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Zeneca has been a prominent and respected voice in the crypto community, both in Australia and globally. Recently, he joined Swyftx as an ambassador. This is where crypto has taken him.
Crypto didn’t quite save my life, but it did give me the life of my dreams.
I’ve forever been a bit of a black sheep, an outcast, a loner. I dropped out of university three times, overcame severe depression and alcoholism, and have been a professional gambler for the better part of my adult life. This is my story.
When I was a wee lad, I can always remember loving games. My dad taught me chess when I was 3, I was playing cards with my grandma at 4, and as soon as I could hold a controller, I was obsessed with video games. To say I have an addictive personality would be an understatement, and this was my first addiction.
I’m not sure if you know this, but being a chess and video game nerd in the 90s wasn’t as cool as it is today. Kids look up to video game streamers nowadays and idolise them. But back then, it was different. We were outcasts. Nerds. Geeks. Weirdos.
Why sit behind a screen and play games when you could be playing sports or socialising with other humans?
So, it’s no surprise that when I came across the game of poker in 2005 at the pivotal age of 17, I once again found myself addicted, obsessed, enthralled. I bought poker books, watched tournaments, joined online forums, started playing for virtual money online, and tried to play with anyone that was interested.
One thing led to another, and after six months at uni, I dropped out to pursue a career in poker. That’s a whole story in and of itself, one that lasted 15 years, but not what I am here to focus on today.
Poker is what led me to crypto. I first heard about Bitcoin in 2011 when the US government passed a law effectively making it impossible to play online poker in the USA, displacing a lot of my friends who were professional players. Most moved to Mexico or Canada to continue playing online, to Vegas to play in person, or quit altogether.
But a small number of people stayed put and started playing somewhere else: a wacky new online poker site that dealt in “Bitcoin”. Living in Australia, I didn’t bother looking into it.
BTC was around $10 at the time, and my regular poker games had a buy-in of $1,000; every game would set me back 100 BTC…or over $10,000,000 at current prices. Whoops.
I didn’t really hear about or pay attention to crypto again until 2017, when the first major bull run was happening and everyone in my world was chatting about crypto. You couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about it, and you certainly couldn’t sit at a poker table without the discussion eventually turning to the profit people were making with this magical internet money.
One of my best friends at the time asked me if I had heard about Ethereum. I hadn’t, and asked him what it was. He summed it up as something like “the next Bitcoin. Newer and better.”
Sounded great to me!
I had missed Bitcoin (it’s funny to say this when BTC was probably trading at under $5k at the time), so of course I was excited to get in on the next big thing.
I didn’t have too much money to my name at the time, but I spent a few thousand dollars on ETH when it was between $100-$200. ETH started to go up in price, and then I started to hear about all these other alt coins… and down the rabbit hole I went. Obsessed with crypto, I spent my time reading Reddit, watching YouTube videos and consuming as much content as I could.
Unfortunately, the content wasn’t great and it led to me speculating like a madman on all sorts of alts I had no business dealing in. It worked well for a while (when everything is going up only, it’s easy to be a genius) but of course, the bear market inevitably hit and I ended up round-tripping the majority of my positions.
All this time I never really bothered to understand Bitcoin or the alts I was trading. I was just speculating (read: gambling) on the price action. I knew that smart people were into crypto, and that there was some advanced math stuff doing magic in the background, and that Ethereum had these things called “smart contracts” that were meant to change the world. But I didn’t really get it.
So as the bear market got worse and worse, I stopped paying attention. I was dejected and it was painful to log in and see my portfolio go down day after day, week after week, month after month. I went back to focusing on poker, and life went “back to normal” for a while. My normal, anyway.
I even decided to go back to uni. I wasn’t enjoying poker, and wanted something “more”. I always wanted to be a lawyer, and so went to QUT to study law. I lasted a bit over a year before realising that it really wasn’t for me. So I dropped out of uni for the third (and hopefully final) time.
Not long after, in 2019, my girlfriend and I ended up moving overseas to Germany. She had been given a job opportunity and asked if I wanted to make the move with her, and being an online poker player with an all too high risk tolerance and a desire to travel Europe, it was easy to say yes.
It didn’t hurt that I was madly in love, either.
While in Germany, I continued to play online poker using Bitcoin. Every now and then, I’d convert my winnings back to AUD – business as usual. But toward the end of 2020, I started to notice the conversion rate kept getting better and better… Bitcoin was moving up in price again.
In early 2021 the same friend who asked me if I knew what Ethereum was, asked me if I knew what an NFT was. I said no, so he explained it to me.
Of course, the more he explained, the more I thought he’d lost his mind. These pixelated images were worth thousands of dollars? Is this a scam? A cult? What’s going on here?
Fortunately, he ended up sharing some articles with me that made something click in my mind. It made me feel like I finally “got” crypto. The idea of true digital ownership, of self sovereignty, of owning your assets – truly owning your own assets – was starting to make a whole lot of sense.
There was still so much I didn’t know, but I had caught the bug. For the first time since getting into crypto, I didn’t just want to speculate and gamble. I wanted to learn. I was obsessed, addicted, and enthralled once again.
I started to inhale as much knowledge as I could. I ordered books, I joined Discord servers, I joined Twitter and created an account with a newly thought up pseudonym: Zeneca. I googled every term I came across that I didn’t understand. I watched endless YouTube videos – but this time, educational content that taught me about DeFi and Liquidity Pools and Layer 2s and Sharding and how Smart Contracts actually worked. It was a whole new world to me, and it was exciting as all hell.
DeFi in particular seemed like a game changer. We could be our own banks? We could borrow and lend money without a centralised third party? We could earn interest on our money by interacting directly – peer-to-peer – with other people from anywhere on earth? What sorcery is this?
Around this time I made the conscious decision to stop playing poker and pivot my professional life into crypto because I sensed an opportunity. I knew there was opportunity in these new frontiers. I didn’t know exactly what, or where, or how. I just knew that this was the future.
But the year was 2021. As cool as DeFi was, nothing could overshadow NFTs. The mania and speculation that captured the crypto space (and the world) was unlike anything I had ever seen and I’m not sure is like anything I will ever witness again.
I found myself falling in love with NFTs. Trading them, investing in them, buying them to hold forever, creating them, playing games with them, building companies around them, advising companies around them. Writing about them. Everything. It was all NFTs, all the time.
Some people think it’s all rainbows and butterflies from the get go. It is not. Want to see the first NFT I ever bought? Here it is.
This is a DeekHash. Why did I buy it? Because I had no idea what I was doing, and some friends in a group chat were talking about minting them. I got FOMO, I got excited and I wanted to be a part of it.
I minted two of these DeekHashes for 0.2 ETH each.
From there, I went on to mint many other projects. I lost money on a lot of them, but I also started making money on some. Around June 2021, I started writing my newsletter. For me, writing has always been a way for me to understand a topic better. If I have to write about something and explain it to others, I need to understand it properly myself. So it was really just another way for me to inhale knowledge and fuel my obsession.
Being active in 2021 and spending 16-18 hours a day engrossed in the NFT space, I started to hit my stride and string together pretty significant wins. My poker background certainly helped, but so much of it was also just the pure love and thrill of it all.
One thing that really propelled my growth was when I started tweeting out daily spreadsheets listing the floor prices of major NFT projects. Back then, the information wasn’t easy to come by, and people quickly flocked to my posts to get their daily market update. This helped accelerate my growth as a content creator, and it also really improved my trading, keeping me in sync with the whole NFT market.
My portfolio, which back in March 2021 was probably worth around $50k, hit 8 figures by August. It was and will almost certainly always be the most ridiculous period of my life. The value continued to go up, and then fluctuated wildly, and within a year we again found ourselves in a brutal bear market and I again found myself having round-tripped a huge chunk of my portfolio.
But this time around, I didn’t leave. I wasn’t bored or dejected. I knew that crypto was the future. I had the conviction to stick around, to keep working, to keep learning, to build, to network, to connect with others, to HODL and to wait. Because I knew that eventually, the world would once again wake up and pay attention, and crypto would be back stronger and better than ever.
During the bear market, my once-girlfriend-now-fiancee and I moved to Dubai to be closer to ground zero for crypto and got to meet plenty of great people. I was working hard at building my education-based company, ZenAcademy, and fully engrossed myself in the industry. It was tough, but rewarding.
Then in mid-2024, we returned home to Australia. We were able to buy an apartment outright in cash, we got a dog, and we settled into our new life. In 2025, we got married with the wedding of our dreams followed up with the honeymoon of our dreams in Japan. All thanks to crypto.
I continue to work – I trade, invest and write. I still run ZenAcademy and have the privilege of getting to spend time with the wonderful community members there on a regular basis. I advise other companies, and even had the absolute pleasure of being asked to be an ambassador for Swyftx.
But I also get to enjoy life now.
I golf, I go bouldering, I travel the world. None of this would be possible without crypto in my life, and without taking the time to learn all it has to offer.
It’s not just the money either. Obviously, that’s great. But crypto has given me purpose.
Education has always been at the forefront for me. Maybe not in the traditional sense – I dropped out of uni 3 times, after all – but in my own way. I paved my own path. It was fraught with highs and lows, ups and downs, wild swings. Fortunately, it worked out in the end, in a way that never would have been possible without crypto. I don’t suggest that my way is the best way, or the only way, or even a recommended way for most people.
But it has been my way.
Crypto is not without its risks – but it is becoming increasingly risky to *not* have any exposure to this new asset class.
Don’t just think about where crypto can take you; think about where you might get left behind.
It all comes back to education and learning. Taking the time to get a little bit obsessed about crypto changed my life. I can’t recommend my exact path, but I can absolutely recommend taking the time to learn as much as you can, and to understand as much as you can, about Bitcoin and about the future of crypto.
Because it’s not just the future of crypto.
It’s the future of the world.
Want more content from Zeneca?
To celebrate Zeneca’s new role as an ambassador for Swyftx, we’re offering all Swyftx customers an exclusive 25% discount on his premium newsletter, Letters from a Zeneca.
Widely recognised as one of the world’s leading crypto publications, this is an incredible opportunity to gain insights from one of the industry’s top minds at a reduced price.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Swyftx. Any information should not be taken as financial advice, investment advice or a personal recommendation.
Zeneca
