Cobie: Long-term trading

Article Author: Thejaswini M A

Article Translation: Block unicorn

 

Preface

In 2012, Jordan Fish, also known as Cobie, had $200 and a dilemma.

At the time, he was a computer science student at the University of Bristol, working at Tesco supermarket to pay his rent, and his life situation... was not great. For a working-class kid, the basic college wisdom is: you need money to live, but you also need time to study, and there are only 24 hours in a day. So, he took out $200 and bought bitcoin.

This was obviously the right decision, but not in the way you might think.

If Cobie had simply held onto that bitcoin, never touched it, never traded it, and never did anything interesting or foolish with it, he would have about $300,000 today. For someone who started with just $200, that's truly a life-changing sum.But that's not the level of "everyone assumes all crypto influencers are billionaires," nor even the level of "the guy who sold a podcast NFT for $25 million."

The strangest part of Cobie's story is what happened between the $200 and his exit. Because the story crypto wants to tell is: you buy the magical internet money, hold the magical internet money, the price soars, and you eventually become a billionaire. But Cobie's real story is more like: you buy the magical internet money, try to create your own magical internet money and fail, get a regular job, then return to crypto, build products, expose scams, start a podcast, pause the podcast after sponsors go bankrupt, then you create a fundraising platform, and finally Coinbase acquires it for $375 million.

This is a much more bizarre story, and it reveals some uncomfortable truths about how wealth is created in the crypto space.

The Lesson of Maxcoin

In 2014, Cobie did what any twenty-something crypto enthusiast would do: he only had a little bitcoin at the time, but was full of confidence, and tried to build a better bitcoin. Back then, almost everyone was trying to build a better bitcoin. The selling point of Maxcoin was that it was faster than bitcoin and used a different hash algorithm (Keccak instead of SHA-256), which seemed important to people at the time.

Cobie collaborated with financial broadcaster Max Keiser, who is now the bitcoin advisor to the President of El Salvador.This shows both how seriously people took things at the time, and how little it all mattered in the end. The launch of Maxcoin was indeed exciting. It was one of the earliest "celebrity coins," and interestingly, it predated the concept of "meme coins" by about seven years.

Then it went to zero.

When the bear market hit in 2015, Maxcoin's price plummeted and the project disappeared. If you want to find evidence that Maxcoin ever existed, you need to do actual research, because the market has completely forgotten about it.

But Cobie did not forget. What he learned from the failure of Maxcoin was that the essence of crypto is not technology, but network memes, stories, and communities. Even if you build the most technically superior product, if no one cares, it all means nothing.

This lesson would have been enough to bankrupt most people. But Cobie miraculously learned from a failed project and spent the next decade proving its truth through action.

Making Money by Not Trying to Make Money

After leaving Maxcoin, Cobie made a wise choice and got a regular job. He worked at several tech startups, including Monzo, which later became one of the UK's largest fintech companies. He worked in product management, a job for those who know how to develop software products but no longer want to write code themselves.

Then, around 2020, he returned to crypto.

Not quietly, nor tentatively, but at the very moment when DeFi was about to sweep the globe, and everyone who survived the last bear market was about to look like a genius.

DeFi was booming, and NFTs were about to explode. Multiple trends converged at once.Cobie was an early supporter of Lido Finance, a liquid staking protocol that has now become the second-largest DeFi protocol by total value locked. He was not just an investor or advisor; he keenly realized that Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake would create huge demand for liquid staking solutions.

In October 2020, Cobie and another crypto analyst, Ledger, launched a podcast called UpOnly. The format was to invite the most influential people in crypto for long, unscripted conversations about current events. They interviewed Vitalik Buterin, and also Sam Bankman-Fried (before he went to prison). Basically, they interviewed all the important figures in crypto.

UpOnly became a must-listen show, creating a strange dynamic.Cobie was simultaneously a market commentator, protocol advisor, investor, and media celebrity. Projects mentioned on UpOnly would see their prices fluctuate. This kind of influence usually requires investment banks and major non-public information (MNPI) disclosure policies.

He invested most of his funds in bitcoin and ethereum, only a small amount in other cryptocurrencies (less than 1% of his portfolio), almost never used leverage, and considered them worthless until there was evidence of value.He said:

“I almost never use leverage, and when I do, it's usually to reduce risk rather than increase it. I guess a lot of people don't fully understand this. In the past five years, I've probably only used leverage to add risk three times, maybe 15 times in my life, and I've never gone all-in. In the past ten years, I've only ever gone all-in on bitcoin and ethereum. When buying other assets, I keep risk extremely low, because until proven otherwise, I assume they're worth zero. So, risk is always less than 1% of my liquid portfolio. The liquid portfolio is also a small part of my overall portfolio, to prepare for possible future mistakes.”

This is the exact opposite of the advice usually given by people in crypto. Their usual advice is to buy some "influencer coin" you heard about from an anonymous account with 5x leverage, hold until you get 100x returns, then go buy a Lamborghini.

Cobie's approach clearly worked, but the way he succeeded suggests that the entire crypto get-rich-quick narrative might be wrong.

The Watchdog's Trouble

In 2022, Cobie did something that may have cost him money, but earned him a different kind of reputation. He published blockchain data showing suspicious trading activity by Coinbase employees. Specifically, someone seemed to be buying certain tokens before Coinbase announced they would be listed, which is textbook insider trading.

Subsequently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation, and the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit. Former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi was sentenced to two years in prison.

This kind of thing makes you a hero in the crypto community, but it probably makes it hard to get a job at most crypto companies. If you're a large exchange considering listing a new token, do you really want someone who exposed your competitor's insider trading to consult on your project? It brings a lot of trouble.

But Cobie persisted. He kept exposing scams, kept questioning various claims, and kept saying uncomfortable things in public.

In November 2022, when FTX collapsed, Cobie ran into trouble. In fact, he ran into several troubles.

The first problem was that UpOnly had accepted FTX sponsorship. This was no secret. Sam Bankman-Fried had appeared on the podcast. The FTX logo was also on the show. If you watch previous episodes, you'll see this—it stands as a monument to what seemed like legitimate business at the time, but now serves as evidence of a disastrous decision.

The second problem was that he had money in FTX when it collapsed. He admitted this publicly, something most people in his position would not do. Usually, after a major scam, people silently take the loss and never mention it again. But Cobie admitted it publicly. He did have funds on the exchange. And those funds are now gone.

The third problem was philosophical.Cobie had long been known for spotting scams, exposing wrongdoers, and being a rational voice in an industry full of Ponzi schemes and gambling. Yet he accepted FTX's investment, interviewed its founder, and clearly, like everyone else, believed it was a legitimate company.

How do you move on from something like that?

The answer is: you don't have to, at least not for now.Cobie and Ledger paused UpOnly. No announcement, no dramatic final episode, just silence. For nearly a year, one of the most prominent figures in crypto all but disappeared. No podcast, few tweets, no public appearances at conferences.

This may have been the right decision, but it was certainly not the most profitable. The usual influencer trick after a crisis is to return immediately, issue a vague apology, promise to do better, and then continue as before. The audience's memory is short. Sponsors want influence, not credibility. As long as you keep posting, you can get through almost anything.

But when he came back, he brought Echo.

A Baffling Exit

Echo launched in 2023, with the idea of letting ordinary people invest in early-stage crypto projects alongside venture capitalists. This solved a real problem. In crypto, there's a huge gap between the price retail investors pay for tokens and the price VCs pay. VCs might invest in a project at a $10 million valuation. By the time retail investors can buy the token on an exchange, it's valued at $1 billion. VCs have already made 100x returns. Retail investors buy at the top.

Echo tried to bridge this funding gap by pooling retail funds and making private investments on VC terms. The platform facilitated over 300 deals, helping crypto projects raise about $200 million. That's a significant sum, but nowhere near the scale that usually fetches a $375 million acquisition price.

However, in October 2025, Coinbase acquired Echo for about $375 million.

The deal also included a $25 million purchase of UpOnly's NFT. This is a non-fungible token, and upon its destruction, Cobie and Ledger are obligated to produce eight new episodes. You can think of it as exercising an option, except the underlying asset is two people recording a podcast. Coinbase paid $25 million for what is essentially a very expensive forced content creation mechanism.

This may be the first time in history that destroying an NFT creates a legal obligation, rather than destroying its value.

But if you analyze the logic, the acquisition of Echo itself actually makes sense. Coinbase's competitor is Binance, and Binance already has Binance Launchpad and other platforms that allow retail investors to participate in early token sales. Coinbase did not have these platforms, but Echo did. So, Coinbase acquired the infrastructure, brand, and community that Cobie built over more than a decade, while Cobie's original intention was not to maximize profits.

Here is Cobie's description of the outcome:

“When I started building Echo two years ago, I knew it had a 95% chance of failure. Honestly, I really couldn't imagine any other outcome, but I thought at least it would be a noble failure worth trying. I certainly didn't expect Echo to be sold to Coinbase, but that's what happened.”

This may be the most honest description of a successful startup exit I've ever read.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

Cobie's story challenges the traditional crypto get-rich narrative. That narrative is usually: buy low, sell high, repeat until you're a billionaire. If you're daring enough, maybe try some 100x leveraged trades. But Cobie didn't do that. He bought bitcoin with $200, made a few small trades, created a failed altcoin, then got a regular job, later returned to crypto, supported quality crypto projects, exposed fraud, started a podcast, built a fundraising platform, and eventually sold it to Coinbase.

This is much longer and stranger than "buy dogecoin at $0.0001 and sell at $0.70."

When people speculated that Cobie was a billionaire, he wrote a long post explaining that he was not. His actual net worth, including the Echo exit and a decade of crypto investments, might be as high as nine figures. That's a huge sum. But it took him 12 years, surviving multiple bear markets, dodging various scams, frauds, and exchange collapses, and always choosing not to maximize short-term profits.

If Cobie treated crypto as a platform for creating value, he might have made more money than treating it as a casino. If that's true, then most people are playing the wrong game.

Crypto Twitter doesn't want to hear "get rich in ten years" stories. But that may be the only truly viable way.

This is Cobie. See you in our next article.