Investor Talks: A Chat With Aylo

Investor Talks is a written interview series that offers deeper insights into some of the most fascinating thinkers and investors in our field.

Thanks to our sponsors for making it possible to share this content for FREE!

| NEWSLETTER CONTINUES BELOW |

This week’s Investor Talks is with Aylo. Aylo, is a legendary crypto researcher and voice in the the space. He runs Alpha Please, which is a content and research collective focused on generating alpha from the world of crypto.

Can you give us a bit of your backstory, how did you get into crypto and when?

I first started investing in BTC and ETH late summer 2017. I was a young professional living in an expensive city and struggling to see how I would ever get ahead. I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and fell down the rabbit hole. I very quickly speed ran the process of going down the crypto risk curve, and bought all sorts of shitcoins on Binance before the 2017 bull run came to a crashing halt (classic first cycle arc). But I was hooked, and researching the tech and industry became an obsession.

What’s a belief you held that felt obvious at the time, and was ahead of mainstream thinking in crypto? 

All of finance would eventually move onchain. It was hard to imagine this when you couldn’t actually use any applications, and everything was just whitepapers.

Can you recall one of your biggest wins in crypto where you felt like you got in early on something?

LINK early 2019. It was the single most important investment of my life. A friend of mine sent me the whitepaper and I finally understood how blockchains were going to become useful beyond sending tokens back and forth. I went all in on LINK around 0.30-0.40. I shoved everything I had into it (I was young enough to take the risk), and it was the best performing asset in that brutal bear market, and it was the first time I had meaningful capital to play with, which gave me a big leg up going into DeFi summer. 

How would you describe your investment style? Are you more of a longer term buy and hold fundamentals investor or are you more of a trader? Or something in between?

All of my best results have come from being a long term fundamental investor, mostly from allocating in bear markets. This cycle I have become a bit more balanced and attempted to trade mini-alt seasons, but I would say my strength lies in assessing fundamentals. The combination of fundamentals and narrative is what I look for in general. Fundamentals gives the asset a price floor and narrative provides a speculative premium. 

How do you source your investments (or trades)? How do you develop a thesis and gain conviction?

I think I tend to start with what I think are investable categories with a big TAM, and then I dive into the data to see if I can spot any opportunities that the market isn’t seeing yet. Crypto still remains inefficient compared with most other markets, which is what creates the opportunity for retail investors.

It’s easy to convince yourself of the bull case for an investment, but I find conviction comes through relentlessly fudding the project and being aware of everything that can go wrong. Once I’ve gone through that process I have clear invalidations and then feel comfortable holding until something fundamentally changes.

What have been your thoughts on this cycle? Has it been harder than previous ones for you - this seems to be the prevailing sentiment amongst many on CT

The reality is that every cycle is harder than the previous one. You are playing against a bigger pool of people, and the number of sophisticated participants increases, and ultimately you get more losers. 

Alt coins have had a tough time this cycle so far because there hasn’t been enough value creation and innovation to justify larger market caps. Very few projects were able to find PMF this cycle with speculative trading being the main driver again of onchain activity.  Plus we have had a lot of value capture in the private markets, and projects launching with bad tokenomics. The memecoin mania was a kind of rejection of low float/high FDV. 

I think it wasn’t necessarily harder for me than the previous cycle because I stayed very tapped in close to the bottom of the bear market, and was able to identify SOL as being mispriced and the possible cycle winner. If I hadn’t built my portfolio around SOL and used the asset in Solana DeFi, then I would likely be disappointed with the returns this cycle so far.

What are 3 (or more) tokens you are holding that you have high conviction in?

BTC, ENA, GRASS, HYPE, FLUID. 

Outside of BTC, which I think is self explanatory, I like the r/r of these alt coins right now, because they are all growing in adoption, have demonstrated PMF, and can grow enormously from here because the problems they solve are valuable.

Are there any tokens you’re looking closely at but haven’t bought yet?

I quite like what I’m seeing with Syrup (Maple Finance).

Are you bullish/bearish on these new Alt L1/L2 ecosystems this cycle and why in one sentence?

• Berachain - Bullish - Doing well with DeFi natives

• Monad - Undecided - Good tech, but might struggle in a competitive landscape, and not sure the market will reward another big general purpose L1 

• MegaETH - Bullish - One of the only new L2s I think that are bringing something drastically different to the table. 

• Movement - Bearish - Need to see less bad headlines and more innovation

• Eclipse - Bearish - Will likely struggle for users and liquidity

• HyperEVM - Bullish - I think it will specifically serve the growth of the perps dex

What’s a hobby or interest you have outside of crypto?

I played quite a high level of football (soccer) when I was younger, and still play weekly.

I’m a history nerd, and can never read enough about the past.

• Follow Aylo on X here

• Subscribe to The Edge Podcast here

• Watch The Edge Podcast on YouTube here