Today we’re doing something a little different, talking with one of our readers, someone who has come out ahead through crypto investing — though not without some stomach churning reversals along the way.

Why it matters: Crypto is often spoken of as a democratizing opportunity, yet regular people seldom see the stories of non-professionals placing bets in the space. Here is one.

Details: Darragh Grove White, a Canadian marketing technologist, is on the leading edge. But, he took some hard hits.

“I made a lot of mistakes, for sure. He tells Axios that he’s had cryptocurrency exchanges take his money.

He was among many Canadians who lost their luck when Gerald Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, died (?). India.

State of play: Grove-White is one of the fortunate ones. By his account, since the Quadriga loss he’s turned around. He’s up around 11x on his principal, though there have been wild oscillations in that number recently.

Axios has confirmed the success of his portfolio.

The scoreboard: He has invested in over 180 coins, his first three purchases being bitcoin, Monero (a privacy coin — that trade is still down) and Verge, a coin with salacious affiliations.

“I have had a few that have done really well and even fewer that I knew would do really well,” he said.

The biggest loss was a token that was the right idea (blockchain finance), but the wrong company at the wrong time. His biggest win was a lucky guess about which solution to fix Ethereum’s speed problems would click with users first.

Context: Although he only became interested in crypto during the bear market year of 2018, he did have some advantages. Given his day job, he’s considerably more technically sophisticated than most people.

It has worked in his favor. He explained, “I’m just super curiosity.” It’s not enough to just read charts in crypto. A person needs to get in to understand it, he contends.

Be smart: He has been in the business for four years and sees new people arrive in waves. You can spot the new investors on Twitter and Discord — they are always looking to make a quick buck.

He said, “This latest cohort of noobs was their on-ramp the Wall Street Bets experience.” “A lot of the n00bs go for meme coins. They invest like it’s a bit of a joke.”

To read more about grove-white take a look at this useful site