How The Crypto Gateway’s Luca Built The Largest Italian Crypto Community

Published in

Set Labs

4 min readAug 12, 2020

Welcome to the Set Social Trader Spotlight Series. In these posts, we give you insight into exciting new traders that are on the Set Social Trading platform. If you want to get primed on Set Social Trading, you can click here.

Today, we‘ve got an interview with The Crypto Gateway, a new trader on the platform and creator of the Bitcoin Trend Follower Alpha Set, for all of you to enjoy.

The Crypto Gateway’s Set is currently live on TokenSets — you can check it out here.

Hi Luca, great to have you. Can you give us an intro of yourself and what you do?

Sure! First of all, thanks for onboarding me, I’m really hyped about being part of such an innovative project!

I’m an engineer who always worked in the healthcare automation industry, with a huge passion for Finance. I started following stocks and commodities markets in my early 20s, developing investing and trading strategies.

When I discovered Cryptocurrencies, I was instantly hooked on them. I fell in love with the technology behind them as well as their volatility, liquidity and 24/7 market availability.

I wanted to learn everything about Crypto and their market, and I gradually started trading and investing on them, adapting my “traditional” strategies to this new exciting market.

I created my community to help other people investing in the new asset class that is Crypto, preventing them from losing money in scams or due to typical novice traders mistakes.

My Community had a huge growth over the past 3 years (its inception was in 2017), and became the largest one in Italy about Crypto Trading and Investing.

Soon I’ll quit my 8–5 job in engineering to dedicate myself completely to the Crypto industry, and that’s a milestone I’m really proud of!

Can you go into more detail about that Set and its strategy?

My Set represents one of my most successful strategies for medium to long term investing, and I developed it directly for the Bitcoin market.

It’s basically a trend follower strategy: its aim is to be exposed to the asset during every upwards movement as early as possible, in order not to miss the potential gains.

It seems easy, but there are 2 main challenges to face with a trend follower strategy.

The first one is about trends identification: you need a signal that is not delayed (like EMA cross or similar) and that is reliable (high probability that the signal develops into a real trend).

The second one is about minimizing false positives: I don’t want to keep opening positions during sideways movements, against the macro-trend or during low volatility periods.

To obtain the best results, I use a signal which is based on the slope of EMA130 of the closing price. I apply 2 filters on it: a trend filter to avoid opening positions against the macro trend, and a volatility filter, to avoid opening positions during sideways movements. You can see a draft of the strategy here: https://it.tradingview.com/script/TKg40Ska/

The strategy applied on the set is a bit different (it opens just LONG positions and uses different parameters), and exposes gradually to BTC using signals from two different time frames at once. This way, drawdown is minimized and profit is optimized on the long run.

What were the biggest challenges in building a community around crypto from scratch? What made you want to start?

Passion made me want to start! I always liked sharing my passions with the public (and probably I’m a bit egocentric too lol): for example, I used to be a DJ when I was younger!

It started as a game, but it quickly gained lots of traction. After a couple of months, I realized that I could do something useful for both people and Cryptocurrencies: I could make people discover this awesome opportunity, and thus help their adoption as well.

The biggest challenge is to educate newbies. They tend to commit mistakes that cost lots of money sometimes. My mission is not letting it happen.

What are the biggest challenges to crypto’s adoption in Italy?

In Italy the biggest challenge is definitely about regulation. We’re in 2020 and we still don’t know how to pay taxes on them, how to declare them to our Country and so on.

This scares lots of people who would be interested in investing or maybe also making a business in the Crypto industry, because they don’t want to risk sanctions or to be seen as criminals.

Where can people find you online?

My main social media is Youtube, where I share my analysis, insights, tutorials etc: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9X2f4pVXSNzsJ2c6ZQVqBQ

Then, I own a Telegram channel, where I post charts, news and all my trades: https://t.me/TheCryptoGateway

You can find me on Facebook as well: https://www.facebook.com/TheCryptoGatewayITA

Finally, our community is on Discord: https://discord.gg/HxQC7GD

All the content is in Italian, but of course International friends are welcome too!

Anything else you’d like to tell us or your potential followers?

One of the main problems that novices face when investing in Cryptocurrencies is FOMO and emotivity. Besides that, everyone wants to trade even if they still don’t have the skills to do it.

I hope that this awesome instrument that’s TokenSets will help them, providing the possibility to delegate trading to who’s been doing it for years.

I’d call it smart HODLing! :)

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed reading this interview! You can view The Crypto Gateway’s profile here. If you’d like to be notified of any future product updates, head here to sign up to email notifications!

Learn more about Set and join our community