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Welcome to another Nugget of Wisdom! A free post I send out once a week. These are designed to be short and sweet, a quick read to (hopefully) impart some sort of wisdom, or at the very least to get you thinking about something interesting.
ZCash has dramatically outperformed the rest of the crypto market over the last couple of months, and one of the reasons for that is because of their integration with NEAR, and specifically, Near Intents.
NEAR Intents for ZCash are a cross-chain solution that allows users to easily swap other cryptocurrencies for Zcash ($ZEC) or vice versa without complex bridging, enabling access to Zcash’s shielded privacy features. They have had over 540k monthly users and almost $3b in volume just in the last 30 days.
Built on the Near Blockchain, RHEA is launching as Zcash’s lending integration.
Rhea Finance is the first unified, multi-chain lending protocol to support native ZCash. built for non-EVM ecosystems, while seamlessly supporting EVM integration.
The average stablecoin yield across EVM ecosystem is around 6%, but RHEA provides up to 12% APY.
They also recently shared a post breaking down their revenue and the buybacks they’ll be making with it.
Learn more here: https://x.com/rheafdn/status/1989356838647910821.
There’s a strange thing that happens when you start making money in crypto.
You finally catch a good move, your portfolio is up nicely, you hit a 2x or 5x or something wonderful, and you feel great…
…until you open X or a group chat and see someone else who doubled their net worth overnight on a memecoin that you almost bought.
Suddenly your real profit can start to feel like a mistake. A missed opportunity. A failure.
This is what I call comparison returns, when your emotional PNL is determined not by your actual outcome, but by someone else’s.
I think it’s because humans are wired to compete on status. Even early hunter-gatherer societies had prestige hierarchies. Being seen as successful mattered. That wiring didn’t disappear when we went from beating our caveman rivals over the head with a club to clicking buttons on a screen.
What this means in crypto market is that you can win financially and at the same time lose emotionally. Literally in the very same trade. Because the scoreboard in our dumb brains sometimes isn’t dollars or our own success — it’s relative success, comparing ourselves to others.
Well aside from just plain feeling bad, it can often lead to you making worse decisions moving forward.
When someone else’s win makes you feel like you lost (even when you didn’t), three things happen:
You chase trades that no longer make sense
You size too big trying to “catch up”
You abandon your process for a dopamine hit
I’ve watched talented traders lose enormous chunks of their bankroll trying to match someone else’s lucky run.
The antidote is brutally simple.
Not easy to implement, but simple: benchmark yourself to yourself.
Compare your today to your yesterday, don’t compare your today to someone else’s today.
Or at least try to do that. Our dumb brains will still fail us at times, but at least we’re trying to do the right thing.
Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇
Letter 89: The Golden Age Of Crypto Is Over
Most of you know that I was a professional poker player from 2005-2021. The skills I learned surviving poker have helped me greatly when it comes to surviving crypto. Things like risk and bankroll management, thinking in probabilities, game selection, mental resilience, and so on.
