Original author: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
I lost millions last year, Xiao Su told Foresight News.
As an old investor in the cryptocurrency circle, he bought a lot of VC coins during the last bull market cycle. In 2021, Bitcoin once broke through US$67,000, setting a historical high. The prices of many VC coins also rose, and the increase was even higher than that of Bitcoin. This is how Xiao Su made his first pot of gold.
However, the market is unpredictable, and Xiao Su suffered a setback in this cycle. Since 2024, the performance of many VC coins in which he held a large position has been poor, and they have continued to fall. Forced to become a diamond hand, he could not bear it and had to sell at a low point. After repeated occurrences, most of his accumulated profits have been lost.
Why is it so difficult to make money this time? Who is making money in the market? Xiao Su is very puzzled. In his opinion, in the past bull market cycle, you could make money by buying coins with your eyes closed, lying down or sleeping, but now you have to run fast to make money. Market participants such as VCs, market makers, exchanges, project parties, retail investors, and hair-pulling studios are all facing new challenges.
Xiao Sus experience is not an isolated case. Not only old investors like him, but also some well-known crypto VC institutions have recently announced their transformation and admitted that the returns on this round of primary investment were very poor.
But from the perspective of cryptocurrency history, 2024 to 2025 is a turbulent year. The approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF has attracted a large number of traditional financial institutions. After Trump came to power again, the crypto policy has ushered in an unprecedented loose environment. A series of favorable factors have caused the price of Bitcoin to break through $100,000 from the bottom of $15,000, setting a record high.
Investors expectations of a wild bull market reached a peak.
However, Ethereum, another important market leader, shattered investors’ dreams. Ethereum did not even hit a record high in this cycle, and DeFi and NFT, the two major price boosters in the past, did not see a boom. Its founder Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation were criticized. With the decline of ETH, the narratives of the second layer, re-staking, and ZK were disillusioned, and the performance of many related ecological tokens was disappointing.
The only hot spot - the craze for Meme coins, is to some extent also an expression of dissatisfaction among retail investors with the high valuations of VC coins. The returns and profits of VC coins have been divided up by VCs before they were listed on the exchange, leaving only retail investors to take over and endless decline.
But in this more brutal casino, only a very small number of savvy traders, insider traders and coin issuance groups made a fortune. Most retail investors who were crazy about Meme suffered increasing losses in one lottery scratch-off campaign after another, and finally realized that the so-called wealth effect was ultimately just a show of showing off for others.
So who is the winner? Foresight News interviewed several crypto practitioners with the above questions, and they gave their own answers.
Bitcoin holders: I won
Bitcoin buyers have undoubtedly made a lot of money in this cycle. On May 10, data from Bitcoin Magazine Pro showed that only 0.55% of Bitcoin addresses were still in a loss state after Bitcoin broke through $100,000, which shows that most Bitcoin players in the market are in a profitable state. As of press time, Bitcoin has broken through $110,000, setting a record high. No one has lost money from buying Bitcoin, and all buyers have made profits.
The NDV (NextGen Digital Venture) fund established in 2022 is one of them. Its founder Jason (@jhy 256) told Foresight News that the first phase of the NDV fund was liquidated in February this year, with a total return of 3.75 times, and it recently started financing for the second phase of the fund.
Jason has extensive experience in venture capital and has worked in institutions such as China Renaissance Capital and Qiming Venture Partners. In 2023, at the age of 34, he chose to leave Blue Pool Capital, a family office jointly established by Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai, and founded NextGen Digital Venture.
Jason said, In the wider world, there is still a lot of external buying. Many institutions dont even have 0.1% allocation. They may just buy 0.1% first, and they are not sensitive to the rise and fall. If traditional big money uses 1% of its funds to allocate Bitcoin, it will also be very impressive for Bitcoin as an asset class. He put most of the funds positions on GBTC in the first year, and switched strategies last year to cryptocurrency-related stocks such as Coinbase and Strategy. These operations undoubtedly hit the market trend.
When talking about the rise of Bitcoin, he said that the launch of spot ETFs played an important role. Traditional financial money can flow directly from ETFs to BTC, which is also an important reason why BTC can continue to outperform many altcoins. Perhaps Trumps election and the issuance of coins will give other digital currencies some new opportunities.
In January 2024, the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF became a milestone event in this cycle. So far, the total net inflow of Bitcoin spot ETFs has exceeded US$42.7 billion. Institutions represented by BlackRock and Fidelity have purchased Bitcoin spot ETFs in large quantities, and have become the clear winners in the market by virtue of early entry, low cost and stable holding. These funds mainly come from hedge funds, pension funds and family offices, and also mark the transformation of the crypto market from retail speculation to institutional investment.
Not only that, various listed companies have also joined the ranks of Bitcoin buyers and made a fortune.
Strategy, a US-listed company, has not only seen its stock price soar, but also its floating profit is astonishingly large due to its aggressive buying style. As of May 18, 2025, Strategy holds 576,230 bitcoins, with a total purchase price of approximately US$40.18 billion, and an average price of approximately US$69,726 per bitcoin. After bitcoin broke through US$109,700, its floating profit once exceeded US$23.039 billion. Metaplanet, a Japanese listed company, holds a total of 7,800 bitcoins, with a historical average purchase price of 13.51 million yen per bitcoin (approximately US$941.657 million). Based on the price of US$109,000 for bitcoin, Metaplanet has a floating profit of US$121 million on its bitcoins.
Since its birth, the long-term growth of Bitcoin has not disappointed any diamond-hand player. Even the island nation of El Salvador, which has been increasing its holdings, has a floating profit of more than US$357 million in Bitcoin.
Mining machines, crypto infrastructure companies, and financial derivatives derived from BTC have naturally also made a lot of money. Take Canaan Technology as an example. The financial report data shows that in the fourth quarter of 2024, revenue increased by 80.9% and mining revenue increased by 312.5%. The company mentioned that customer orders in the first quarter of 2025 have been scheduled to the second quarter, indicating that the momentum of mining machine sales continues.
Meme Big Winner: Earning Millions of Dollars with a Single Coin
The current total profit has reached 100 times, mainly including the profits from AI, deSci and TRUMP last year. Yuyue told Foresight News,
The well-known on-chain KOL yuyue seized the TRUMP opportunity and made millions of dollars and became famous overnight. According to the circulating community pictures, she spent 158,000 US dollars to buy TRUMP, and her floating profit once exceeded 2 million US dollars.
She joined the circle in March 2022. At first, she just wanted to find an internship. Later, she met more people through airdrops and communities and reviewed market opportunities. Finally, when the opportunity came, she dared to take a position and finally got a big result.
In the crypto world over the past year, the track with the greatest wealth effect is undoubtedly Meme. Since the beginning of 2024, Meme coins have set off an unprecedented craze in the crypto market. From WIF and BONK on the Solana chain, to PEPE and TURBO on Ethereum, to DEGEN and MOCHI, which have quickly become popular on the Base chain, and even Meme assets in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the emergence of each hot spot has quickly attracted tens of thousands of retail investors and speculators to pour in.
Meme is no longer just entertainment, it has become a new experimental field for wealth distribution mechanisms. According to statistics from Coingecko and Dune Analytics, in 2024, the total market value of Meme coins soared from less than $2 billion to more than $60 billion, with an increase of more than 2,900% during the year. Among them, the market value of Meme coins on the Solana chain alone accounts for more than 1/3. WIF once rose from an initial market value of less than $1 million to more than $3 billion, and early holders even received more than 100,000 times the return. A user bought a new Meme coin BOME for less than $200 in April 2024, and the account value soared to more than $2 million in just 72 hours.
These meme coins often have no traditional technical background, and do not even rely on a complete project white paper. Just a one-sentence slogan or a simple dog avatar can trigger millions of dollars in trading volume.
The craziest meme wealth effect belongs to the meme coin TRUMP before Trump officially entered the White House. Traders such as 0x Sun, Daewoo, Leng Jing, CryptoD, etc. made tens of millions of dollars in profit from a single coin, which set off the entire crypto circle and countless people exclaimed. However, there are only a few players who can make such huge profits from a single coin. Position management and risk preference are also a big deal.
Yuyue admitted that she is quite flexible in position management, and does not hold any other long-term positions except Bitcoin. In terms of trading style, There are currently two styles: the sweep chain style and the two-stage style. These two styles are distinct, but I prefer the two-stage style, which emphasizes narrative.
She said that market participants must have their own judgment on the target. For example, if focusing on the second stage, it is necessary to pay attention to the narrative and the market value estimation range, and trade on these basis. The narrative here is not imaginary, but can be supported by the K-line and the market.
The OG player on the chain, Bitcoin Factory, also made a fortune in the meme coin gold rush. He told Foresight News, In the last cycle, I started my on-chain trading journey after earning dozens of times the high return in just a few weeks with SHIB. In the meme trading in the past one or two years, the profit was around millions, and I seized the opportunities in ORDI, GOAT, TRUMP and other targets.
However, it is not easy to get high returns. Those around me who get high returns often invest a lot of time and energy in on-chain research. This is what they deserve, and most people may not be able to do it. He sighed.
Trading Meme coins is more challenging than trading mainstream coins. Bitcoin giants say that Meme trading requires grasping big figures, big trends, and big narratives. Big hot spots are also very important. Searching for keywords or contract addresses on Twitter can also be used to observe short-term popularity.
The profits from his Meme coins will also be used to buy Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin accounts for 85% of the position, Ethereum BNB accounts for about 13%, and the rest are some alt-Meme coins.
The myth of Meme coin’s wealth was temporarily extinguished due to the sluggish market, and even large orders were rarely posted on social media. Many Meme coin players who dreamed of getting rich quickly were repeatedly frustrated in the scratch-off activities, and were repeatedly anxious between zeroing out and selling out. Some people chose to return to mainstream altcoins, while others chose to dig for gold in other tracks.
Perhaps, every Meme player who is unwilling to leave is waiting for the time when the altcoin market will fully recover. Some market players have achieved great results through effective strategies and perseverance. They are the airdrop players.
Airdrop from the sky: From national carnival to game involution
In 2023, the Arbitrum airdrop became my highest-return project, earning me approximately RMB 30 million, well-known airdrop player Feng Mi told Foresight News.
He has more than ten years of experience in traditional finance, and has worked in hedge trading and investment banking. He entered the crypto circle due to ICO in 2017, and discovered the opportunity to make money through DeFi in 2020. From then on, he has been unstoppable, and his speed of making wealth is even faster than mining or cryptocurrency speculation.
After that, Wormhole brought higher book profits in 2024, and the corresponding value at the time of TGE even exceeded ARB. But unfortunately, the timing of collection and sale was not well grasped, and in the end it was only brilliant on paper, with limited actual gains.
The golden age of airdrops is not far from us. In the crypto bull market from 2020 to 2021, the surge in DeFi, NFT, and Layer 1/Layer 2 projects provided fertile soil for airdrops. The airdrop activities of DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, 1inch, and dYdX easily brought thousands of dollars in revenue, attracting a large number of retail investors and early studios to enter. During this period, the threshold for airdrops was low, and ordinary users could participate through simple wallet operations or social tasks. That was indeed the golden age of airdrops. At its peak, Feng Mi, a top airdrop player, told Foresight News, When ENS issued the coin, the single number reward for the airdrop exceeded 100,000 yuan, and multiple numbers directly became rich. At PSP (Paraswap), one number started at 10,000 US dollars.
The subsequent fur-pulling industry gradually shifted from wild growth to professionalization. Studios improved efficiency by creating accounts in batches and automating scripts. However, even so, the industry still has a lot of airdrop wealth effects.
The airdrops of testnet projects such as Aptos and Sui have further fueled the craze for free-to-air trading, with some studios using the multi-account strategy to earn millions of dollars. To prevent Sybil Attacks, project owners have generally raised the threshold for airdrops, such as introducing identity verification, on-chain behavior analysis, or community contribution requirements. This has made it more difficult for retail investors to free-to-air, and studios with technical advantages and resources have gradually taken a dominant position.
When talking about his experience, Feng Mi said frankly that, first of all, choosing the right project is the most important. The airdrop that can really change your life must come from a project with products, innovation, capital, and pattern. It cannot be made up by swiping 100 low-quality activities. It is better to invest heavily in 3 projects that are sure to win than to cast a net on 30 projects with no certainty. Secondly, participants must learn to understand what kind of people they want to screen out, understand the logic of the protocol, understand the characteristics of the protocol, and have a very clear overall view. The more they are like real users and put themselves in the developers perspective, the easier it will be to be counted into the allocation rules and reward models of high-quality weights in the future. In addition, just like the sensitivity of professional traders, you must be decisive when it is time to stop losses, and give up cleanly.
In his view, arbitrage is not an isolated behavior, but a typical structural arbitrage method. Participants can use arbitrage as the left hand of stable returns: low cost, high odds, and time for opportunity. At the same time, use the right hand to configure positions in the secondary market, hold basic assets such as BTC/ETH, or boldly bet on some long-term and highly elastic speculative projects such as meme. Eat certainty on the left and fight uncertainty on the right. At present, this is a more stable and more cycle-crossing combination in my eyes.
The airdrop track remains hot in 2024. Projects such as Starknet, Hyperliquid, Magic Eden, and Pudgy Penguins have distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in tokens through airdrops. Subsequently, the market situation changed suddenly, from highs to lows. Those who chose to sell at the beginning kept their big profits, while those who chose diamond hands and chose to wait and see became the exit liquidity of fast runners.
In this regard, Fengmi reflected that Mao has never been an assembly line-style mechanical operation. Behind every account, every TX, and every project token, I personally interacted, recorded, waited, and even lost money. They are not just numbers, but more like a game of strategy and luck, and also a kind of extremely strong emotional investment. A project has poured a lot of effort and time, Gas and principal, and because of this, it is an emotional investment. But it is this emotion that has become my biggest failure in this round: I was reluctant to sell when I should sell, and I kept waiting when I should leave. As a result, I handed over the profits that I had already obtained to the market, and just accompanied it for a while.
Market players have winners and losers, and the winners are always a minority. Subsequently, both individuals and studios have been repeatedly counter-emptied. When airdrops such as zkSync and LayerZero were released, the market was filled with wailing. Small retail investors received very few airdrops, and the airdrop studios suffered heavy losses and were even forced to close. The project owners were criticized, but their attitude was quite tough. Since then, most projects in the market have also begun to follow suit, issuing fewer or even no airdrops.
Feng Mi told Foresight News, “The era of wild money mining has long ended. The bonus window where everyone can make their first pot of gold from the chain has closed. It is no longer a stage where you can earn rewards by simply interacting with a few buttons.”
When most players find it difficult, it is even more difficult to persist. Many players miss the opportunity to make money due to lack of patience. Fengmi analyzed that the reason why many players cannot persist is that airdrops are delayed, gas is constantly invested, interactions are boring, tasks are becoming more and more formal, and points are becoming more and more rampant. When rewards are delayed, doubts will erode execution little by little, and complaints will follow. But the real big results are often hidden behind those persistences that you almost want to give up and almost think are ineffective. You have to believe that the results never happen first, but are believed first, and then they will be fulfilled.
Fengmi also shared the failure cases he encountered in the process of wooling. Babylon did a lot of BTC staking interactions and invested a lot of money and attention. As a result, the airdrop distribution was extremely limited, and the returns were so dismal that it was unbearable to look at. In addition, he invested heavily in the entire Move ecosystem, including Aptos, and invested more than 4 million US dollars at the peak of its market value. As a result, the ecological projects collectively failed, none of the ecological projects were strong, and the official also lacked a sense of direction and top-level operational capabilities.
Airdrops also have their ups and downs.
However, compared to buying coins, airdropping may still be one of the few tracks where you can make a lot of money from a small initial capital. The multi-account strategy and the boutique account strategy are still practical means, but they also pay more attention to methods. The game of fighting wits and courage with the project party still tests the cognition and execution of the players.
Conclusion
The only constant in the crypto market is change. Although it may be an exaggeration to say that one day in the cryptocurrency world is like one year in the real world, it also reflects the rapid pace of change. If you cant see clearly and grasp it, the opportunity will be gone. For those who are constantly pursuing more wealth in the industry, this is undoubtedly the most tormenting.
However, the most fascinating thing about the crypto circle is that every time market participants think that they have reached the end of the wealth effect, there is always a field in some inconspicuous corner that is thriving and gathering strength for its subsequent rise. Through another amazing wealth effect, it continues to attract curious young people to rush in to dig for gold.
