Gigantic Rebirth: Top Crypto Traders 2024

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INTRODUCTION

GCR is one of the most famous traders in crypto. Named after his alias “Gigantic-Cassocked-Rebirth” on the fallen exchange FTX, he became well-known on Crypto Twitter for his verified elite performance, many successful predictions, and clever writing.

From 2021-2022, he would frequently appear on FTX’s Top Traders leaderboard and beat out many other market participants for one of the highest overall PnLs on the exchange. Although his identity remains unknown, he claims to have begun his journey from almost nothing, building his fortune up solely through trading.

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His fame peaked as crypto entered a bear market, with frequent reporting on the performance of his ‘inverse investments’ - large short positions placed across a variety of altcoins in 2022. This came to a head in April of that year, with a $20 million bet against LUNA paying out almost double as the cryptocurrency went to zero.

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GCR’S BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

GCR has never spoken publicly in depth about his background, but has occasionally mentioned facets of his life before coming to crypto. On X, he stated that he came from a starting portfolio value of only $1000 and traded his way up as this was the “only possible option” for him. He first exercised his predictive abilities through political forecasting, a practice that he has frequently mentioned on X. He has also spent time on sports betting, and has even claimed to have spent “probably thousand[s] of hours” researching the topic of life extension.

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He’s a self professed hard worker, encouraging other traders on Twitter to put in over 120 hours a week into their craft when market conditions are good. On the flipside, despite encouraging his audience to take a break at the end of 2022, he personally stated that he had not taken a day off in almost 3.5 years.

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GCR is at his core a contrarian - he frequently mentioned during his 2021 tweets a “Tree of Life” that was the key to exploiting the market. After much speculation from many different traders as to what GCR’s secret was, he eventually hinted at this “Tree of Life” simply being a willingness to bet against the consensus view. He’s a big fan of George Soros, and will frequently mention Soros's talking points, discussing reflexivity and the idea of contrarianism.

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He was most well-known for publicly and successfully trading crypto throughout the markets of 2021 and 2022, amassing a wide base of dedicated followers across a range of alt accounts. However, in early 2023, he went silent, leaving X after posting what he described as “likely my final tweet regarding crypto”. Since then, his social accounts have gone dark.

THE CRYPTO BULL MARKET - EARLY 2021

GCR was not well-known in early 2021, and had only a small following on Twitter where he would post details of his recent sentiment as well as trading activity. From the very beginning, he was a fan of contrarian viewpoints, with one of his very first posts being details on shorting the retail-driven GME runup in January 2021. “I’ve always found Reddit culture to be distasteful and stand with the oligarchs and plutocrats”, he wrote.

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His feed in 2021 largely consisted of trading principles that have since been widely repeated across Crypto Twitter. He would repeatedly underline the importance of patience, and of looking for areas in which one can find unique areas to press edge.

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Interestingly, he also posted an old prediction of his that “if you put like 20 eth into SHIB and wait 5 months for full bull peak / you might be worth 40 million” (sic). By May 2021, it turned out that in fact, a trader would have only had to invest 2 ETH in Shiba Inu (SHIB) to net $40M in profit. This was the first post from GCR that would underline his affection for memecoins - an asset class that evoked disbelief from conventional traders, especially in early 2021.

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He posted several bearish warnings throughout April and May, with a strong bias against popular bullish narratives such as the ‘supercycle’ popularized by other popular 2021 traders like 3AC’s Su Zhu. His justifications for positions were occasionally no more complicated than simply being counter to the ‘prevailing market narrative’, in the retail-driven fervour of 2021.

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Amidst the crypto hype of early 2021, the popular memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE) began a spike upwards in price. At its peak in May 2021, DOGE had risen 69,136% from its lows in 2020. Dogecoin is a ‘memecoin’, a coin with no utility, or fundamental backing. It defied expectations to reach a market cap of $98 billion after the tech mogul Elon Musk took an interest and began tweeting about it. Much of its run was fuelled by the liquidation of short positions, taken out by traders in disbelief that a joke currency could command such a significant market capitalization.

One of GCR’s most well-known trades during early 2021 was publicly shorting the top of DOGE on 9th May 2021 - the day of Elon Musk’s appearance on SNL. Over a year later, he would explain: “retail heavy coins often hyped for months due to some 'future catalyst' … just as retail imagines meme catalyst will make them millionaires, market makers use the cascade of final liquidity to distribute”.

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GOING AGAINST THE HERD - H2 2021

The second half of 2021 saw GCR turn bearish, publicly posting advice for traders to heed his prior warnings - both to trade less in adverse conditions, and not to entertain any delusions that “alts can swim on their own and survive goblintown for BTC”.

On July 15th, GCR posted his infamous 2022 bear market prediction in a private Telegram chat, forecasting a long and deep bear market, with very little respite for even the strongest projects.

“local bottom will be at ~20k…macro/equities top in 2022, shadowlands…most altcoins going to -95% or -99%”.

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GCR’s bearishness didn’t mean that he would leave the crypto-markets - rather the opposite. Despite remaining optimistic on the opportunities remaining in the 2021 market, his strategies towards the second half of 2021 moved towards short positions taking advantage of liquidity flowing out of the market. From then on, he was heavily shorting weaker altcoins against Bitcoin or stronger pairs.

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He also diversified his predictive skills across different assets and disciplines, first heading back into political forecasting and successfully betting on the runup of the underdog, Valérie Pécresse, during the 2022 French Presidential Election. 

Pécresse didn’t end up winning - but GCR later stated that he was aiming to capitalize on the upside from a fringe candidate becoming more accepted by the mainstream - as he explained, the difference between 5% and 50% is a 10x return, whereas betting on a winner in a 50/50 contest would yield only 2x return.

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In August, GCR began to speculate on NFTs, favoring them for their lower market-caps over memecoins, which he dubbed ‘Altcoins 2.0’. Aside from attempting to purchase hundreds of Pudgy Penguins, his address also won the auction for a “Sad Doge” NFT, which he sold 1 month later for $2M USDC. However, he had commented that NFTs were a very difficult asset class to get exposure for, commenting “My NFT exposure is 7 figures, but constitutes less than 1% of my net worth and is part of a broader barbell investment strategy”.

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By October 2021, he began betting on Trump to win the 2024 election. With a large enough size that accessing sufficient liquidity on exchanges was simply impossible, he ended up resorting to direct OTC trades with Alameda Research. Just over 1 year later, Alameda Research’s balance sheet would be leaked to reveal that they still held $7.3M of unhedged TRUMPLOSE tokens - potentially left over from GCR’s deal.

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In October, GCR posted his advice for young traders to spend time seeking all possible edge in the market. “You will never have such easy opportunities for generational wealth even if you live another 80 years.” The exuberance would last for approximately 2 months longer - before the crypto market hit its all-time high in late November 2021.

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Shortly afterwards, he began recruiting for a new group - named RebirthDAO. Its purported aim was to form a “decentralized hedge fund” by combining the strengths of a number of highly successful traders in the crypto market. The group’s first trade was an ETF News trade in October 2021: aiming to identify and capitalize on the approval of the Proshares BTC Futures ETF. According to GCR, this was highly successful - and RebirthDAO were among the first public traders to receive alerts for the news that sent BTC’s price from $57.1K to $59K, giving them a valuable few seconds of edge against other news traders.

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“THE BIG SHORT” - GCR IN 2022

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GCR’s flurry of activity over October 2021 wound down in November - he took a vacation, as the altcoin market reached peak euphoria. On November 22nd, he posted “back and shorting”. 2 days later, he famously called the cycle market top: “High confidence interval that we’re very late in the cycle [and that cycles still exist] … secure your freedom if you’ve won it”. Almost 2 weeks before, on November 10th, Bitcoin had already hit its cycle all-time-high of $69K. He had one piece of advice for traders entering 2022:

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With RebirthDAO, GCR began to plan ways in which he could capitalize on what he saw as an unsustainably heated altcoin market. With Crypto’s total market cap hovering above $3 trillion, GCR looked for the coins that had the heaviest inflation schedules over 2023 - and instructed his DAO researchers to gather as much information on token supply unlocks as possible. Rather than shorting the largest-cap assets like BTC or ETH, RebirthDAO planned for “The Big Short”- aiming to short a basket of the weakest altcoins in the market. “Most interested in tokens distributing most supply first 3 and 6 months of 2022”, he wrote.

The researchers used anything they could find to uncover this mass of data - not only documentation, but also studying on-chain wallets and even directly approaching project team members for clarity on the exact size of their supply increases in 2022.

GCR later stated that a large number of the coins that were identified by the DAO as particularly good targets for short positions were either in the Solana ecosystem, where several FTX-funded “low float” projects maintained a high share of locked tokens going to investors, or metaverse coins, which had received most of the irrational exuberance in the closing months of 2021.

GCR’s most famous position, however, was a public bet with the founder of LUNA, Do Kwon. On March 14th 2022, GCR proposed a $10M bet against Do that the price of his cryptocurrency, Terra Luna, would be lower in a year than it was at that time. GCR managed to convince Do to bet $10M on his own cryptocurrency, with the popular account @cobie managing the escrow.

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Although GCR managed to convince Do to bet $10M against him directly, he wanted more size on the bet - so he made up the remainder with derivatives on FTX, shorting $10 Million of LUNA on perpetual futures. Only 2 months later, on May 7th, GCR revealed that position to be already at a profit of $2.3M.

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LUNA was particularly susceptible to sell pressure due to one of its particularities - the cryptocurrency was used as backing for UST, an ‘algorithmic stablecoin’ - the price of which depended upon the current market bid for LUNA itself. During most of the bull market, the bid-side for LUNA had been able to absorb any excess capital fleeing the UST ecosystem - and it had even withstood one ‘depeg’ prior - during the crypto market crash of May 2021. However, by May 2022, there was an excess of $10B in UST stuck in the LUNA ecosystem, compared to the $1B in 2021.

As UST was sold on-market, UST holders rushed to redeem their funds for LUNA, to sell it for real dollars. The long queue waiting to redeem UST, claim and sell LUNA dissuaded traders from buying LUNA on the market - resulting in the price plummeting.

Ultimately, LUNA’s price collapsed to virtually zero. GCR was able to completely cover his LUNA risk with only $0.72, effectively hedging his entire $20M short position with less than a dollar.

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The progression of the 2022 bear market had GCR predicting a rise in hacks, rugs, scams from both bad actors as well as project teams. As more and more DeFi protocols found themselves the victim of code bugs, exploits and re-entrancy attacks, GCR reminded traders to “Always bet on incentives in a bear market”.

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The end of 2022 saw GCR repeatedly shorting the few remaining pumps on DOGE, and encouraging his audience to recharge and vacation when market conditions were less inviting. As the global BTC bottom approached at the end of the year, GCR reminded traders that “[macro is] not going to ever give you an edge; never … Stick to what you know”.

On 8th November 2022, the exchange FTX was toppled by a bank-run on customer deposits. After it had come to light that the sister-company Alameda Research had been appropriating user funds from the exchange, a flood of outflows quickly sent the exchange into insolvency.

GCR had repeatedly reminded traders to take care around custody - the large number of hacks, scams, and wallet drainers during the bull market had caused him to call for more traders to custody with Tier-1 exchanges. Unfortunately, he hadn’t foreseen the collapse of the number 2 exchange in crypto.

As FTX closed withdrawals, he wrote “I hope. for the sake of the industry, that the final piece of my prophecy does not unfold”. Unfortunately, over the next 3 months, it would come to light that not only was FTX itself insolvent for around $9 billion, but had been allowing Alameda to absorb losses using customer funds for years. One of the assets on their balance sheet? $7.3M of ‘TRUMPLOSE’ tokens. “I had always assumed they were hedging it on Betfair” he posted.

2023 AND BEYOND: GCR’S PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE

After the FTX collapse, GCR stopped tweeting on the @GiganticRebirth account for good. His alt account, @GCRClassic, provided fewer updates on individual trades and gave more general predictions for the future. 

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Perhaps GCR’s most important advice at the 2022 bottom was on the value of time: “regardless of your remaining equity, familiarity with the scene is invaluable”. Despite losing a significant portion of his capital on FTX, GCR remained confident in the future of crypto. “digital assets for an increasingly digital reality”, he wrote. He posted that on November 23rd, two days after BTC bottomed at $15,476.

As the market doubted a future for crypto, and startups began to pivot away from the industry, GCR pursued the idea of an ‘echo bubble’ in 2023, after the last hopefuls had been washed out of the market. Incidentally, a market-wide resurgence in January 2023 cemented the cycle bottom for Bitcoin.

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Throughout early 2023, GCR took the opportunity of a slowly reviving market to explore some of his longer-term beliefs and predictions for crypto’s future. One of his earliest tweets of 2023 stated that the next rally would be China-led: “Many future pumps will be on coins none of your circle know”. Within months, the first BRC20 coin, ORDI, had been deployed on Bitcoin. In November, ORDI would proceed to hit a $1B Market Cap - widely credited to its adoption through Asian exchanges and speculators.

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He would continue to be broadly confident in the future of crypto, although with a cynical eye. A tweet in May 2022 had predicted humanity becoming more “desperate, greedy, degenerate, lonely, and trapped in the metaverse”. He continued to broadly support this thesis throughout 2023, during which time the crypto market slowly pivoted through phases of casino coins, memecoins, and even dabbled in hamster racing. During 2023, the valuation for RLB, the coin of crypto’s top tokenized casino, peaked at $777M - before retracing over 50%.

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From late 2021, he had forecasted a significant increase in crypto’s market efficiency in a multitude of ways. From an “influx of talent from every Ivy league grad realizing this is the arena” to more advanced regulatory structures - to even the crackdown on privacy protocols and private cryptocurrencies. Despite a popular idea in crypto being that users can transact at least semi-anonymously, GCR advised his audience to “Disabuse yourself of the notion anything you are or can be doing on the blockchain is 'private'”

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He showed a keen interest in the American 2024 Presidential Election - from late 2021, making significant bets on Donald Trump as the overall winner. “Dumbest and smartest people know that Trump is going to steamroll”, with the former US President’s attention-grabbing feats repeatedly putting him in the limelight throughout 2023, even including, on 23rd August, turning himself in for arrest at the Fulton County jail in Georgia.

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He continued to invest in narratives that some in crypto still found outlandish - over January-March 2023, he bought over 300 tokens of the NFT project ‘Milady’ - selling half of those almost 3 months later as Elon Musk himself tweeted a meme of one of the NFTs. He still holds more than $890,000 USD worth of Miladys on his public address, ezekielx.eth.

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One month before GCR left Twitter, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. This resulted in a temporary de-pegging of one of the largest stablecoins in crypto, USDC, as it briefly tumbled to a value of 0.88. This event didn’t faze GCR - he swapped a total of $4M USDT to USDC on-chain.

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Meanwhile, on Twitter he underlined his belief in the inevitability of crypto in a digital age. “People will demand an alternative; a new path”.

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His final tweet on the GCRClassic account was optimistic - containing his fundamental thesis, “they’re only going to print more money”. “ETH at 10k is one day programmed”, he wrote.

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One week later, he liked a tweet of someone remarking “see you at 10k ETH”. 

With that, he was never seen again.

>> Track Gigantic Rebirth (GCR) on Arkham.