GIGANTIC REBIRTH: TOP CRYPTO TRADERS 2024
Renowned crypto trader “Gigantic-Cassocked-Rebirth” (GCR), also known as the “Big Short” in the crypto community, made a comeback on Twitter yesterday after a year-long absence. In his tweet, he encouraged everyone not to give up amidst the recent market crash, and the post has garnered over 50,000 likes. Many people are curious about the legendary achievements of this crypto trader.
This article takes this opportunity to provide a detailed introduction to GCR’s background, trading philosophy, and the market analysis and predictions he has shared in his previous tweets. GCR is well-known for his outstanding performance on the FTX exchange and his accurate predictions of market trends. The article reflects GCR’s preference for short-selling, investments in meme coins and NFTs, and his bets on the 2024 US presidential election.
Despite reducing his social media activity in early 2023, GCR’s market insights and trading strategies continue to attract attention from the crypto community. GCR’s final public statement emphasized a positive outlook on the future of cryptocurrencies, particularly a long-term bullish view on Ethereum’s price. This article aims to restore confidence in the future development of the cryptocurrency market in the digital age and provide valuable experiences and insights for the general public.
Introduction:
GCR is one of the most famous traders in the crypto field. He was known on the now-defunct FTX exchange under the alias “Gigantic-Cassocked-Rebirth” and gained popularity on Twitter for his verified investment techniques, successful predictions, and insightful writings related to crypto.
From 2021 to 2022, he frequently appeared on the top trader leaderboard on FTX and outperformed many other market participants, becoming one of the most profitable individuals on the exchange. Although his identity remains a mystery, he claims to have started with almost nothing and accumulated wealth solely through trading.
GCR’s Background and History:
GCR has never publicly discussed his background in depth but occasionally mentions fragments of his life before entering the crypto world. On X-platform, he mentioned having only a $1,000 investment portfolio initially and referred to it as his “only chance,” gradually increasing his assets through trading. He showcased his predictive abilities through political influence analysis, which he frequently mentioned as a practice on X-platform. He also dabbled in sports betting and claimed to have spent “thousands of hours” researching how to extend lifespan.
He describes himself as a hardworking individual. When the market conditions were favorable, he encouraged other traders on Twitter to dedicate over 120 hours per week to enhance their skills. 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 nearly three and a half years.
GCR is essentially a contrarian, often mentioning a “Tree of Life” in his tweets in 2021, which he used as a key to understanding the market. After much speculation about GCR’s secret, he finally hinted that the “Tree of Life” was simply a willingness to bet against consensus views. He is a loyal follower of George Soros and frequently mentions key points from Soros’s conversations, discussing reflexivity and the concept of contrarian thinking.
GCR’s contrarian strategy reflects his deep understanding of market behavior and accurate grasp of crowd psychology. He recognizes that in the market, the majority’s opinions are often wrong, and real opportunities are often hidden in the opposite direction of consensus. This mindset allows him to find profit opportunities in market fluctuations and achieve success through unconventional trading decisions.
George Soros’s theory of reflexivity suggests that biases of market participants influence market prices, and these price changes, in turn, affect participants’ expectations and behavior, forming an interactive cycle. GCR is clearly influenced by this theory and applies it to his trading strategy, seeking market imbalances and opportunities through contrarian thinking.
His most well-known trades were in the crypto market in 2021 and 2022, accumulating a large following distributed across his multiple alternate accounts. However, he became silent in early 2023 after posting “This may be my last tweet about crypto” on X-platform. Since then, his social media accounts have remained dormant.
Cryptocurrency Bull Market – Early 2021:
In early 2021, GCR was not well-known and had only a small number of followers on Twitter. He would post details about his recent market sentiment and trading activities there. From the beginning, he favored contrarian views, and one of his earliest posts detailed his short position on the GameStop (GME) stock driven by retail investors in January 2021. He wrote, “I’ve always found the Reddit culture repulsive, and I’m on the side of the oligarchs and billionaires.”
The content he posted in 2021 primarily included trading principles that were widely disseminated on Crypto Twitter afterward. He frequently emphasized the importance of patience and finding areas where one can have a unique advantage.
Interestingly, he also revealed a previous prediction that if someone invested 20 Ethereum in SHIB and waited for five months until the peak of a full-blown bull market, it could be worth $40 million. By May 2021, it turned out that traders only needed to invest 2 Ethereum in Shiba Inu (SHIB) to make a $40 million profit. This was GCR’s first post highlighting his fondness for meme coins, an asset category that was particularly skeptical among traditional traders in early 2021.
During April and May, he issued many bearish warnings, strongly opposing the popular bullish narratives promoted by popular 2021 traders like Su Zhu from 3AC, such as the “super cycle.” His reasons for supporting his stance were sometimes straightforward, simply going against the “mainstream market views” in the mass retail trader-driven frenzy of 2021.
In the crypto frenzy of early 2021, the meme coin Dogecoin (DOGE) began to skyrocket in price. By the peak in May 2021, DOGE’s price had surged by 69,136%, far surpassing its low point in 2020. Dogecoin is a meme coin, an asset without practical use or fundamental support. It unexpectedly reached a market cap of $98 billion after tech mogul Elon Musk showed interest in it and started discussing it on Twitter. Most of its rise was driven by the liquidation of short positions held by traders who didn’t believe a joke coin could have such a significant market value.
One of GCR’s most notable trades in early 2021 was shorting DOGE at its peak on May 9, the day Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live. Over a year later, he explained, “Due to some ‘future catalysts,’ coins heavily held by retail traders are often pumped for months… Just as mass retail traders imagined meme catalysts would make them millionaires, market makers used the last waterfall of liquidity to distribute.”
Contrarian Approach – Late 2021:
In the latter half of 2021, GCR shifted to a bearish stance and publicly issued warnings, reminding traders of his previous cautions to trade with reduced expectations and not to believe that “altcoins can survive on their own, swimming in BTC’s Goblin Town.”
On July 15, GCR made his infamous 2022 bear market prediction in a private Telegram chat, foreseeing a long and severe bear market with limited breathing room even for the strongest projects. He stated, “Local bottom will be around $20,000… Macro/stock top in 2022…Most altcoins will drop 95% or 99%.”
GCR’s bearish attitude did not mean he would leave the crypto market—quite the opposite. While remaining optimistic about the remaining opportunities in 2021, his strategy in the latter half of 2021 shifted toward shorting altcoins relative to BTC’s weakness or strength.
He also applied his predictive skills to different assets and domains. First, he returned to political predictions and successfully bet on the rise of dark horse Valérie Pécresse during the 2022 French presidential elections.
Although Pécresse did not ultimately win, GCR later explained that his goal was to capitalize on the upside potential brought by a fringe candidate being accepted by the mainstream. As he explained, the difference between 5% and 50% is a 10x return, while betting on the winner in a close match would only yield a 2x return.
In August, GCR began speculating on NFTs, favoring their lower market cap compared to what he called “altcoins 2.0,” i.e., meme coins. Besides attempting to buy hundreds of “Pudgy Penguins” NFTs, his address won a “Sad Doge” NFT in an auction, which he sold a month later for $2 million in USDC. However, he commented that NFTs are a very illiquid asset class, stating, “My NFT investment is seven figures, but it’s less than 1% of my net worth and part of my broader barbell investing strategy.”
By October 2021, he started betting on Donald Trump winning the 2024 election. Due to the large scale of the trade, it was nearly impossible to obtain enough liquidity on exchanges, and he eventually had to resort to direct over-the-counter (OTC) trades with Alameda Research. Just over a year later, Alameda Research’s balance sheet was leaked, revealing that they still held $7.3 million worth of unhedged TRUMPLOSE tokens, possibly the remaining part of GCR’s trade.
In October, GCR released his advice for young traders, urging them to spend time seeking every possible advantage in the market. “Even if you live another 80 years, you’ll never have such an easy generational wealth opportunity.” This extreme prosperity lasted for about two months until the crypto market reached its all-time high at the end of November 2021.
Shortly after, he started recruiting members for a new team named RebirthDAO. Its claimed goal was to form a “decentralized hedge fund” by combining the power of many highly successful traders in the crypto market. The team’s first trade was in October 2021 during an ETF news event: identifying and capitalizing on the approval of Proshares BTC Futures ETF. According to GCR, the trade was highly successful, and RebirthDAO was among the first public traders to receive BTC at $57.1K.News Alert: GCR pushes Bitcoin to $59,000, giving them a valuable few seconds advantage over other news traders.
GCR discusses RebirthDAO on Twitter.
4. “The Big Short” – GCR in 2022.
GCR discusses shorting the market in November 2021.
After a busy October, GCR slowed down in November due to the highly excited state of the altcoin market and chose to take a vacation. On November 22nd, they posted online saying, “I’m back, time to short.” Two days later, they explicitly announced that the market was nearing its peak in the cycle: “I am confident that we are at the end of the cycle, and the cycle still exists… If you have made money, make sure your profits are safe now.” About two weeks ago, on November 10th, the price of BTC reached its highest point in the cycle, at $69,000. For traders entering 2022, GCR gave some advice.
GCR’s advice to traders.
GCR starts looking for ways to profit from the overheated altcoin market through RebirthDAO. With the total market value of the entire crypto market exceeding $30 trillion, GCR sought out projects with large token issuances planned for 2023 and had their DAO team collect as much information as possible about token unlocking. RebirthDAO chose not to short the largest market cap coins like BTC or Ethereum but planned to short the weakest batch of altcoins in the market. GCR stated that they were most interested in the tokens with the largest issuances in the first half of 2022.
The research team used various methods to gather this information, including reviewing documents, analyzing on-chain wallets, and even directly contacting project team members to learn about their token issuance plans for 2022.
GCR later mentioned that the DAO found many projects particularly suitable for shorting, either projects within the Solana ecosystem that had received funding from FTX and had a large amount of locked tokens given to investors, or metaverse-related tokens that had been excessively hyped by the market at the end of 2021.
However, GCR’s most famous operation was a public bet with Do Kwon, the founder of LUNA. On March 14, 2022, GCR proposed a $10 million bet to Do, betting that the price of Terra Luna would be lower than the current price after one year. GCR successfully convinced Do Kwon to wager $10 million worth of his own crypto, with the bet being managed by a well-known account called @cobie.
Although GCR successfully convinced Do to directly bet $10 million, they wanted the stakes to be larger, so they used derivatives on FTX to hedge a $10 million short position on LUNA perpetual futures. Just two months later, on May 7th, GCR revealed that the position had already made a profit of $2.3 million.
LUNA was particularly susceptible to selling pressure due to its unique nature, as it was used as the asset backing the algorithmic stablecoin UST, whose value depended on the price people were willing to pay for LUNA in the market. During most of the bull market, buyers willing to purchase LUNA were able to absorb all the funds flowing out of the UST system – it even withstood a “decoupling” event during the crypto market crash in May 2021. But by May 2022, there were over $10 billion worth of UST in the LUNA system, compared to just $1 billion in 2021.
When UST was being heavily sold in the market, those holding UST rushed to convert it into LUNA and then sell it for real dollars. The large queue waiting to exchange UST, claim, and sell LUNA deterred other traders from buying LUNA in the market – resulting in a significant drop in the price of LUNA.
In the end, the price of LUNA almost dropped to zero. GCR completely offset their risk on LUNA for a cost of only $0.72, effectively hedging their $20 million short position on LUNA for less than a dollar.
With the continued bear market in 2022, GCR foresaw an increase in network attacks, scams, and fraud events, which could come from both criminals and project teams. As more decentralized finance (DeFi) projects suffered from code vulnerabilities, exploitation, and re-entry attacks, GCR warned traders to pay special attention to incentive mechanisms as an important basis for investment decisions during the bear market.
By the end of 2022, GCR had repeatedly shorted the remaining rally of Dogecoin (DOGE) and advised their followers to rest and take a vacation when the market sentiment was not optimistic. With the arrival of the bottom of the global BTC price at the end of the year, GCR reminded traders, “The macroeconomy will never give you an advantage; it’s never possible… Stick to what you know.”
On November 8, 2022, FTX Exchange collapsed due to a massive withdrawal of customer deposits. The rapid outflow of funds occurred after it was discovered that their sister company, Alameda Research, had been using customer funds from the exchange. GCR had repeatedly warned traders about the security of fund custody – during the bull market, numerous hacks, scams, and wallet fund losses prompted them to urge more traders to choose top-tier exchanges for fund custody. Unfortunately, they did not anticipate the collapse of the second-largest exchange in the crypto field.
When FTX halted withdrawals, GCR wrote, “I hope, for the sake of the entire industry, that the final part of my prophecy does not come true.” Unfortunately, in the following three months, it was discovered that FTX had debts of around $9 billion and had allowed Alameda to use customer funds to cover losses for years. One item on their balance sheet was the “TRUMPLOSE” token worth $7.3 million. “I always thought they were hedging on Betfair,” GCR posted online.
5. 2023 and beyond: GCR’s predictions for the future
After the collapse of FTX, GCR permanently stopped tweeting on the @GiganticRebirth account. Their backup account, @GCRClassic, provided fewer individual trading updates and offered more general predictions for the future.
GCR’s advice to Crypto participants.
During the low point of the crypto market in 2022, GCR’s most important advice may have been a reminder about the value of time: “No matter how much money you have left now, the depth and breadth of your knowledge about the market is very valuable.” Despite losing a significant amount of money on FTX, GCR remained optimistic about the future of Crypto. They said, “In an increasingly digital world, digital assets are essential.” This tweet was posted on November 23rd, just two days after the price of BTC dropped to about $15,476.
As uncertainty about the future of Crypto spread in the market, some startups began shifting their focus away from the industry. GCR put forward a viewpoint that a “reverberation bubble” could occur in 2023, which would only emerge after the last optimists in the market were completely eliminated. Interestingly, the full recovery of the market in January 2023 actually laid the foundation for the cyclical bottom of BTC.
At the beginning of 2023, as the market gradually recovered, GCR seized the opportunity to discuss some of their long-term beliefs and predictions for the future of Crypto. In their earliest tweet in 2023, they pointed out that the next rally would be led by China: “Many future rallies will occur on coins that no one in your circle knows.” Within a few months, the first BRC20 token, ORDI, had been deployed on the BTC network. By November, the market value of ORDI would reach $1 billion, largely due to its popularity on Asian exchanges and among speculators.
GCR remained optimistic about the future development of Crypto, although with some pessimism and skepticism. In a tweet in May 2022, they predicted that humans would become more “desperate, greedy, corrupt, lonely, and trapped in the metaverse.” Throughout 2023, they continued to hold this view, and during this process, the Crypto market slowly went through various phases, including casino coins, meme coins, and even peculiar projects involving hamster racing. In 2023, the token of RLB, a top-level online casino in Crypto, reached its highest point of $777 million in market value, but then declined by more than half.
Starting from the end of 2021, GCR predicted a significant improvement in the efficiency of the Crypto market. They believed that there were many reasons for this improvement, such as top university graduates joining the field, regulatory structures becoming more mature, and strict controls on privacy protocols and private cryptos. While it is generally believed in the Crypto field that transactions can remain anonymous to some extent, GCR reminded everyone not to assume that any behavior on the blockchain is private.
They showed a keen interest in the 2024 US presidential election – starting from the end of 2021, they placed heavy bets on Donald Trump, believing he would be the ultimate winner. They said, “The dumbest and smartest people all know that Trump will win easily.” The former US president became the center of attention throughout 2023 with a series of attention-grabbing stunts, including voluntarily surrendering to Fulton County Jail in Georgia on August 23rd.
In the first three months of 2023, GCR invested in over 300 tokens of the NFT project “Milady,” despite some in the Crypto community finding the project peculiar. About three months later, when Elon Musk posted a meme about the NFT project on Twitter, GCR sold about half of their tokens. Nevertheless, they still hold Milady tokens worth over $890,000 in their public wallet address ezekielx.eth.
A month before GCR left Twitter, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. This temporarily uncoupled USDC, one of the largest stablecoins in Crypto, and its value dropped to $0.88 at one point. This event did not affect GCR – they exchanged a total of $4 million worth of USDT for USDC on-chain.
On Twitter, GCR expressed their belief that Crypto would inevitably be widely adopted in the digital age. They said, “People will seek an alternative, a new path.”
In their last tweet on the GCRClassic account, they were optimistic, saying, “They will continue printing more money.” They also stated, “The price of Ethereum will someday rise to $10,000.”
A week later, they liked a tweet from someone else that said, “See you when ETH reaches $10,000.” After that, they never appeared again.