rafaolo

•     Early and continuous market participant since September 2015, with self-custody across every generation of wallet technology: began acquiring BTC in Brazil well before local on/off-ramps existed. Held funds through Bitcoin Core wallet.dat files and paper wallets in the pre-BIP-39 era, then adopted hardware wallets (Trezor, Ledger, from their earliest models) and mobile/Lightning wallets for day-to-day balances. Today a daily user of crypto debit cards for everyday spending in Brazil, and occasional cross-border crypto payments for small purchases abroad. 

•     Multi-exchange operational fluency: hands-on experience as an end user across BitMEX, Bitfinex, FTX, Binance, Bybit, Deribit, Mercado Bitcoin, and Foxbit, each used for a distinct purpose (spot, futures, options, BRL on/off-ramp), including VIP client status on Bybit based on trading volume and account activity, with participation in Bybit-hosted community events. Comfortable with the full account lifecycle — registration, KYC/verification tiers, and generating tax-reporting statements — from the client side. 

•     Informal onboarding support for friends and family: walked multiple newcomers through exchange account creation, document verification, deposit/withdrawal mechanics, and the practical limitations of unverified/partially verified accounts, as well as wallet setup, self-custody best practices, and explaining basic Bitcoin concepts from scratch — essentially first-line client education. 

•     Security-first account management & blockchain investigation support: exclusive use of passkeys, 2FA, and other current best practices across every exchange and wallet. Applied this security awareness practically by assisting a close contact in tracing BTC stolen through a compromised exchange account, identifying several cross-exchange and intra-network transaction hops using Chainalysis-type and comparable analytics tools. 

•     Brazilian crypto tax compliance & self-maintained portfolio tracking: ten years of firsthand experience with Receita Federal's cryptoasset reporting requirements, applicable exemptions, and recurring regulatory updates, applied to my own filings and shared informally with others. All positions and tax-lot history are managed through custom spreadsheets built since 2015, reflecting a low-frequency, high-discipline approach to record-keeping. 

•     Independent quantitative research project: conceived and designed a funding-rate arbitrage framework comparing coin-margined perpetual futures across Deribit and Bybit — including the full mathematical derivation of position sizing, liquidation buffers, rebalancing methodology, and a Monte Carlo cost model — built on a historical dataset from a market-data API. The strategy design, quantitative model, and documentation are entirely my own; implementation was AI-assisted, reflecting current, practical use of AI tools for technical work. 

•     Applied derivatives trading strategy: over a decade of long-horizon, low-leverage derivatives use to manage a personal BTC-heavy portfolio — including maintaining a long BTC futures position sized to replicate lost spot exposure after the FTX collapse (held 2022 until final USD-denominated claim settlement in 2024); systematically shorting BTC futures during 2025's rally to realize capital gains beyond Brazil's monthly BRL 35,000 tax exemption, unwinding those hedges through mid-2026; and selling options to generate yield on idle BTC during high-volatility periods while dollarizing part of the portfolio and collecting funding.