I was fourteen years old the first time I watched a single wallet move $40 million worth of Bitcoin in a single transaction on a block explorer. I didn't understand most of what I was looking at. But I understood one thing immediately: whoever was behind that wallet knew something I didn't.
At the time, I was learning to code — nothing serious, just building small scripts and scrapers, the kind of thing a high school freshman does when he'd rather be at a computer than anywhere else. But that transaction stuck with me. I started asking a different kind of question: what if you could watch those wallets systematically? What if you could see them accumulate before a move happened?
"I wasn't trying to build a business. I was trying to solve a problem that bothered me: why does the smart money always seem to know first?"
I spent the next two years building crude tools — scripts that would pull wallet data from public blockchain APIs, look for patterns in accumulation, flag when the same addresses were active across multiple assets simultaneously. Most of it didn't work. Some of it did. The results were inconsistent enough to be interesting and inconsistent enough to be maddening.
The pattern that changed everything.
In early 2024, I noticed something I'd seen before but never isolated properly: a cluster of seven wallets — unrelated addresses on the surface, no visible connection — began accumulating the same mid-cap asset over a twelve-day window. Small amounts. Spread across different exchanges. Structured to avoid triggering volume alerts. Coordinated, but disguised.
I watched. Didn't act on it — I didn't have capital to risk. Three weeks later, the asset moved 340% in under a week before correcting sharply. The same seven wallets had distributed nearly everything within the first 48 hours of the move.
That was the proof of concept I'd been looking for. Whales weren't just big — they were smart, coordinated, and operating on information the rest of the market didn't have. The on-chain data was there. You just had to know how to read it.
Finding August.
I met August through a mutual connection in late 2024. He was studying at Schulich, thinking about capital markets, and equally frustrated with the same structural problem I'd been chasing for years: retail investors operate with fundamentally inferior information. They see price. Institutions see flow.
We talked for four hours the first time we spoke. By the end of it, the framework for Coinara existed in rough form on a whiteboard. I had the technical infrastructure. He had the fund structure, the LP framework, and the financial discipline to turn a system into an operation. We started working together the following week and haven't stopped since.
Building Coinara has been the continuation of something I started at fourteen with a block explorer and a lot of questions. The tools are more sophisticated now. The stakes are higher. But the core obsession is the same: find the signal before the market does, and make sure our LPs benefit from it before anyone else.
That's what we do. Every day.