There is something elegant about a person who does one small thing for years and does not get bored of it. This is the story of how @waleswoosh became Wale.
I saw another gm from Wale this morning. Nothing unusual. The familiar character, a short post, and hundreds of people already saying gm back.
But it made me realize something: I have seen Wale on my timeline for years, yet I never knew how Wale became Wale.
So I started looking. I went through old threads, interviews, profiles, and every piece of his history the open internet would give me.
Welcome to "People who inspire me", a series about the people whose work and consistency stay with me.
Episode one is @waleswoosh.
A small disclaimer before we begin: I do not know him personally, and I have not interviewed him. Everything below comes from public sources.
Before CT knew Wale
Wale is not his real name.
He said it himself in a January 2023 interview: “I’m Wale – not my IRL name by the way.”
Source: https://carlitosway23eth.substack.com/p/don-carlitos-10-interview-w-waleswoosh
He is still undoxxed. Even after nft now put him on its cover in October 2023, he said he never felt that revealing his identity was necessary.
His story began before the account did.
In early 2021, Wale was finishing a Business Administration degree in Germany. He also worked in marketing at a car company. At the time, the NFT space still felt too unreal to leave a normal career for.
Source: https://crosat.com/the-1-true-sign-an-nft-bull-market-is-back-on-wale-nft-collector/
Then he heard Gary Vaynerchuk talking about NFTs.
Wale bought his first ETH, minted something, and sold it a few hours later for around $200 in profit.
That was enough to pull him in.
He became a day trader of JPEGs, rarely holding a project overnight. His first projects were cash grabs. None of them exist today.
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1668219358298947586
He also entered a BAYC giveaway on Instagram, lost, and was apparently too salty to buy one on OpenSea afterward.
Source: https://carlitosway23eth.substack.com/p/don-carlitos-10-interview-w-waleswoosh
The first 10,000
On March 10, 2022, the @waleswoosh account appeared on Twitter.
The handle has never changed. The display name has – from wale.swoosh, a reference to CloneX and Nike’s swoosh, to wale.moca.
Wale did not create the account because he wanted to become an influencer.
He created it because Twitter moved NFT prices, and because he wanted people to talk about projects with.
That difference matters. The audience was not the original goal. Being part of the conversation was.
At first, he shitposted.
He made memes and tried to meet people. It did not really work. Then he wrote a thread.
Almost nobody liked it, but Wale enjoyed writing it. So he wrote another one. And another. By June 2023, he had published more than 150.
Around the same time, he joined the CloneX community and became a reply guy.
Not for a few minutes when he had something to promote. For several hours, every day.
He remembered the people who kept showing up. If someone replied to him, he wanted to reply back. Every new thread was a chance to study what had worked, what had failed, and what he could do differently next time.
It took around eight months to reach his first 10,000 followers.
From the outside, that number looks like the beginning.
In reality, it was already the result of hundreds of threads, conversations, and ordinary days when almost nobody was paying attention.
By early 2023, people were beginning to notice.
One of them would change the direction of the account completely.
The DM that changed everything
By early 2023, Wale had reached his first 10,000 followers.
Then a DM arrived from Locationtba, one of Azuki’s co-founders:
"You’re doing a good job with your content".
They started talking. Eventually, Locationtba invited him to a call.
Wale did not think it was a job offer. He later described what was happening inside his head:
"WTF the co-founder of Azuki wants a meeting with ME?"
During the second half of the call, Locationtba told him about a program they were building and suggested they could work together.
On February 13, 2023, Wale announced that he was joining Azuki as its second Researcher in Residence, after Elena.
It was not a traditional job. Wale remained an independent researcher and continued publishing through his own account. Azuki could request topics, but a neutrality agreement meant that his conclusions did not have to match the company’s views.
https://x.com/DemAzuki/status/1625893032552808448
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1625117501578174464
He also changed his PFP from a CloneX to an Azuki – which, in that world, was not a small thing.
Azuki’s support allowed him to keep his threads, newsletter, and Twitter Spaces free. Wale went full-time and later said he began investing "100x more" into the brand.
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1668219468852629504
But the most important part of this opportunity may have happened before the DM.
Wale said he had received offers to shill NFT projects almost every day.
He rejected them. He does not believe the Azuki opportunity would have happened otherwise.
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1668219500167061507
The year Wale became Wale
After the Azuki offer, the account began to accelerate.
In May 2023, Wale joined the NFT Inspect Community Council. Inspect described him as "a researcher in residence and a Web3 expert by every measure".
By June 12, Wale had reached 50,000 followers.
He was ranked #1 on NFT Inspect, worked with Azuki, sat on the NFT Inspect Community Council, and said his content was receiving hundreds of thousands of views every day.
But the numbers only show the visible part.
Behind them were three threads a week and more than 400 replies every day. Wale said he answered every comment under his threads and every morning GM.
At that point, he claimed he had not missed a single day in more than a year.
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1668219475622068224
GM was never the entire strategy.
It was one small part of a much larger system: research, threads, Spaces, comments, and hours spent inside the community. But it made the consistency visible. Every morning, the account returned, and people learned to return with it.
The growth continued.
In October 2023, Wale had more than 71,000 followers, a Discord community of over 1,200 people, and the #1 position for global reach among Web3 creators on X, according to NFT Inspect.
Then nft now put him on its cover.
Wale posted the cover and wrote that he was speechless.
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1716467468372160677
A year earlier, he had been writing threads that almost nobody read.
Now his PFP was on a magazine cover.
Same skill, new game
Wale had built his name through NFTs. But CT does not stay in one place for long.
The subjects changed. Wale continued doing what he had always done: watching where attention was moving, understanding the new game, and becoming part of the conversation early.
By February 2025, he was no longer known only as an NFT researcher.
He posted that he had ranked third in Crypto Twitter mindshare over the previous seven days – behind @cz_binance and @VitalikButerin.
"Life is a simulation".
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1889628251120636375
A few months later, he reached 15,000 yaps:
https://x.com/waleswoosh/status/1938212303616545239
There is a temptation to keep repeating the thing that first made people notice you.
Wale did something harder.
He kept the habits that built the account, the research, the replies, the daily presence, but allowed the account itself to change.
The ritual that stayed
The threads changed. The metas changed. The account grew.
One small ritual stayed visible through all of it.
On June 12, 2023, Wale wrote that he replied to every GM in the morning and had not missed a single day in more than a year.
That places the beginning of the ritual no later than June 2022, only a few months after the account was created.
There are two parts to it.
First, Wale publishes his own short "Gm" post, usually around 06:00 UTC and often with the same character.
Then there are the replies: people saying gm to him, and Wale answering them.
That second layer matters. The ritual is not only a post. It is a conversation.
X does not provide a public counter for how many original GM posts he has published, and its search does not return a complete history. So there is no honest exact number.
What I could verify was the pattern.
Every day from December 14 through December 31, 2025, was there, including one "Late gm". The same was true for every day checked between August 10 and August 25, 2026.
If the streak remained uninterrupted, that would mean approximately 365 original GM posts in 2025 and 237 between January 1 and August 25, 2026.
These are estimates, not audited totals.
Here are his three most recent morning posts at the time of writing:
GM did not build Wale by itself.
Neither did one thread, one community, or one opportunity.
But the ritual reveals something about the way the account was built: Wale kept returning, even after he no longer needed to prove that he could.
What Wale built
Today, Wale is more than one X account.
But the account is still the center of everything around it.
His current bio reads:
"On vacation | For business:
@R3ACHNTWRK ".
R3ACH handles the business side.
The company describes itself as Wale’s management team, connecting Web3 creators with brands. Its public case studies show R3ACH finding sponsors, organizing campaigns, and building partnerships around Wale’s audience.
https://r3ach.com/walexaiarena
R3ACH also has a public page dedicated to the wider Wale ecosystem: his X account, Wale Hub, newsletter, Spaces, and The Wale Show.
The page lists 157,000 followers and seven million monthly impressions. The figures are now outdated, but they show how the account was presented to potential partners at that stage.
The Wale Show became another extension of the account, bringing projects and people from across Web3 into live conversations.
There is also Wale Drops, his newsletter. The page is currently quiet and simply says "Coming Soon".
https://waleswoosh.substack.com/
And the link in his current X profile leads to Polymarket.
https://polymarket.com/@waleyyyy
As of August 25, 2026, the X account had approximately 176,600 followers and almost 292,000 posts.
The follower count shows the reach. The post count shows the work.
The part I want to keep
I did not write this because I think Wale made every decision perfectly.
I wrote it because there is something in his story that I want to keep for myself.
He continued writing when almost nobody was reading.
He treated replies as part of the work, not as something beneath it.
He protected his reputation before he knew what it might become worth.
And when CT changed, he changed with it without abandoning the habits that had built the account.
That is why Wale is the first person in this series.
Not because of one viral thread, one opportunity, or one morning post.
Because thousands of small actions, repeated for years, eventually became an account that feels impossible to imagine CT without.
