From Zero to Conviction: The Engineer Who Bet His License Plate on Ethereum

When ETH rallied back to $4,350 on August 11, Wesley’s first move wasn’t to chase gains or upgrade his lifestyle. Instead, he drove to reclaim a personalized license plate reading “ETH10K”—a bet he’d registered back in Perth when Ethereum hovered around $3,000. “This small piece of metal is my handshake with my past self,” he explained. It wasn’t about prestige; it was about keeping a promise made during the darkest market hours.

The Accidental Fintech Founder: How One Engineer Built His First Fortune

Wesley’s entry into technology wasn’t predetermined. After working two years as a bond salesman in Hong Kong’s investment banking sector, he realized the corporate theater wasn’t his stage. “I’m introverted by nature—every day felt like acting,” he recalls. The turning point came when his family’s financial struggles collided with an opportunity: creating a lending platform specifically designed for cash-strapped students.

Armed with only a month of coding experience, Wesley couldn’t build a traditional app. So he engineered a workaround: embedding lending logic into Facebook’s SDK, turning the entire borrowing process into a conversational flow. By decomposing complex steps into executable dialogue trees, he created a functional minimum viable product using conditional logic—a predecessor to today’s conversational AI, but stripped down to absolute essentials.

The results surprised everyone. With barely a core team and minimal overhead, the platform broke even within two to three months. Over its lifetime, it processed roughly 10 million in transaction volume while serving five to six hundred users. Not a single default loan—a remarkable track record considering the demographic. One borrower used the funds to purchase a flight to Japan and repaid the debt immediately upon landing.

“My motivation was simple back then: my family had limited means, and studying abroad required money I didn’t have,” Wesley said. That desperation became fuel. After an argument with his co-founder forced him into self-teaching programming or watch the company collapse, he chose the harder path. The venture eventually sold, marking his first substantial wealth accumulation.

Australia’s Quiet Education: Nights of Code, Days of Finance

Between 2016 and 2017, Wesley pursued a working holiday in Australia. Constrained by visa regulations requiring his job to match his degree (finance), he took positions at a small community bank—work that ranged from analyzing spreadsheets to physically counting ATM cash. It was mundane, but it came with revelation: colleagues departed by 3 PM, leaving entire evenings as blank canvas.

Wesley filled those nights systematically. Online courses, public lectures, PDF textbooks—he assembled computer science foundations from fragments: data structures, algorithms, operating systems. Simultaneously, he prepared GRE and TOEFL exams, envisioning a trajectory through a US master’s program into big tech.

Reality was harsh. With only one year of self-taught coding and no formal credentials, his résumés faced rejection after rejection. Yet those two years yielded roughly 400,000 RMB in savings and crystallized one certainty: if he wanted to transition into engineering, he needed to anchor himself in the Chinese tech community. So he returned home, formally committing to the engineering track and unknowingly laying groundwork for an imminent entry into decentralized finance.

The Accidental Crypto Entry: When Insurance Tech Met Market Chaos

In 2018, Wesley joined a Hong Kong insurance startup as a backend engineer. The timing was serendipitous—a major cryptocurrency exchange had recently collapsed, displacing dozens of practitioners. The startup absorbed many of them, and “suddenly, technical discussions shifted entirely to crypto vocabulary,” Wesley observed. This linguistic shift marked his unofficial initiation into Web3.

By 2019, he began accumulating Ethereum and Synthetix (SNX)—“precisely one year before DeFi Summer,” he notes with self-aware timing. When the summer of 2020 erupted with yield farming mania, SNX skyrocketed, yet his positions remained modest. “Even substantial gains felt fleeting because my capital base was still limited,” he admitted.

What truly catalyzed his focus was a technical problem: spot-contract basis arbitrage. Working with a colleague, he developed an algorithm to exploit funding rate differences between perpetual futures and spot markets—a strategy generating 80 to 90 percent annualized returns by late 2020. But he faced a fundamental constraint: insufficient capital to scale.

His solution was unconventional. Armed with a PDF explaining the mechanics—basis spreads, carry costs, hedge ratios—he approached former classmates now working in investment banking and private wealth management. He avoided crypto hype narratives entirely. Instead, he framed it in traditional finance terminology: “This is a yield-generating hedge with crypto exposure.” The appeal was immediate. Within months, he’d raised nearly ten million dollars across Hong Kong and Singapore, transitioning from sideline calculations to real-time execution.

“The team was basically me,” he laughed. By connecting exchange APIs to automated trading infrastructure, his strategy achieved approximately 87 percent returns in its debut year. Yet success bred a troubling realization: he’d built a highly efficient machine operating atop blockchain networks he barely understood. So he stepped back from trading entirely and systematized his education: from Ethereum’s Yellow Paper through Solidity bytecode analysis to writing custom tooling. He even embedded himself with core developers at prominent projects to cement his engineering foundations.

When Code Faces Reality: Learning Security Through Catastrophe

His integration into DeFi’s core infrastructure came during the 2020-2021 bull market—not as a trader, but as a “CTO” at a prominent protocol. The role involved managing deployments, parameter adjustments, price feeds, and liquidation mechanics. Then disaster struck.

In his first week, the protocol suffered a hack that vaporized millions. Months later, another breach drained tens of millions more. These twin shocks shattered any remaining bull market euphoria and installed a permanent operating discipline: mandatory multi-signature controls with time-locks, extreme reluctance to execute upgrades, bytecode verification before every deployment, and graduated traffic testing before full rollout. “Code is verifiable,” Wesley concluded. “Systems deserve that trust.”

After the second incident, he pivoted to founding his own venture: a lean NFT trading and distribution platform operating on fixed fees plus 10 percent commission. One transaction alone generated 80 ETH in revenue—enough to crystallize Ethereum as his portfolio’s emotional and practical center.

The Philosophy That Survived the Bear: Why Ethereum, Not Solana

When asked why he’d staked his identity on an ETH10K license plate rather than Bitcoin or Solana, Wesley’s answer was distinctly engineer-like: verifiability.

“If a contract is non-upgradeable, it executes exactly as the code on-chain dictates. There’s no trust requirement. In the EVM ecosystem, I can examine the source code or bytecode before deciding whether to interact,” he explained. This capability—the ability to audit, verify, and reproduce outcomes—fundamentally shaped his conviction.

Solana, by contrast, left him unsettled: “It’s powerful, but you can’t verify transactions on-chain the way you can with Ethereum. There’s less transparency, which means less personal control.” His preference wasn’t dismissive; it was precision-weighted. He respects Bitcoin’s status as digital gold and acknowledges its place in long-term portfolios. But his personal conviction skewed toward Ethereum: “To me, Ethereum functions like an operating system—iOS or Android—whereas Bitcoin is more analogous to digital real estate. Both have value, but I’m biased toward the platform.”

This wasn’t ideology. It was epistemology: an engineer’s demand that systems reveal themselves.

The Bull Market Trap: How Symbols Became Anchors

Even conviction has weaknesses. During the market’s peak frenzy in 2021, Wesley purchased a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for 35 ETH when the collection was ascendant. Floor price exploded to 140 ETH. He never sold.

Then came Otherside. After the land launch, he spent hundreds of ETH acquiring parcels containing specific Koda and Azuki assets—premium acquisitions reflecting peak euphoria. The reversal was abrupt; once-bluechip assets collapsed toward near-worthlessness. “Later I realized that using these materialized symbols to attract others fundamentally misaligned with who I am,” Wesley reflected.

By 2022, with LUNA’s collapse and FTX’s implosion reshaping the industry’s moral landscape, Wesley made a defining decision: liquidate external client portfolios and operate exclusively with personal capital. He also cleared his Australian holdings—the oceanfront villa, the sports cars, the symbols of conquest. He “almost emptied possessions,” boarding planes as a digital nomad across Asia with a single checked suitcase.

“I felt quite empty during that period,” he admitted. The emptiness proved clarifying. Without the accumulated weight of real estate, vehicles, and client obligations, he discovered something unexpected: conversations without performance, connection without display, communication as its own reward.

The DCA Path: How Discipline Replaced Conviction

The true architecture of his “long-term” commitment crystallized when Ethereum plummeted from $4,871 to $880—a 82 percent destruction. “When it hit eight or nine hundred dollars, I genuinely considered capitulating,” he confessed. “But something held.”

That “something” evolved into systematic conviction. Starting from approximately $1,200, he initiated dollar-cost averaging (DCA), committing to regular accumulation regardless of price fluctuations. “When it dropped $50, I treated it as a crash and increased purchases. From that point forward, I’ve never stopped.” By 2025, this disciplined accumulation had compounded into meaningful holdings.

Parallel to this mechanical commitment, he rebuilt cash generation capacity through his original arbitrage strategy and contract development work. By 2023, after completely closing external client operations, he refined his approach: still low-leverage, non-directional funding rate trading; simultaneously, contract work writing smart contracts and NFT systems at fixed rates plus revenue sharing.

“I expected this program to run for three years total,” he noted with surprise. “Unexpectedly, we’re now in year five and still executing.” Annualized returns had compressed to approximately 10 percent—far below the 87 percent peaks—but the strategy remained profitable even at modest scales. “Going forward, spreads will likely narrow further, but small volumes can still generate gains.”

The Unvarnished Approach: Verification Over Everything

His methods resist romanticization. They’re built on austere principles: verify what can be verified; mark for potential reversal what can be rolled back; hedge anything running naked. Low leverage. Non-directional. Mechanical.

“It’s like maintaining a channel,” he explained. “Traffic flows in both directions continuously. Money accumulates slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it accumulates.” This wasn’t the narrative of sudden wealth or portfolio explosions. It was capital formation through patience, discipline, and systems designed for survival across market cycles.

The License Plate: More Than Vanity

In spring 2025, when ETH surged back to $4,350, Wesley’s instinct wasn’t to escalate positions or acquire another sports car. He redeemed the “ETH10K” license plate. On the day it was restored to his vehicle, he sent a message to friends: “When the red brake lights illuminate, the bear market’s clouds retreat into the rearview mirror.”

The plate wasn’t aspirational signaling. It was documentary evidence—a legal registration proving that during the market’s cruelest hours, he’d genuinely believed Ethereum would reach five figures. And now, four years later, he remained willing to attach his identity to that bet.

“For someone like me, who comes from engineering,” Wesley concluded, “code is the ultimate form of communication. Ethereum’s transparency, its verifiability, its refusal to hide behind opacity—that’s why I keep accumulating. It said it would work. So far, it has. I see no reason to change conviction based on price movements alone.”

The interview ended as dusk approached. He was catching a flight to Bali, then onward to Phu Quoc Island. Before departure, he mentioned one final thought about why he doesn’t evangelize constant capital deployment to others: “I prefer teaching people how to learn. Start with Udemy’s Python Bootcamp to get code executing. Move to O’Reilly’s Introducing Python to fill foundational gaps. Finish with Coursera’s Data Structures & Algorithms specialization. First, do. Then, understand why. That’s how systems get built.”

As he drove away, the “ETH10K” plate caught the evening light. Not quite ten thousand yet. But the code kept running, the systems kept executing, and the discipline kept holding.