What follows is the kind of thing you would see on the bottom of almost any crypto blog, and at first glance it looks like generic boilerplate. But I want to actually walk through it in plain language, because every line of it is true and load-bearing — not decoration. If you are a new reader, reading this page carefully will probably do more for your portfolio over the next year than reading three more market-call articles. There is also a long, dedicated §7 US/EU section at the bottom that gets specific about the SEC, FINRA, FDIC, SIPC, IRS, MiCA, FCA, GDPR, CCPA and the actual recourse channels you have if something goes wrong. That section is the part most disclaimers either skip or copy from a template that is years out of date. I tried to write it as if I were sitting across the table from a friend in Brooklyn or Berlin who just opened their first Coinbase account.

§1Nature of the content

Everything on this site is my own opinion, written from my own lived experience as a market participant. It is not a research report, it is not investment advice, it is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, token or financial instrument.

I came into crypto in 2016. Ten years of mistakes, blow-ups, missed opportunities and good calls — all of it eventually ends up in writing, and the only reason to write it down is so that someone who arrived later can save themselves a few of the same trips into the same wall. But my view only represents "this is what I happen to think at the moment I am writing this article." It is not a declaration of truth, it is not a forecast, and it is not a promise about the future. Three months from now I may have changed my mind because new data showed up, and if that happens I will write an update and log it in the corrections center rather than quietly editing the original.

In crypto, almost everyone walks around feeling like they have figured it out. Including me. So whenever you read anything written by anyone — including me — please run it through your own judgment before doing anything with real money. I would rather you disagreed with me and made a different decision based on real research than agreed with me and lost money because you outsourced your thinking.

§2Investment risk

The crypto market is extremely volatile. That is not rhetoric, it is the historical record:

Three deep bear markets, each one wiping out about eighty percent of price, plus the kind of single-day flash crash you saw in August 2024. Before you put money in: do the arithmetic. If this entire balance dropped eighty percent tomorrow, would your life break? If yes, this money should not be in crypto. It should sit in a checking account, a money market fund, or a treasury bill — anywhere that the worst-case outcome is "you earn less than inflation," not "you cannot pay rent."

The 2024-08-05 flash crash is worth dwelling on because it broke a generation of "BTC just goes up since the ETF approval" thinking in a single overnight session. The Bank of Japan announced a rate hike, the yen carry trade started to unwind, and every leveraged risk asset on the planet sold off in lockstep — BTC, NASDAQ, Topix, copper, oil. The point is not that the carry trade specifically matters for crypto; the point is that crypto has zero macro independence. When global liquidity tightens, crypto goes down with everything else, often harder, because the leverage is higher and the liquidity is thinner. Holding crypto is not a hedge against tradfi; it is a leveraged bet on the same risk-on regime.

"Whether you make money in crypto is up to you. Whether you avoid bankruptcy is decided before you ever click buy — by whether you did the arithmetic first."

§3What you should actually do · DYOR

DYOR means Do Your Own Research. The phrase has been used so often in crypto that it has been almost completely drained of meaning. Let me unpack what it actually requires, in my view:

These five rules sound aggressively boring. But across seven years of watching dozens of crypto friends, the ones who actually followed all five are basically all still in the game; the ones who did not are mostly liquidated and gone. The boringness is the point — survival in crypto is not about being clever, it is about not destroying yourself during the times when being clever stops working.

§4Affiliate disclosure

I want to address this directly because most crypto blogs hand-wave it.

The exchange links on this site (Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, HTX, MEXC, Gate, LBank, and others) are affiliate links. When you register through my referral codes (Binance is XG188) and trade, I receive a portion of the trading fees from the exchange's marketing budget.

But your trading fees do not increase as a result — the share I receive comes from the exchange's own marketing budget, not added on top of your fee. Several exchanges actually offer you a small fee reduction when you sign up through a referral, so in practice you frequently pay slightly less, not more.

You are completely free to skip my referral code and sign up directly through the exchange's homepage. The articles will be exactly the same quality, I will not write a single word less, and nothing on the site is gated. The reason this page exists is to put the commercial relationship in plain sight rather than burying it. After you read this section, you decide how to sign up — that is your right and your call.

§5Content recency

Crypto moves quickly. Any article published on a given publication date represents my view at that moment, and three months later it can be flat-out wrong.

A few examples I have lived through personally:

When you read older articles, please check the publication date in the header. Every article also keeps a corrections record at the bottom for any material changes. The full revision history is at the corrections center. The point of keeping the corrections is partly EEAT compliance, partly accountability — if I want readers to take my current view seriously, the price of admission is leaving a paper trail of every time I have been wrong.

§6Third-party content and data sources

The on-chain data, prices and market caps cited in articles come primarily from the following public data sources:

The accuracy of these data sources is the responsibility of the source providers. I am referencing them, not generating the data. If a source ever diverges from observable reality, please trust the latest first-party data you can pull yourself over what I quoted in an older article — and if you flag it, I will update the article and log it in corrections.

§7For US / EU / UK readers · special compliance section

This is the section that matters most for readers based in the United States, the European Union or the United Kingdom — and it is also the section that almost every crypto blog either skips entirely or fills with a copy-pasted line from 2019. I want to actually walk through the specific regulatory ground you stand on when you read this site, because the legal posture in the US/EU/UK is meaningfully different from the rest of the world, and being precise about it protects both you and me.

No SEC, FINRA, FCA or BaFin registration

gan111.com is not a registered investment adviser ("RIA") with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, not a state-registered investment adviser in any US state, not a registered broker-dealer with FINRA, not a Commodity Trading Adviser registered with the CFTC, not authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, and not licensed by Germany's BaFin or any other EU member-state regulator. I am one person who writes about my own experience. Under SEC Rule 202(a)(11)(D)-1 and equivalent UK/EU "personal-view publisher" carve-outs, generic educational commentary that does not give individualised investment advice for a specific person's portfolio does not require RIA-style registration — but it also means you should not treat anything written here as the kind of personalised, fiduciary-grade advice a registered adviser would owe you.

No FDIC or SIPC insurance

Your crypto holdings carry no federal insurance, regardless of which exchange you use. FDIC insures bank deposits up to $250,000 per depositor per bank — crypto is not a bank deposit and is not covered. SIPC insures up to $500,000 of securities held at a broker-dealer in case the broker fails — crypto is not a security held in a SIPC-member account (with the narrow exception of spot ETF shares like IBIT, which are SIPC-covered because IBIT is itself a registered '40 Act fund). If a crypto exchange like Coinbase, Kraken or Binance.US fails (and FTX showed that exchanges absolutely can fail in the US), there is no federal backstop coming to make you whole. You are an unsecured creditor in a bankruptcy proceeding, and historically unsecured crypto creditors have recovered somewhere between zero and roughly fifty cents on the dollar — and only after years of court proceedings.

US tax reality · every swap is a realised event

The single most under-appreciated US compliance issue in crypto: under IRC §1031 as amended by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, "like-kind exchange" treatment was eliminated for all property except real estate. That means every single crypto-to-crypto swap — selling ETH for SOL, swapping USDC for ETH, converting USDT to BTC — is a realised capital-gains event in the eyes of the IRS, regardless of whether you ever touched fiat. The reporting form is Form 8949, flowing into Schedule D. Short-term gains (held under a year) are taxed at ordinary income rates up to 37%; long-term gains at 0%, 15% or 20% depending on bracket. Starting with the 2025 tax year, brokers (including Coinbase, Kraken and major exchanges) must issue Form 1099-DA reporting your gross proceeds to the IRS, which means under-reporting will be matched and audited at scale. If you have been swapping coins on-chain through MetaMask or Uniswap, you still owe the tax — the on-chain swaps just aren't reported on a 1099-DA, but they are absolutely on the chain and discoverable. Talk to a crypto-aware CPA, not a generic preparer.

State-by-state US regulations

The US has fifty different crypto regulatory regimes layered on top of the federal one. New York's BitLicense requires money-transmitter-style licensing for any company serving NY residents and effectively shuts out most international exchanges (Binance.com is unavailable in NY; even Coinbase had to negotiate around it). Texas has the most crypto-friendly mining environment, with explicit state support for proof-of-work mining as an industry. California's DFPI regulates crypto businesses as money transmitters with growing consumer-protection rules. Florida has positioned itself as a crypto-friendly hub with no state income tax. The practical implication for readers: which state you reside in materially affects which exchanges you can use and what your tax exposure looks like.

EU MiCA compliance

The European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA) came fully into force in December 2024 and creates a single licensing regime across all 27 member states for Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASPs). gan111.com is informational only and is not a licensed CASP — I do not custody assets, do not execute orders, do not run a trading venue, and do not provide individualised portfolio management. Under MiCA Title III, stablecoin issuers (USDC, EURC) now require explicit authorisation; under Title IV, exchanges and brokers offering services to EU residents must be CASP-authorised by their home member state. The practical implication: if a CEX you are considering does not yet have CASP authorisation, you should expect it either to obtain one in 2025-2026 or to wind down EU service.

UK Financial Promotion Rules 2023+

The UK Financial Conduct Authority's financial promotion rules for crypto-assets took effect in October 2023 and require any communication that "invites or induces" an investment in cryptoassets to carry specific high-risk warnings, a 24-hour cooling-off period for new customers, and personalised appropriateness assessments. Generic editorial commentary (which is what this site is) is generally outside the scope of "financial promotion" — but the line moves. Wherever this site includes commercial language or pricing claims, you will see explicit "high-risk investment, you could lose all your money" warnings as the FCA requires.

GDPR + CCPA · your data rights

If you are reading from the EU or UK, the General Data Protection Regulation gives you the right to access, correct, port and erase the personal data this site holds about you. If you are in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act and CPRA give you analogous rights, plus the right to opt out of "sale" of personal information. This site uses Google Analytics 4 with IP anonymisation enabled (the anonymize_ip: true flag is visible in the gtag config block at the top of every page), and the only personal data collected is what GA4 captures plus any voluntary email if you contact me. Full details are in the privacy policy.

Affiliate / sponsored disclosure (FTC + ESMA)

Per US Federal Trade Commission Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and ESMA's analogous consumer-protection rules in the EU, I am explicitly disclosing: the Binance XG188 affiliate code and the OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate referral codes constitute a sponsored commercial relationship. I earn a share of fees when you trade through these codes. That sponsorship does not affect what I write — I have publicly criticised Binance, OKX and others in articles, and I will keep doing so when warranted — but the FTC requires the relationship to be conspicuously disclosed, and this paragraph is that disclosure.

Recourse channels for US/EU/UK readers

If something does go wrong — a scam, a fraud, an exchange that fails, a phishing attack that drains your wallet — here are the real, working recourse channels by jurisdiction:

None of these are fast. Recovery of stolen crypto is genuinely difficult and most reports do not lead to recovery. But filing the report does two things that matter: it builds the dataset law-enforcement uses to map patterns and prosecute future cases, and it preserves your legal position if you later pursue civil action or an insurance claim. File. Always file.

This disclaimer does not replace your judgment

The final point I want to make is the one disclaimers almost never make explicit: none of this absolves you of the responsibility to do your own due diligence. Disclaimers protect both reader and writer by being clear about what this content is and is not, but they do not turn the writer into a substitute for the reader's judgment. The tools on this site (BTC chart, support/resistance, dominance) and the articles exist to give you better instruments — they do not replace the work of deciding whether and how to use them. A US reader who follows my analysis blindly, ignores the IRS reporting requirements, skips the appropriateness check and ends up bankrupt is not a reader I have helped, regardless of what this disclaimer says. The point of this entire page is to make sure that does not happen.

§8Contact

If you spot an error, have a question, or want to send feedback, the four contact channels are in the footer below. Twitter (X) is fastest — I am there for most of the day. Email works better for anything long-form or that needs attachments. Telegram for short questions. Weibo for Chinese-language readers.

If what you found is a factual error — a broken link, a wrong number, a misdated event — I will fix it as soon as possible and log the change in the corrections center. EEAT requires that the corrections trail be public and continuous; that is what the corrections center is for.

Last updated · 2026-05-28 gan111.com · Gan · @mor_xiaogan