The crypto barbell.

Why a barbell

Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularised the barbell strategy in Antifragile: keep most of your capital somewhere very safe, put a small part into very aggressive bets, and avoid the comfortable middle where the risks hide. Your downside is capped. Your upside is not.

Crypto fits this almost perfectly. A few deep, liquid assets drive the market, and behind them sits a long tail of tokens whose outcomes look more like venture capital than like stocks: most fail, a handful go parabolic.

Cap the downside first. Let the upside take care of itself.

Sleeve 1 · Core Vault (60–70%)

Bitcoin and Ether: the deepest, most liquid crypto-assets, with the longest track record. This sleeve is not meant to be exciting. It is meant to still be there after a 70% drawdown, something crypto has delivered more than once.

• Two assets, held spot. No leverage, no lending, no yield games.
• Rebalanced on a fixed calendar, not on headlines.
• Never sold to fund a moonshot.

Sleeve 2 · Venture Sleeve (20–30%)

This is where we think like a venture or private-equity fund. Venture returns follow a power law: a small number of investments produce most of the gains. Paul Graham explains it well in Black Swan Farming. The consequence is simple: you need enough shots on goal, and no single shot can be big enough to sink you.

• 8 to 12 positions spread across narratives: DeFi, real-world assets, infrastructure, AI, gaming.
• Each position starts small, with a written thesis, a catalyst calendar and an invalidation point.
• Winners are trimmed back into the Core Vault. Losers are cut when the thesis breaks, not when the chart hurts.

Sleeve 3 · Moonshot Casino (max 5%)

Yes, we gamble. Like professionals. The casino sleeve is a fixed budget for high-risk, high-upside bets: early tokens, fresh narratives, memes with real liquidity. Every bet is sized so it can go to zero without changing your life.

• Hard cap: 5% of the portfolio for the whole sleeve.
• One bet never exceeds 1% of the portfolio.
• Above 3x, part of the gain is taken off the table and moved to the Core Vault.

Position sizing: the part everyone skips

In 1956, John L. Kelly published A New Interpretation of Information Rate, the origin of what is now called the Kelly criterion: the bet size that maximises long-term growth for a given edge. Edward O. Thorp later took it from the blackjack table to the stock market (The Kelly Criterion and the Stock Market).

Two lessons matter for crypto. First, even with a real edge, betting too big ruins you. Second, nobody knows their true edge in crypto, so we use a small fraction of what any formula would suggest. Small, deliberate sizes keep you in the game long enough for the winners to show up.

Diversification, honestly

Harry Markowitz showed in Portfolio Selection (1952) that combining assets that do not move together lowers risk for the same expected return. Crypto has a catch: in a sell-off, almost everything falls together. That is why our diversification relies on position size and time (dated catalysts, staged entries), not only on owning many tokens.

How we research

Every position rests on public, verifiable data: market data from CoinGecko, on-chain activity and fees from DefiLlama, project research from Messari, plus each project's own documentation and token unlock schedule. We link our sources so you can check our work.

What we will never do

• Recommend leverage, derivatives or borrowing to buy crypto.
• Hold, manage or touch your money.
• Tell you what to buy based on your personal situation. We publish model portfolios for education; your decisions are yours.

References

• Markowitz, H. (1952). Portfolio Selection. The Journal of Finance, 7(1), 77–91.
• Kelly, J. L. (1956). A New Interpretation of Information Rate. Bell System Technical Journal, 35(4), 917–926.
• Thorp, E. O. The Kelly Criterion and the Stock Market.
• Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.
• Graham, P. (2012). Black Swan Farming. paulgraham.com.
• European Supervisory Authorities (2022). EU financial regulators warn consumers on the risks of crypto-assets.