Tetranode is a pseudonymous cryptocurrency and DeFi investor and influencer. He is well known as an early investor in several DeFi protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem including Frax Finance, JonesDAO, Dopex, [REDACTED], Rocket Pool, and JPEG'd.

Career

Early Years

Tetranode has a biology degree but didn't continue his education or pursue a career in biology. ^[3] After graduating, he worked as a dishwasher earning minimum wage while learning more about Bitcoin himself from podcasts and YouTube videos. ^[3] He also 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.^[1]

Around 2009, he first learned about crypto and Bitcoin. At the time, he was a PC builder and gamer, and torrenter - he downloaded free music, and sometimes free video games, too. While building PCs he noticed that the Radeon 5870s graphics cards were sold out. After investigating he found out the reason they were sold out was that they were being used for Bitcoin mining. He then started learning about Bitcoin mining, hashing, and cryptography.^[5]

It was not until 2011 when Tetranode attempted to buy some on Mt Gox, but after needing passport verification, he stopped:

After looking at the technicals and the implication that it can’t be double-spent, I intended to send $100 to MtGox to buy, but never followed through because moving money overseas was complicated and not worth the effort.^[5]

In March 2014, after finding out from a co-worker that Mt Gox went bankrupt and the FBI seized Silk Road, he bought his first BTC on Coinbase.^[5]

Building a Portfolio

Tetranode spent much of the period of 2014 through 2020 investing in Bitcoin.^{[1] [6]}

In 2014, Tetranode had an opportunity to buy Ethereum crowd sale but passed. He was drawn in by Ethereum’s whitepaper and saw it as a natural progression in blockchain technology. 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.^[1]

In 2015, Tetranode started buying Ethereum at Kraken. In February 2018, he left this job. 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. He had been providing liquidity on Uniswap. Tetranode was active throughout DeFi summer, farming and providing liquidity on most of the early-stage DeFi primitives on Ethereum. In one of his interviews, he mentioned:

"My mentors were Andreas Antonopoulos, who educated me on politics and basic options of Bitcoin, and James De'Angelo, who told me about cryptography."^[2]

Tetranode mentioned in one of his interviews, that in order to gain a broad and in-depth understanding of each project, he investigates its use case and from there breaks down how the technology functions on a molecular level. Tetranode utilizes this process in order to determine how he will participate in various projects from Bitcoin to more novel projects like Olympus:

“Always approach things from the principle. Always approach it from the atomic level, understand it from the basics. So you go in and you ask, ‘What’s Bitcoin?’ Bitcoin is internet money which cannot be changed and cannot be reversed. So you have to ask yourself, ‘How can it not be reversed?’ It cannot be reversed because there’s a consensus system working. How is it irreversible… and so you keep diving down until you grasp like the first principle and then you can view everything with a very clear eye and that’s how you make rock solid decisions without any doubts in your mind.”^[4]

As stated in one of his interviews, Tetranode mentioned he bought a house with crypto gains but still drives a Toyota. Currently, he makes money by farming and being an advisor for new projects, providing tokenomics, market making, and marketing strategy advice.^[6]

While looking through the projects to invest in, Tetranode pays attention to a product market fit - if a company or protocol suggests something novel that can be incorporated into day-to-day operations. In one of his interviews, Tetranode mentioned SismoDAO as a good example of projects he is looking for. The founder reached out to Tetranode and explained the project's vision, and Tetranode immediately found a use case for it.^[7]

DeFi Investments

Frax Finance

Tetranode was an early investor in Frax Finance. In an interview with the UpOnly podcast on January 14, 2022, he spoke about the upcoming Frax Price Index (FPI) which launched in April 2022. Frax Price Index is the second stablecoin of the Frax Finance ecosystem and the first stablecoin pegged to a basket of real-world consumer items as defined by the US CPI-U average.^[2][13] Tetranode also stated that Frax Finance is one of the leaders in the curve war as it has been obtaining a massive war chest for the purpose of being a dominant DAO of liquidity wars of the curve wars.^[14]

JonesDAO
In January 2022, JonesDAO raised $52 million in 24 hours. Using Tetranode's advice, Jones added what the project called a "twist" to its token sale. After raising roughly 20,200 ETH in total, the project returned 15,200 ETH to people who invested in the second round. The team mentioned after the launch:

“The purpose of the twist was to make token distribution as fair as possible, eliminate incentives for bots, scripts, and sybils, to ensure fairness to everyone who succeeded and failed to deposit in the first sale, and to those who didn’t deposit because it had sold it.”^[8][7]

Dopex

Tetranode is also one of the investors of Dopex, a decentralized options protocol on Arbitrum. Tetranode calls Dopex, a single staking options vault (SSOV), his "highest conviction bet" and his most used L2 app. Dopex' SSOV provides deep liquidity for option buyers and automated, passive income for option sellers.^[7][5]

[REDACTED]

[REDACTED] is the OlympusDAO fork which was backed by Tetranode. The Redacted ecosystem is a product suite of smart contracts empowering on-chain liquidity, governance, and cash flow for DeFi protocols. They have built two products: Hidden Hand, a marketplace for governance incentives, commonly referred to as "bribes", and Pirex, a product that creates liquid wrappers that allow for auto-compounding and the tokenization of future yield/vote events. The Redacted protocol is the dApp centered around BTRFLY, which allows users to stake, earn incentives, and interact with governance proposals.^[9][7]

Rocket Pool

In one of his interviews, Tetranode called Rocket Pool "the only decentralized staking" protocol on Ethereum. In November 2021, Tetranode bought 180,000 RPL worth 1800 ETH in a single transaction.^[10]
[11]

JPEG'd

Tetranode is an advisor of JPEG'd, a DeFi platform that allows NFT holders to use their NFTs as collateral for loans and accrue rewards.^[12][7][14]