Shane | Crypto Research & Commercial Growth

My wife asked me a question I couldn't fully answer. "If you die tomorrow, how do I access your crypto?" I've been in crypto for years. I had no clean answer. This is the conversation every crypto holder needs to have with their family, and almost nobody has it. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to break down exactly what you need to do to make sure your crypto doesn't die with you. Follow along if this is something you've been putting off.

Most people think options are complicated. They're not. The concept is simple. You pay a small premium for the right to buy or sell an asset at a set price. That premium is your maximum loss. No margin calls. No liquidation. Compare that to trading perps, where a bad week can wipe your entire position. Options don't remove risk. They define it. That's the difference.

Most crypto holders have thought about what happens if the market crashes. Almost none have thought about what happens if they're not here tomorrow. Your family knowing you hold crypto is not the same as them being able to access it. A wallet with no instructions is just a locked box. What's your plan?

I've been posting for a month. Time to introduce myself properly. I'm Shane. 20 years in key accounts, revenue strategy, and partnerships. Here's what that means for you. How to research a crypto investment before touching it. How to protect what you build and hold. I'm building my own crypto treasury and sharing everything I learn along the way. And the commercial gaps that stop great Web3 and music projects from ever reaching their potential. That's what I write about here. Every week. If that sounds like your world, follow along. More soon.

Music and Web3 are the most underserved commercial intersections in crypto right now. Platforms exist. Artists have audiences. Protocols have liquidity. Nobody is building the commercial strategy that connects them. That's not a technology problem. It's a revenue problem.

Running my 5-pillar framework on XRP today. Here's what I found, and my honest verdict as a treasury-style investor. 1. Problem. The use case is real. Cross-border payments are slow, expensive, and broken. XRP Ledger settles in 3-5 seconds at fractions of a cent. The problem is that Ripple's biggest 2026 wins, including a JP Morgan and Mastercard pilot, settled in their own stablecoin RLUSD, not XRP. Only around 40% of Ripple's 300+ institutional partners actually settle in XRP. 2. Tokenomics. Structurally weak for a treasury asset. Ripple controls roughly 35-40% of all XRP and sells a net 200-300 million tokens every month to fund its own operations. That's a permanent, recurring sell-side overhang built into the design. 3. Team. The strongest pillar by far. Experienced, stable leadership that survived a five-year SEC lawsuit, paid a $125 million settlement, secured a national bank charter, and raised $500 million at a $40 billion valuation. Battle-tested is an understatement. 4. Price structure. Bearish. Down roughly 70% from its July 2025 all-time high, sitting near 20-month lows, with a confirmed death cross on the chart. Lower highs and lower lows for a full year. No structural confirmation of a long-term entry point yet. 5. Exit triggers. The clearest risk is value decoupling. Ripple keeps winning commercially, but the wins flow to the company and RLUSD, not to XRP holders. SWIFT chose Ethereum over XRPL. Stellar won the DTCC tokenization mandate. The moat is narrowing. Verdict: Weak treasury candidate. Ripple the company is building something genuinely impressive. XRP the token is increasingly optional to its own success story. Until the price structure confirms and the token starts capturing more of the value being created, this one stays off the treasury list.

If you're going to use crypto options, Derive is where I'd start. $20B+ in trading volume. Fully onchain. No KYC. Self-custody. Just integrated with Gold-i, meaning institutional infrastructure is taking onchain derivatives seriously. The retail education gap is still massive. That's what I'm here to help close.

If you could only hold 3 crypto assets for the next 5 years and could not touch them, what are they and why?

Running my 5-pillar framework on HYPE today. Here's what I found, and my honest verdict as a treasury-style investor. 1. Problem. The clear category leader. Hyperliquid built a fully on-chain order book that actually performs like a centralised exchange. It's the dominant on-chain perps venue and the only major perps exchange to gain market share in 2026. 2. Tokenomics. Genuinely holder-aligned. Zero VC allocation, 31% airdropped directly to users, and roughly 97-99% of trading fees get routed into automated buybacks. A burn in December removed about 13% of circulating supply. The catch is a multi-year unlock to core contributors that runs through 2027-2028. 3. Team. Lean and bootstrapped. Founder Jeff Yan turned down VC money and built this with profits from his own trading firm. Around 11-14 people total. They kept shipping straight through the FTX collapse and the 2022-2023 bear market. 4. Price structure. Strong uptrend. Higher highs and higher lows through 2026, recently hitting an all-time high. Worth noting volume actually declined into that high, which is a bit of a froth signal. Key support sits at $50-$52 and $32-$34 on a deeper pullback. 5. Exit triggers. The JELLY incident in 2025 is the main scar. Validators stepped in to override a manipulated trade, which drew real criticism around centralisation. On the positive side, the platform handled the largest liquidation event in crypto history in October with zero bad debt and full uptime. Verdict: Strong treasury candidate. Real revenue, real usage, and the most aggressive buyback mechanism of any major token right now. But it's trading near all-time highs after a squeeze-driven run, so this is one to accumulate on weakness rather than chase up here.

Most Web3 founders I observe have brilliant technology and zero revenue infrastructure. No sales process. No partnership framework. No commercial strategy. The product isn't the problem.

Crypto estate planning isn't just a personal problem. It's a commercial one. Every Web3 founder holding significant treasury assets in crypto faces the same risk. What happens to the protocol treasury if the key holder dies suddenly? This is a governance and commercial infrastructure problem, not just a personal finance one. Nobody is talking about this at the founder level.

The bear market filters out the tourists. Every cycle the builders who kept shipping during the red months are the ones who win the next bull run. Who's still building?

The three things every crypto holder needs to document for their family. 1. A complete list of every wallet, exchange, and platform you hold assets on. 2. Clear instructions on how to access each one, without exposing your keys publicly. 3. A trusted person who knows where that document is. This isn't morbid. It's responsible. How many of you have done this?

A quick explanation of crypto options for people who've never used them. A call option: the right to buy an asset at a set price before a set date. A put option: the right to sell. You pay a premium. That's your maximum loss. No liquidation. Compare that to a perp, where a 10% move against you can wipe your position. Which would you rather hold through a bear market?

Quick question for crypto holders. Have you told your partner how to access your assets if something happened to you? Yes or no.

Running my 5-pillar framework on SUI. Here's what I found, and my honest verdict as a treasury-style investor. 1. Problem. Real and well-solved. Sui's object-centric model delivers genuine speed advantages over Ethereum and Solana. But it's a crowded race and technical edge alone doesn't guarantee it captures the value. 2. Tokenomics. Hard-capped at 10 billion SUI. The good news: the large investor unlocks are done. Monthly dilution has dropped from around 1.1% to 0.34% of circulating supply. The bad news: only 40% of supply is circulating right now, and 52% of total supply doesn't unlock until after 2030. 3. Team. One of the strongest in the L1 category. Founded by ex-Meta engineers who built the Move language. Fully public, deeply credentialed, and still shipping through the bear market. 4. Price structure. Confirmed downtrend. Down 80-85% from its January 2025 all-time high. Currently struggling to hold $1.00 as support. Every major moving average is pointing down. Not a momentum entry. 5. Exit triggers. Three mainnet halts in 2026, including 15 hours of downtime in late May. A $223M DEX exploit in 2025. Validators froze funds to recover it, which raised real questions about how decentralised the network actually is. Verdict: Moderate treasury candidate. Exceptional team, real institutional adoption including spot ETFs and CME futures, and the worst of the token unlocks are behind it. But four network outages in one year on a chain selling itself as financial infrastructure is a serious red flag. Not a core holding. A small satellite position with strict exit rules if reliability doesn't improve.

Derive just got integrated into Gold-i's institutional platform. Onchain options are going institutional. Retail still hasn't caught up. That gap is an opportunity.

Here's what happens to your crypto when you die with no plan. Your family knows you held crypto. They don't know where. They find a hardware wallet. They don't know the PIN. They find a seed phrase written somewhere. They don't know what to do with it. The crypto sits there, or worse, gets lost forever. Billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin is already permanently lost this way. Next post: the three things you need to document right now.

Most retail crypto investors use perps to hedge. Most retail crypto investors get liquidated. There's a better tool. Options. Defined risk, no liquidation risk, more flexible. The problem isn't the product. It's the education gap. I'm going to break down how options actually work for crypto holders. No jargon, no complexity. Starting next week.

What's the biggest mistake you've made researching a crypto project? Mine was ignoring tokenomics entirely in my first year.

Most people research crypto the wrong way. They hear a name, check the price chart, and buy. I use a 5-pillar framework before touching anything: 1. What problem does it actually solve? 2. Tokenomics. Inflationary or deflationary? Any big unlocks coming? 3. Team. What have they shipped before? 4. Price structure. Higher highs, higher lows, key support levels. 5. Exit triggers. What would make me sell? Every week I'm going to run a project through this publicly. What crypto do you want me to analyse first?