Introducing Token Theorist

The story behind the newsletter

After my lightbulb moment, I knew I had to get involved in the crypto industry. Given my development background, the obvious choice was to become a Solidity developer. I do intend to explore that option further, but early on in my journey I became more concerned with crypto scams. $7.7 billion was stolen in these scams just last year. I saw dozens of tokens get posted on CoinMarketCap every day, and it seemed like half of them were trying to steal someone’s money. Surely there was something that could be done.

Then I found a YouTube channel called Crypto Opinion. He investigated these new tokens to look for signs of a scam. I had a lot of respect for him—he seemed genuinely interested in helping as many people as possible. But his videos seemed too subjective and unnecessarily long. Worse, he seemed to lose his motivation somewhere along the way. His output started to lag, and then he actually deleted his channel.

Meanwhile, I decided to start a channel called Token Flags. The idea was simple: Count the number of red flags in a new token, then create a video that’s as concise as possible to convey that information. The red flag counter added a degree of objectivity, and the conciseness made sure I didn’t waste my viewers’ time.

I had only just begun when one of my videos caught the eye of Theodore, creator of Whiteboard Crypto. Having already watched many of his videos, it had been cemented in my mind that WBC is the best channel on YouTube for educating those who are new to crypto. At the time, my channel had 200 subscribers, while his had over 500,000. He sent me a message:

Hey, we should work on something together :)

I jumped at the opportunity. He suggested I create a 10-video course on fundamental analysis techniques for his Whiteboard Crypto Club. I hadn’t even considered that my videos qualified as fundamental analysis, but he was right. Given the prevalence of scams, scam detection is perhaps the first and most important step of fundamental analysis in crypto. That said, it’s only one of the steps. Fundamental analysis is ultimately about establishing the intrinsic value of a token. It’s a deeply complicated subject. I accepted the offer, but I knew I had my work cut out for me if I wanted to do the course justice.

Today, the course is nearing completion. It has been incredibly valuable for me to do a deep dive into crypto fundamentals, and I’m quite grateful to Theodore for the opportunity. Getting paid to learn is the best kind of work, and teaching is the best way to learn. I want to keep teaching the fundamentals, but I also want to keep Token Flags focused on scam detection.

Thus, Token Theorist is born. It’s for those who want to determine the intrinsic value of a token. It’s for those who want to go deeper than scam detection (but we’ll cover that too). It’s for the theorists, for the insatiably curious, for those who won’t shy away from something just because they don’t yet understand it. Whether this is all new to you or you’ve been around the block for years, there’s something here for you. Welcome!