KOLs self-report: How did I earn 10 million US dollars in the encryption market at the age of 22?
Original author: Vida
Original translator: Deep Tide TechFlow
A 22-year-old KOL Vida posted a long tweet on Twitter, detailing his story of making $10 million in the cryptocurrency market.
Success on wealth is not accidental. Persistence, intelligence, execution, and keeping up with trends. We can gain many insights from Vida's wealth accumulation journey.
How does it feel to have a net worth of $10 million at the age of 22? This is my own story.
Firstly, let me talk about how I accumulated wealth. I started engaging in internet businesses at the age of 14. From age 14 to 19, I made money by setting up game servers and selling products from the west to the east, or from the east to the west, which I call geographic arbitrage.
There is always an information gap between China and the West. For example, the cost of labor in China is usually 1/7 of the West's. The latest technology in the West is more advanced than in China. For instance, everyone in the West now knows about ChatGPT, but most Chinese people do not.
In the end, at the age of 19, I had accumulated a wealth of 500,000. Then, I entered the cryptocurrency field. I heard from one of my Chinese clients that he made millions of wealth through cryptocurrency mining and operating online gambling with cryptocurrencies. In 2020, I became a holder of ETH and BTC.
An inexplicable problem arose: my father is a trader (he made $2 million in real estate and stocks). Unfortunately, he thought that cryptocurrency was in a bubble in January 2021, so he persuaded me to sell my holdings of ETH and BTC. At that time, my portfolio had only tripled. Selling my ETH at a price of $969 was a big mistake.
But it was still enough. By the age of 20, my net worth was around $1 million. There were setbacks during this journey as well. For example, I shorted BTC at a price of $32,000 and got liquidated after the news of Tesla accepting Bitcoin, resulting in a loss of $50,000. That was probably the biggest loss in terms of net worth percentage.
But that incident made me think: If I could get this news first and buy and sell to those retail investors after the news about Tesla, I could profit from it.
So, I seized the opportunity in March 2021. Whenever Elon mentioned Doge or dog-related keywords on Twitter, the price of Dogecoin would rise. At that time, I had my developers create a monitoring bot to track every tweet from Elon. Then, when Musk tweeted, I would manually buy.
I made some successful attempts, but later realized that I needed to automate my trades in order to be competitive. So in April 2021, my developer created an automated trading robot for me based on Elon's tweets. It was a huge success, and I made at least $500,000 from that robot.
I had several successful trades, but later realized that I needed to automate this process to stay competitive. So in April 2021, my developer created a automated trading robot for me based on Elon's tweets. It was a huge success, and I made at least $500,000 from that robot.
In 2021, whenever Elon tweeted, I would buy Dogecoin and sell it to retail investors a few minutes later. The same went for other mentioned currencies like $SHIB and $PEOPLE. I made at least $1.5 million just from Elon's tweets.
By the end of 2021, I discovered that not only Elon's tweets could move the market, but also announcements from certain exchanges, particularly the top three. If I could be the first to enter these specific events, I could make a 100% profit. So I started building the infrastructure to capitalize on these events.
In 2022, I had one of the fastest robots in the market, and I saw my business as similar to MEV, where I took advantage of people's mistakes, desires, and inefficiencies.
Through my robot business, by 2022, at the age of 21, my net worth had reached $4 million, and I had four developer employees.
In the bear market of 2022, I continued to improve my latency advantage, with the goal of "working hard in the bear market and reaping the rewards in the bull market." I worked an average of 10 hours a day, building new robots, optimizing latency, and participating in major events like the FTX-Binance acquisition.
In 2023, my efforts to optimize the robot, build infrastructure, and improve trading skills paid off. I made a lot of money through my robot from token offerings and news like Elon's tweets. I also manually traded in some major events such as the SVB federal bailout, the XRP case victory, Ethereum ETF, and Grayscale victory.
A few days after trading the Grayscale victory event, my net worth at the age of 22 exceeded $10 million.
Reaching this net worth is a milestone in my life, but I believe it's not my limit. I still work until 4 a.m. to optimize my robot and stay competitive.
I know that achieving this net worth at my age comes with risks of laziness, arrogance, overconcentration in my portfolio, and gambling. Just look at the unfortunate examples on Coinfessions. I won't make the same mistakes as those people.
I only spend a little time on entertainment, and most of my time is dedicated to working hard or learning new technologies and knowledge.
I know there are people who are more excellent than me in different fields, so I am happy to associate with outstanding individuals.
In addition to cryptocurrencies, I also participate in the traditional financial field to achieve asset diversification.
60% of my assets are cryptocurrencies. My current cryptocurrency portfolio consists of 90% USDC and USDT because I need stablecoins for robot trading and news trading businesses, and 10% Bitcoin spot positions for long-term holdings.
40% of my assets are in traditional finance, including 10-30 year US Treasury bonds, Chinese and Vietnamese indices, Chinese and US technology stocks, and a small portion of the S&P 500 index. I have a positive outlook for emerging markets and technology in 2023 because I believe that high interest rates in the United States will not last long.
For me, I don't like gambling, but in cryptocurrency trading, gambling and trading are human nature. So whenever I want to prove that I am right in uncertain trades, for example, shorting $CYBER and buying PUT options of $NVDA and $COIN, I will test it with $1-10,000 to see if I am right or wrong.
My advice to young people:
Find your passion and work hard, you need to work harder than your competitors to surpass them.
Search for arbitrage opportunities based on information asymmetry, there are many opportunities here.
Outsource unimportant tasks to people who are cheaper or have better skills than you.
Communicate with money-making individuals and stay away from ordinary communities such as specific coin holders.
Don't gamble or blindly follow like ordinary people, focus on the certainty of trades.
Discover market efficiency and take advantage of it.
The winner is not the one who competes for speed, but the one who competes for a continuous and abundant flow.
