I Was Wrong About Holding ETH Through This Bear Market

Added: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]For 6 months, I told myself that Ethereum would recover and that my bags would take care of myself. And then eventually, once the price goes back up on Ethereum, I will be in profit. I will be set. But you know what I realized?

[00:00:13]The problem was not my coins. The problem was my strategy. You see, I was holding Ethereum without any system behind it. And today, I want to show you what that looked like before when I was just holding Ethereum. And then I want to show you what strategy I implemented within my portfolio to put my crypto to work and start earning on Ethereum in a bear market-friendly way. Let's go and dive straight in. Ethereum hit an all-time high of 4956 all the way back on August 24th, 2025.

[00:00:40]And since then, it's retested that all-time high multiple times before being set in a bearish trend on October 6th, just like many other crypto assets, including Bitcoin itself. Now, here's the thing. This plays right in with the Bitcoin halving cycle. So, assuming we go down for another 6 months or so from today, we will bottom out and then eventually, the market will start to pick back up. The interest in crypto will start to pick back up and we'll be set to deliver higher all-time highs in the future, a couple years from now. But the thing is, during this entire time, I thought, "Okay, well, I'll just hold on the way down. Yes, I will suffice a short-term loss, but I won't sell, right?" And then when the market moves back up, I'll be golden and I wouldn't have panic sold anything. I wouldn't have made any emotional decisions and instead, I will be at a profit later on in the future. And what I realized after Ethereum crashed down to $2500 is that it's not the right play. Right now, I can be accumulating Ethereum. I could be earning on my Ethereum and I could be producing cash flow in my portfolio that I can use to extract profits from my portfolio or compound back into my portfolio right now. And now that Ethereum is at 1755 today, I can show you the results of that process and I can break down everything for you so you know exactly how it works and how you can implement this in your own portfolio. So, So, a big fan of lending and borrowing within the DeFi industry, especially when it comes to the Ethereum blockchain. And the reason why is because it allows me to put up my crypto assets and have full market exposure to them while being able to extract instant capital that I can use for other DeFi activities like liquidity provision, so on and so forth. So, that's exactly what I'm running in my portfolio. You'll see that I have $90,000 supplied. Of that, I have about $35,000 of wrapped ether via Ethereum. And I also have $5,000 of wrapped staked Ethereum. So, that's about 40 grand of Ethereum exposure right there in conjunction with some other assets that I'm running with this exact same strategy. Now, the thing is since I put these assets up as collateral, I now have the ability to borrow against them and extract that instant liquidity into my portfolio.

[00:02:42]That's what I did over here. I borrowed $30,000 right here. Now, of this $30,000, 20,000 of it has already been finalized through various strategies and brought back into the lending market.

[00:02:52]But, another $10,000 of it is still running in conjunction with $10,000 of my own capital that I brought in specifically to execute on this strategy. And the strategy's actually very simple to execute. The hard part is planning it and actually building the strategy. So, I'm actually in an Ethereum to USDC liquidity pool. And I have about 7,500 bucks or so that I deployed into this pool, and now it's worth about 6,600 bucks. So, you're wondering, "Well, Jake, how come you're down? Isn't that what you wanted to avoid?" No, actually. Because as this position loses money, I actually end up with more Ethereum. And of course, I'm generating income along the way. If we simply just take a look at this position, it started at about $2,300 per Ethereum. And over time, Ethereum continued to fall all the way until current prices at 1757.

[00:03:40]But, what really happened here is I started with 88% USDC, and I now have 28% USDC. Now, what that means is I also started with 12% Ethereum and I now have 72% Ethereum. So, let's read this out in plain English. 4,448 USDC was converted to 2.21 Ethereum at an average price of 2,010 USDC. Meaning that I've essentially bought $4,400 worth of Ethereum at an average price of about 2,010 USDC per Ethereum or $2,010 per Ethereum. Yeah, my entry price in this position was about 2,300, but that entry price was only for the 850 bucks that I put into Ethereum. So, as this continues to fall, what's going to happen is I'm going to be constantly shifted into Ethereum and then I could re-execute the strategy later on as I bring in more capital. But, let's just say we go down to 1,500, which is kind of like where I'm thinking Ethereum is going to bottom out at over the next couple of months.

[00:04:44]So, 1,500 would yield me about 3.839 Ethereum right here. So, I take that 3.893 Ethereum and I multiply it by the 2,300 that we started this position at and that puts me at 8,800.

[00:04:58]That right there is a $1,300 profit from what we initially deployed, the 7,500 that we initially deployed basically.

[00:05:06]But, we're at the same price that we deployed 7,500, yet we have 8,800.

[00:05:11]That is because we lowered our cost basis. We lowered our average entry price into Ethereum by using a liquidity pool. Now, some may say, "Why not just wait till 1,500 and buy all at that $1,500 price?" Simple answer is because of emotions, right? When we're at that $1,500 price, it's very hard to keep your emotions in check and actually execute on that because you're going to be thinking, "Oh, well, what if it goes lower? Oh, but we're actually really bearish right now. Maybe I don't want to buy." Or, "Oh, I actually already panic bought when we started to go back up at $2,200, right?" You're going to run into all of those problems, whereas my strategy just slowly dollar cost average me into Ethereum and meanwhile, while it's doing that, it's producing me cash flow. That cash flow is coming out to $12 per day on this $6,600 position right now, or $358 per month. So, not only am I going to have $8,800 at my initial entry price, I'm going to have all the cash flow that I earned on the way down. And that cash flow, I can inject to repay the interest on my borrow. I could repay my borrow all together. I can take that cash flow and I can re-collateralize it as Ethereum, so I have more core exposure.

[00:06:17]Or, of course, I could put it directly into my bank account if I wish to do so.

[00:06:21]And all while this is happening, we still have full exposure to Ethereum because we are lending it out as our core collateral. That's this wrapped EtherFi Ethereum right over here, right?

[00:06:30]So, when Ethereum goes up 2x, 3x in the future, after we've kind of closed this position and held out the Ethereum, then guess what? We have that exposure on this now 3.839 Ethereum that we have in the position, as well as all of the EtherFi Ethereum that we have over here, which is about 20 Ethereum. And then ultimately, we witness gains on both of those. And then we repay our borrow in the future once Ethereum's at a price that we're ready to start to ladder out on. And then ultimately, we can execute the same exact process next bear market.

[00:06:59]Now, this is the exact same strategy that we run with our clients at my company Builder Wealth, right? It slowly buys assets on the way down. And yes, the trade-off is you are producing lower yield because you'll have broader ranges because you want room to buy. But the thing is you're putting more money in your pocket at the end of the day. And it does fully rely on Ethereum going back to its initial entry price that you entered at, right? So, in my case, $2,300.

[00:07:22]But in the case that it does, I have a 20% profit roughly at the price of $2,300 compared to being at a break-even if I was just holding Ethereum in my wallet, or compared to locking in a ton of impermanent loss if I was just going in and out of a bunch of different liquidity pools trying to time the market and chase the highest APY. Here's what one of our clients said, "My CLP stayed in range for everything. So, I was generating yield from there. I have also been approaching my CLPs conservatively as well. I'm trying to generate underlying assets in stables."

[00:07:55]That right there is the goal. You see the income that we generate, we typically park in stables, but the underlying assets that we accumulate through the dollar cost average mechanism, that right there goes back as core collateral. So, a broader range with most of my range being to the downside allows me to stay in range longer.

[00:08:12]Granted, the trade-off is lower APY and slower fees, right? But, the consistency has been nice. Overall, I'm developing a system that works for me, and it was reassuring to see it withstand real stress recently." This is an actual quote and message from one of our clients directly. So, if you're in the situation where you're holding Ethereum, hype, Bitcoin, or maybe another asset that you truly believe in, but the same exact time you don't want to hold without a strategy because you're just going to end up holding all the way down, all the way back up, all the way down again, and just repeating throughout multiple market cycles, and never really ever taking some profit for yourself, then we've created a service where we will help you implement this as soon as possible. That way you can take advantage of the downside and actually buy more on the way down by leveraging your existing bag without having to bring in new capital. And at the same time, while you were buying on the way down, you were generating cash flow that you can extract directly to your bank account, directly to your crypto wallet, into other assets so you can buy the dips. So, if you have a portfolio greater than $25,000, I'm going to leave a link at the top of the description.

[00:09:18]It's a short, quick application. It takes about 2 minutes or so. Then after you go through that, it will give you an option to book a call with me or my team, where we'll dive into your exact situation, see if this strategy is the right fit for you, and go from there.

[00:09:30]And I want to leave you with one more thing, and that's from one of our members, Casey, that was in the same situation as you roughly 3 months ago or so. He was holding assets, no real strategy behind it, and he had a lot of money and he was leaving a lot of money on the table. He jumped on one of the calls that I host every single month in the group, and he said, "I was on Jake called call this morning, and my huge win was pretty simple. I understood 90%." And the thing is, Casey came in as a holder that knew absolutely nothing about DeFi. And now he's at the point within a couple of months of actually executing on the strategy, deploying his first few positions, and ready to scale it upwards. And his quote is, "I don't know about everyone else, but when I see something in action, it brings a whole picture into focus." So, I hope you guys enjoyed today's video. Should you have any questions, go ahead and put them right in the comments below, and I'll happy to make some more content around it. Drop a like, subscribe, notifications turned on, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace out.