Who is Tetranode? – The Whale to Watch

Who is Tetranode

Tetranode is a self-made, crypto anon rumored to be worth ~$1 billion – here’s one of his wallets. Tetranode started out as a self-described “misfit” – a medical school student who failed to make it through med school. He worked in a biotech lab for several years in the late 2000s, where he regularly went to work late and slept in his car during breaks because he was always up late playing video games. Tetranode is a lifelong, hardcore gamer; it was in 2009 when he asked himself, “Where did all the Radeon 5870 graphics cards go? They were so expensive.” This question led him to Bitcoin. He heard about Bitcoin and his initial observation was: “it’s some sort of virtual money that needs a lot of graphics processing power.”

Early Days

Tetranode was amusing to find that Bitcoin sounds a lot like BitTorrent, something he was quite familiar with at the time, and he speculated that he could make a lot of “free money” by mining Bitcoin, but thought his landlord might get mad about the electricity usage and kick him out. Tetra decided not to mine due to the electricity usage. He said that in the years that followed he was haunted by the “what if” thoughts that so many OGs struggle with but has since come to terms with his prior nativity, perhaps after accumulating generational wealth later in bitcoin’s adoption curve.

In 2011, the price of Bitcoin got as high as $30, and Tetranode attempted to buy some on Mt Gox, but after needing passport verification, he deemed it too much of a chore. After it dipped to $2, he felt like he had dodged a bullet. By 2013, Tetranode still hadn’t accumulated any BTC, and the price had reached $200. Later that year, it mooned to $1000, but instead of thinking about what could have been, Tetra began to understand the Bitcoin’s potential.

Tetranode spent much of the period of 2014 through 2020 dollar-cost averaging (DCA) into bitcoin and held almost all of it through the 2020 bull run. His thesis throughout Bitcoin’s early years revolved around the cryptography and economics that undergird the network. Tetranode quickly became close friends with several influential Bitcoiners who served as invaluable mentors to Tetranode – they were the OGs that strengthened his conviction to buy BTC, helping him hodl through the grueling winters.

Tetranode’s Twitter PFP

Beyond Bitcoin

In 2014, Tetranode had an opportunity to buy Ethereum crowd sale but passed since he believed the pervasive narrative amongst Bitcoiners at the time that Bitcoin could just copy anything interesting Ethereum does. He was drawn in by Ethereum’s whitepaper, and saw it as a natural progression in blockchain technology. He recalls showing the whitepaper to a Microsoft architect, who retorted that it was a bunch of “gobbledygook,” but Tetranode’s interest was not dissuaded. He believed that “Bitcoin can be digital gold, but the future blockchain is e-commerce and e-commerce is a lot more than digital gold”. He knew that the potential to build applications through smart contracts was immense.

In 2015, Tetranode fell deeper down the Ethereum rabbit hole, first buying at $0.50, with an average purchase price of ~$3/ETH. When he first started buying Ethereum, Tetranode had two distinct visions for the future: (1) a future in which BTC served as the base layer of e-commerce money, essentially the internet’s native currency and (2) a future that would arise from rapid and in some respects chaotic innovation, which in his mind was embodied by Ethereum.

Tetranode’s Twitter header

By 2017, Tetranode was ready to quit his job but continued working “out of sheer habit” only to eventually quit in February 2018. He spent some time traveling the world and spending time with his wife. In the summer of 2020, Tetranode came back full-time to crypto “for YFI.” He had been providing liquidity on Uniswap since its launch in 2019 but he missed the feeling of being ‘on the hunt’ and DeFi summer gave him the perfect opportunity. Tetranode was active throughout DeFi summer, farming and providing liquidity on most of the early stage DeFi primitives on Ethereum. Tetranode, unlike many other crypto OGs that have amassed fabulous wealth, has never done VC – no presales, seed rounds, private placements, etc. All of Tetra’s investments came via the secondary markets, trades that anyone at the time could have made but few had the foresight and conviction to pull the trigger like Tetra.