From Code Verification to "ETH10K": How an Engineer Built Trust in Ethereum

The red brake lights came on. On the day Ethereum climbed back past 4,350, Wesley didn’t rush to add positions or upgrade his car collection—instead, the first thing he did was redeem the “ETH10K” license plate he’d previously abandoned. That small metal plate wasn’t about vanity. It was, in his words, “a footnote to my past self.”

His story doesn’t fit the typical crypto trader archetype. Instead of chasing pumps and riding hype cycles, Wesley has built a career on what he calls “verifiable certainty”—finding edges in the gaps between spot and futures prices, writing code that can be audited on-chain, and betting on Ethereum not because someone promised it would hit 10,000 dollars, but because its transparent architecture deserves the bet.

The Journey: Finance Desk to Code at Midnight

Wesley’s path into crypto was anything but conventional. Fresh out of finance school in Hong Kong, he landed a bond-trading gig but quickly realized the work felt like “acting.” He quit to build a chatbot-based lending platform for students—with only a month of coding experience. Using conditional logic and the Facebook SDK, he stitched together a functioning MVP that served 500+ users and achieved nearly 10 million in transaction volume with zero defaults.

After selling that venture, he moved to Australia under a working holiday visa and took day jobs at community banks—once counting ATM cash, later doing equity valuations during hostile takeovers. Nights were reserved for self-teaching: data structures, algorithms, operating systems, all pieced together from online courses and PDFs. After two years and saving roughly 400,000 RMB, he realized that to truly commit to engineering, he needed to return to the Asian tech ecosystem.

By 2018, back in Hong Kong, he joined an insurance startup where a collapsed crypto exchange had left dozens of developers newly unemployed. “The office suddenly spoke in crypto jargon,” he recalls. That’s when his real Web3 chapter began.

The Strategy That Made Sense: Funding Rate Arbitrage

In 2019, Wesley started accumulating Ethereum and Synthetix (SNX) ahead of the DeFi Summer rush of 2020. But what truly moved him to action was algorithmic funding rate arbitrage—profiting from the spread between spot and perpetual contract prices without making directional bets. By end of 2020, his strategy was live and delivering 80-90% annualized returns.

The problem? He had almost no capital. So he took a simple PDF explaining “spot-contract basis and carry costs” to old classmates now working in investment banking and private wealth. Traditional finance professionals intrigued by crypto exposure without extreme volatility responded—he raised roughly 10 million dollars across Hong Kong and Singapore markets.

The execution was razor-thin: basically just him connecting APIs to exchanges for automated execution. But it worked. His first year generated approximately 87% returns, managing tens of millions in AUM with 60+ client accounts at the exchange.

The Wake-Up Calls

Then came the hacks. During his first week working as a CTO at a top project, the protocol lost millions. Months later, hackers struck again, siphoning tens of millions. These weren’t abstract losses—they crystallized everything he believed about security: multi-signature wallets, time locks, bytecode verification before deployment, gradient rollouts for new code.

“Code can be verified, and systems deserve trust,” he says. That became his operating principle.

Around the same time, he launched his own venture distributing NFTs, earning 80 Ethereum on a single deal. It was during this period that Ethereum truly rooted itself in his conviction. Not because of price predictions, but because its architecture—lending protocols like Aave, exchanges, vaults, derivatives all composable like Lego blocks—gave him something tangible to work with. Everything was auditable on-chain.

Solana fascinated him technically, but he saw it differently: “It’s powerful, but after deployment, you can’t verify on-chain like EVM. For me, less control means less trust.”

The Bull Market Detour

At the peak of 2021, the bull market tide swept him along despite his principles. He bought a Bored Ape for 35 ETH when floor prices were surging toward 140 ETH—but never sold. He spent hundreds of ETH on Otherside parcels containing coveted companion NFTs. When those blue chips collapsed to near-zero, the lesson was clear: material symbols don’t create authentic connection.

He became a digital nomad carrying only a checked suitcase across Asia. Unexpectedly, he found freedom in it—connecting with people through conversation alone, without props or attachments.

The Bear Market Reset: 2022-2023

When Ethereum crashed from 4,871 to 880 in 2022, he faced the same temptation as everyone else: capitulate. Instead, at around 1,200 dollars, he began systematic dollar-cost averaging. “Every 50-dollar drop feels like a crash—time to add,” became his rhythm.

Meanwhile, he cleared out the symbols of success he’d acquired: a sprawling ocean-view villa in Perth (where he rarely used more than one room), the sports cars, the luxury appointments. He sold them all and moved to a farm to pick apples, doing physical labor by day and contract coding at night.

The irony wasn’t lost on him: the material things that once seemed like proof of victory felt hollow. What actually grounded him was discipline—verifiable strategy and regular investment.

The “ETH10K” Thesis

In 2022, when Ethereum hovered around 3,000 dollars, he registered the “ETH10K” license plate in Perth—a public bet that 10,000 wasn’t merely possible but inevitable. Not because of hype cycles, but because Ethereum’s architecture as an operating system for finance deserved that valuation over time.

Today, with Ethereum (currently priced at $2.93K, down 1.06% in 24 hours) still climbing toward that target, he’s running a disciplined playbook:

• The strategy remains unchanged: 10% annualized returns from funding rate arbitrage on his own capital
• Low leverage, heavy auditing: Every deployment matches bytecode; every risky operation has a rollback plan
• No external funds: After the FTX implosion, he closed all client accounts to eliminate counterparty risk and the sleepless nights that accompanied them
• Contract work funds daily life: Smart contract and NFT development gigs provide runway

He doesn’t promote “all-in” bets. Instead, he prescribes a learning path: Udemy’s Python Bootcamp to get code running, O’Reilly’s Introducing Python to fill in fundamentals, and Coursera’s Data Structures & Algorithms specialization to solidify underlying logic. First learn to do; then understand why.

The License Plate as Footnote

When Ethereum surged past 4,350 on a recent summer day, red brake lights glowing, Wesley redeemed the “ETH10K” plate once more. He sent a message to friends: “When the brake lights come on, the bear market clouds fade into the rearview mirror.”

The plate isn’t vanity—it’s a footnote to his younger self. It’s the signature beneath choices made during the downturn, ones he still stands behind. It reminds him of something crucial: when ETH eventually reaches 10,000 dollars, the license plate says “drive slowly; don’t get carried away.”

His story matters not because it promises riches, but because it illustrates a different archetype in crypto: the one who places technology and finance on the same table, who believes markets will fluctuate but methods must remain verifiable. The bear market breaks fantasies. Discipline—low leverage, heavy auditing, code you can read—carries you through cycles.

That’s the real footnote: not to youth, but to futures built on foundations that can actually hold.