From Arbitrage to Faith: How a Coder Became an Ethereum Believer | The "ETH10K" License Plate Story

The red brake lights flickered as he pulled into the registration office. Wesley mounted the “ETH10K” license plate back onto his sports car with deliberate care. He’d sold three vehicles during the bear market’s depths—a Ferrari, an SUV for groceries, and this red Porsche that once carried his most meaningful plate. Now, on the day Ethereum climbed above $4,350, the first thing he did wasn’t to add leverage or upgrade his car. It was to reclaim this small piece of metal. “A car can be replaced. Your position can grow again. But your word—that requires reclamation,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

The Weight of Bear Market Choices

When ETH collapsed from $4,871 toward $880 in 2022, the “cryptocurrency winter” was more than a market condition—it was a reckoning. Wesley didn’t panic-sell at $800 like many did. Instead, he liquidated almost everything else: two houses in Australia, all three cars, even the license plate that symbolized his conviction. Then he boarded a plane to a farm, trading his engineering career for physical labor—picking apples by day, teaching himself code by night.

“During those months, I felt genuinely empty,” he recalled. The ocean-view villa, the sports cars, the lifestyle tokens—none of it provided the meaning he’d imagined. What did sustain him was a simple decision: return to first principles.

Starting in late 2022, around $1,200 per ETH, he implemented mechanical discipline. Every time the price dropped, he treated it as a buying opportunity rather than a warning sign. “If it falls $50, I see it as a crash and allocate fresh capital,” he explained. This wasn’t speculation—it was conviction married to algorithm.

The Engineering Path: From Finance to Code

Wesley’s route into blockchain wasn’t through get-rich-quick schemes but through gaps in the market that required technical execution. His journey began in Hong Kong’s investment banking sector, where he worked as a bond salesman after studying finance. “Going to work felt like performing,” he said. “I’m introverted by nature, so I eventually quit and started building.”

His first product wasn’t a polished app but a proof-of-concept: a Facebook-based chatbot lending system for students, built after only one or two months of self-taught coding. Using conditional logic to parse keywords, he broke the lending process into conversational steps. By embedding logic directly into Facebook’s SDK, he created an MVP that achieved break-even within two to three months, serving 500-600 users with zero defaults.

“My family had limited means, and I needed tuition money to study abroad,” he explained. “I wondered: could students like me have a more dignified path to credit?” One early borrower used the loan to purchase a ticket to Japan; he repaid it immediately upon landing. The numbers were modest but the lesson was permanent—verifiable systems build trust.

Building the Arbitrage Engine

In 2016, Wesley moved to Australia for a working holiday, taking day shifts at a small community bank while teaching himself computer science at night through online courses, textbooks, and public lectures. His colleagues left by 3 PM each day; he used the entire evening to study data structures, algorithms, and operating systems.

By 2019, after returning to the Chinese blockchain community and joining a fintech startup in Hong Kong, he began allocating to Ethereum and Synthetix (SNX)—a year before DeFi Summer. The real breakthrough came through funding rate arbitrage: designing algorithms to exploit the basis spread between spot and contract markets.

“The concept is simple: no directional bets, no trend-chasing, just disciplined execution of a repeatable edge,” he explained. By late 2020, his strategy generated 87% annualized returns. He raised approximately ten million dollars from HNW individuals and finance professionals by explaining it through traditional finance language—“carry trade,” “holding costs,” “basis trading.”

The first year as an independent trader validated his models. Yet success exposed a gap in his knowledge. “I was running on the API but didn’t really understand blockchain itself,” he acknowledged. So he resigned again, spending months studying the Ethereum Yellow Paper, learning Solidity, reading bytecode, and writing smart contract tools. He followed engineers from top blockchain teams to solidify his foundation.

The Code Never Lies

His first role as a CTO at a DeFi project revealed blockchain’s harsh reality: the chain is not always safe. During his first week, the protocol was hacked for millions. Months later, another attack cost tens of millions more.

“That’s when I stopped celebrating and started systematizing,” he said. Multi-signature wallets with time locks. Bytecode verification before every deployment. Gradual traffic ramps with rollback triggers. Avoiding upgradeable contracts whenever possible.

The philosophy was simple: “Code can be verified. A system deserves trust built on transparency, not faith in operators.”

This conviction extended to his choice of blockchain. When asked why Ethereum specifically, he gave an engineer’s answer: “Because it’s verifiable. If a contract is non-upgradeable, it runs exactly as written. You can examine the source code or bytecode, then decide whether to interact with it—no blind faith required.”

Solana, by contrast, he described as “powerful but essentially a black box after deployment. You can’t verify execution on-chain the way you can with EVM chains. That centralization of understanding worries me.”

Bitcoin he respects as “digital gold” with a reasonable role in portfolios. But for his personal allocation—currently at $2.93K per ETH as of late 2025—he’s chosen almost exclusively Ethereum. “Call it professional bias,” he smiled. “To me, Ethereum is more like an operating system: iOS or Android. Programmable, verifiable, composable like Legos.”

The NFT Lesson and Market Discipline

The bull market tested his discipline. In 2021, he purchased a Bored Ape for 35 ETH while the floor was around 140 ETH but never sold. The psychology worked—with a monkey avatar, strangers approached him constantly.

At the market peak, he spent hundreds of ETH on Otherside plots containing Koda and Azuki names. The flip was brutal. From “blue-chip” status to near-zero in months.

“I realized later that using these physical status symbols to attract others simply doesn’t align with who I am,” he reflected. When the bear market arrived, he walked away from it all—another lesson in stripping down to what truly matters.

From External Clients to Personal Capital

During the FTX collapse and market chaos of 2022, Wesley made a critical decision: withdraw all external client funds. He returned approximately $10 million AUM to investors and committed to running only his own capital.

“After FTX, one reality became crystal clear: if my position exists, it could go to zero,” he said. The API outages, counterparty risks, and mounting stress at 3 AM when alerts fired—the math no longer worked.

He transitioned to contract work: writing smart contracts, developing NFT infrastructure, charging on a “fixed fee plus commission” basis. His funding rate arbitrage strategy, now running only on his personal accounts, still generates approximately 10% annually despite market maturation.

“I thought I’d only do this for three years,” he laughed. “We’re now in year five, and it still works. Thinner margins ahead, probably, but at small scale there’s still profit.”

The License Plate as Anchor

In 2025, when Ethereum broke above $4,350, Wesley didn’t rush to increase leverage or buy a new car. He redeemed the “ETH10K” license plate he’d registered in Perth back in 2022—when ETH was around $3,000 and the $10,000 target felt genuinely possible, not delusional.

“That plate isn’t about vanity,” he clarified. “It’s a note to my past self: I meant what I said during the bear market. I still do.”

The irony is sharp: during the bear market, owning an “ETH10K” plate on a luxury car meant nothing but debt and risk. Today, with substantially more ETH accumulated and clear conviction, the plate returns—not as a boast, but as a signature.

The Methods Stay Simple

When asked what he’d teach others, Wesley defaults to engineering discipline rather than trading secrets. Learn Python through Udemy’s bootcamp. Fill in fundamentals with O’Reilly texts. Solidify data structures through Coursera. First learn to do, then understand why.

The trading system follows the same philosophy: verify what can be verified. Gray out what can be rolled back. Never run naked against what can be hedged.

Low leverage. Heavy auditing. Verifiability as the baseline.

He doesn’t encourage “all-in” mentality or predict where Ethereum will go next. He simply maintains the system that’s worked: disciplined accumulation, mechanical execution, trust built on code rather than charisma.

On days when brake lights glow red ahead and the market pauses, that small license plate catches the light—a reminder that positions can be rebuilt, but integrity cannot be purchased. The $10K target remains a question mark. The conviction, however, is stamped in aluminum.

“When the red brake lights light up,” he texted friends before flying to Southeast Asia for a break, “the clouds of the bear market finally recede in the rearview mirror.”