I did.
Then I started rebuilding and sold it five years later for a much greater gain than the average real estate market return over that time period. I was very comfortable with the whole renovation and rebuilding process, and at that point I thought maybe I could make more real estate investments that way. But then the cryptocurrency skyrocketed, and I gave up on this idea, but this may be my biggest non-cryptocurrency investment victory. This is not just luck, but actually the return of my detailed preliminary research and preparation work.
Nansen: I found that in the above several stories, you like to find experts in this field to communicate directly. When you first got into poker, you went to Gibraltar. When buying a house, I hired a consultant. Do you still do it now? Before Zee Prime invests, will you invite experts in the corresponding field? How are you doing that kind of due diligence now?
Fiskantes：Cryptocurrency is a new and fast-growing industry, and you don't really have the kind of specialists you have in other industries. However, last year we started focusing on games. Mainly because of some of our partners especially Pavel, the poker company guy that I mentioned earlier from Gibraltar, who has built a huge gaming company that includes not only poker games but some other games as well. He has been a game expert for 11 years, so he knows games and how to make them fun and profitable, more than most VCs investing in cryptocurrency games today. It was a lucky coincidence that we managed to recruit him and use his connections to hire more professionals in the field.
To this end, we built our own small team and are now focusing on the game track. Beyond that, we're hiring people who I wouldn't say are experts, but we're hiring pretty bright, young and hungry brains from traditional finance who are now analyzing some of the DeFi opportunities. Early on the team was more like a bunch of people coming together from different backgrounds, but now as we scale, we're trying to methodically build out dedicated teams that are purposefully focused on each of the areas we invest in.
Maybe we're lucky and we're earning big returns. In the future, we may expand our investment to other fields that we think are necessary to promote the development of human civilization. So we'll probably hire some outside experts and advisors to help us invest, maybe more passively, not as hands-on as we do with cryptocurrencies, but maybe in the next three to seven years, we'll think about it... about I don't want to reveal too much about this, because this is just our internal brainstorming. But we are discussing this matter seriously. Given enough funding, we can help realize some dreams that now seem out of reach. Having said that, we are not experts in this area and we never will be. So we may need some outside help and more passive investing.
Nansen: That's something you've mentioned a number of times in this interview, and I've seen you talk about it on Twitter. Investing with a higher purpose seems to be a motivator for you.
Fiskantes：Yes, I mean, flipping coins is fun, and I do what I do, especially NFTs. It's fun, but it's never the main motivator. After a while, you realize that if you bought a bigger yacht, you wouldn't be any happier if you had a bigger number on your screen. I don't know what other people are going to do with their money, but what you can do is either stop being so focused on your career and investing and start doing something else like focusing on your health or at least have some higher Goal, why did you accumulate all these numbers, what are you going to do with them in the future.
I'm kind of trying to do both. My partners and I feel that we need to give back, or identify areas that can really drive human progress, areas that may be underdeveloped, or capital is misallocated in some way, or there are some inefficiencies, we Will try to figure out how to think about them differently, how to transfer them to where it might be more beneficial for all of us.
It sounds corny, but I kind of feel like, at the end of the day, it's the purest form of motivation. You have to dream bigger than what you already have and try to help something that might be beyond you.
And that's exactly what cryptocurrencies are doing. It's interesting how so many people get very rich early in life without waiting 20 years or more after building a company. We don't want to see the world destroyed in our old age. So I think it makes more sense to switch from a purely "how much do we let our assets go up" mindset to, let's say, let's live in a greener, more pleasant world.
Nansen: There are many "child prodigies" in the crypto world. Do you think there are some people who are naturally suitable for trading? Is this something that can be learned? Is it a skill that can be developed through training?
Fiskantes：I think you need to have some knowledge base to do this. Of course, many of these require training. If people aren't, are trained from a young age, or aren't used to taking big risks, it's going to be hard to build wealth quickly in the crypto space.
Especially for trading, where you're literally glued to the screen and trying to make quick decisions on large amounts of money very quickly in a noisy environment. You need to have a certain quality... I don't know how to describe it, but I feel like you need to let something "die" deep inside of you.
Nansen: What exactly do you want to "die"?
Fiskantes：There needs to be something dead inside of you, or in other words, something that you need to be calm about. You know, some people get very emotional when they think about money. We have this game with poker players where we go to a bar, we have some drinks, and then we'll propose a coin toss to the bartender. If we lose, we pay triple the price. Or if we win, we pay nothing, he needs to pay with his own money.
While this is clearly a value-added strategy for the bartender, since you're risking 1 for a 50-50 chance of winning 3, the reality is that the average bartender won't accept this condition.
Most people are very risk averse, and the concept of losing is more painful to them than the vision of winning larger sums. So I think you need to be someone who maybe doesn't feel too risky, but at the same time, you shouldn't be addicted to gambling. After all, there are indeed many people who are addicted to the dopamine rush brought by the crazy rise and fall of numbers.
So to me, numbers aren't that interesting. I remember when I was playing poker, it was just a grind. I just sit there, play for a few hours a day, and happily do something else. And some people are so addicted they can't leave the table at all.
Nansen: For you, what is painful? In trading, there must be something that really "torn" your heart. What is painful?
Fiskantes：Let's say I missed a successful project for sloppy reasons, or missed something for sloppy reasons. The opportunities just kind of overwhelmed me when everything was going up so fast. And, yes, it hurts to make sloppy mistakes, even if I don't really lose money on them.
But the other thing, this is more from an investment standpoint, the other painful thing that I see is, I sympathize with the builders who are under a lot of pressure. They are the ones who are tasked with actually creating something important, interesting and innovative. And these people get so much hate and so much pressure. I feel like these guys are working hard for it, very hard. And our idea is just to sell their tokens for profit, nothing more.
So I think it's a bit of a pain when I see really good projects and really good, well-meaning teams, they're struggling, just because the token thing is down because of timing, and the community puts When problems are piled on them, it can be overwhelming. Everytime when I want to get out of the field or have a long vacation it usually has something to do with something like this.
We would love to support founders or developers who may have eccentric personalities, or have flawed designs, and they should probably be more active in addressing the issue. But I've always been partial to people who can make a noise in some innovative area, and sometimes even if things don't work out, but it's very noticeable, I feel like the world is moving forward.
Nansen: I found that there are very few Zee Prime wallets marked by Nansen. Is this for security reasons?
Fiskantes：Speaking of OPSEC, since I'm probably the most public face on our team, I don't personally control any funds other than my own. Sometimes I may test some new projects and buy some NFTs. I am also a backup of some multi-signature wallets, but I never actively perform any signature operations, and I am very careful about this.
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Fiskantes personal account chain activity records
Fiskantes：To be honest, in our team, my judgment on NFT assets has always been unique. Pretty much everyone said it was just an unexplained fashion trend, but I kept asking them to dig deeper and dig into the space, to find opportunities.
When I was playing poker, there was a proprietary trading desk in Eastern Europe that was hiring traders to do high frequency trading on small exchanges like the Warsaw Stock Exchange and the Vienna Stock Exchange where stocks were illiquid . You can artificially implement what the current market maker algorithm does automatically, and you can make a lot of money in a very fool-like way. In the process I learned a few tricks about how to "play" the order book.
I was there for three weeks and I realized I didn't want to go to the office in a shirt and tie every day and I quit, but I learned a few tricks. So I actually found out last year that you can do something like that in NFTs, because those markets are so illiquid, they're hard to automate. So I'm doing this, but really I'm also just trying to buy some lottery tickets and see if something pops up.
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Fiskantes Realized Gain Record
I don't do this very often, but I just figured out that it's a viable strategy, and if it weren't for the super high ethereum fees, it might be the best place to learn how to do it, but also because So it's not for everyone.
Also, when someone accidentally lists a very rare NFT, you should be quick to buy it. I do that too, and I think I can get pretty good returns in this activity if I really focus on it. But at that point, we were already running our fund, and I wasn't interested in just "hunting around" all day, that's what I've been playing poker for five years, so it shouldn't be something I've been doing for the rest of my life.
Right now, I think the NFT market is saturated. The market is full of knockoffs, not as exciting as when I used to play. Now I do not recommend that you buy NFT directly, but should study more projects such as NFT game applications or NFT infrastructure.
Nansen: In the cryptocurrency market, people often say that a powerful market player like you is behind the scenes controlling the movement of the entire industry. What do you think of this point of view?
Fiskantes：I'm not one of those so-called insiders who pop up in a lot of private groups. If there is any chat group that is so important as to drive the market, I will definitely not join it. But the truth is that backroom trading and insider information are inevitable. I don't think it's different from other industries, it's just that the crypto market is so new and growing fast that those little information asymmetries are much more valuable in this market.
Now I'm a bit tired of it, and I'm no longer as starry-eyed and innocent as I was four or five years ago. At that time, I was more inclined to believe that all cryptocurrencies are about equalizing opportunity, making everything more decentralized and more democratic.
In some respects, though, it's still moving in that direction. Everyone, anywhere in the world, can connect intelligently, and it's an equal opportunity for everyone. The common denominator then is just pure art skill of figuring out how to play the DeFi/MEV game better than others without any background. And if the game is global, it can be anywhere. All you need is your computer, and suddenly you can be in it. You could even make a ten figure fortune out of your mom's basement in Pakistan.
wallet analysis
As part of the interview, Fiskantes shared some of Zee Primes' most successful investments, including early bets on Synthetix and Solana, and buying Luna at $1. Fiskantes also revealed that Zee Prime is growing rapidly, with multiple other entities operating under the same roof. This includes Sigil, a DeFi-focused liquidity staking tool, and a new addition to the family: Devmons.gg.
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Devmons.eth Realized Earnings Record
Devmons owns a Parallel card collection of over 1600 cards and has been a hit with hyped series like Goblintown and Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult.
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Devmons.eth NFT Portfolio
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