Trading in Chaos: My 2025 with Bitget

Original Author: CryptoSAWA (X: @0xsawa)

Introduction | One Thing I Learned in 2025: Defend First, Then Attack

We once looked forward to 2025 with immense anticipation, with sentiment peaking after the "crypto-friendly president" Trump took office; however, the market took a sharp turn for the worse after October, catching everyone by surprise.

To summarize my 2025 in one sentence: I accepted the chaos of the market and made "survival" my top priority.

I too once believed in the eternal bull market, believed in narrative innovation, believed that "spot is fine." But this year, the market taught me in the most direct way:

When fortune favors, heaven and earth lend their strength; when luck departs, even heroes are not free.

This piece is not a report card, but a contrast—how I survived a series of mistaken expectations, and how I saw my true choices of the year reflected in the annual statement Bitget provided me.

1) Observations on Market Changes in 2025

My 2025 could be described as a catastrophic start.

At the beginning of the year, my judgment of the market was highly optimistic:

I believed macro factors and the Fed would take a backseat, with the real variable being Trump; ETH would set new all-time highs, becoming the second crypto asset to break a trillion-dollar market cap, and altcoin season would arrive as scheduled.

Looking back now, I can only smile wryly: entering 2025 with such a complete, yet utterly wrong, understanding and still being alive today is truly a medical miracle.

With such a strong bullish expectation, I chose to go long on the ETH/BTC ratio starting from 0.022, meaning going long ETH and short BTC. The result is known to all: the ratio kept falling, I kept averaging down, until I was close to liquidation, and my mentality completely collapsed.

During that time, I happened to be attending a conference in Hong Kong. The market combined with my emotions meant I was almost escaping reality every day. I drank late into the night, just hoping to wake up slower the next day, to face the brutal numbers in my account a little less.

Fortunately, the ETH/BTC ratio found support and rebounded around 0.0177. I eventually broke even and closed the position, but in doing so, I also missed ETH's subsequent main upward wave.

This is the first lesson I learned in 2025:

No extreme, no trend; no trend, no extreme.

Translated into trading behavior, this means: first, going long against the trend before the downtrend reaches an extreme; second, not daring to go long before the uptrend reaches an extreme.

Another misjudgment came from my obsession with "altcoin season."

I bought a basket of altcoin spot positions, only to end up holding a bag. I also attempted to make up for missing out on ETH by going long PEPE. Although I made money, the holding experience was terrible. In the end, it really would have been better to just go long ETH directly.

The second lesson came more cruelly and thoroughly:

Altcoin season no longer exists.

This also corresponds to the two most profound divergences in the market:

1. The divergence between US stocks and crypto: overall liquidity in the crypto market dried up, with funds flowing into the higher certainty of US stocks;

2. The divergence between majors and alts: altcoin narratives were thoroughly disproven, with most alts entering a final stage of gradual decline.

The core reason behind this divergence is that the false dream built by blockchain (emerging technology) in the crypto market has shattered. Everyone realized it solves ethereal problems with little connection to reality. Like over-built, unfinished buildings, even if they appear magnificent on the surface, they are actually flashy without substance.

2) My Annual Keywords: Wait / Defend / Restrain

As mentioned earlier, after experiencing twists and turns for most of the year, I "turned over a new leaf." Starting in September, I only traded ETH contracts, specifically, I only shorted ETH.

Shorting is difficult and was not smooth sailing. In the process of wrestling with ETH, I gradually developed a stable trading model, which are also my annual keywords: Wait / Defend / Restrain.

Wait: Observe more, act less, avoid forced trades.

Defend: First learn not to lose money, then talk about how to make money.

Restrain: Control leverage, stabilize emotions, let the system make decisions for me.

Looking at asset and trading concentration, my choices have become very clear:

Contract Trading: Only trade mainstream assets like ETH, deliberately avoiding high-volatility, low-liquidity pure narrative tokens.

Spot Allocation: Hold BGB and PARTI without leverage, as a small alpha bet.

TradFi: Experiment with small positions in precious metals like gold and silver.

These are all things I saw from my Bitget annual report. The report is like a mirror, reflecting my changes.

I started using Bitget in March 2024, walking together for 664 days. In 2025, I made 651 trades, traded 54 spot pairs, and achieved an overall account profit of 10%.

The data might seem unremarkable, but it also hides stormy seas: At the end of September, I shorted ETH at a阶段性底部 (stage bottom), encountered a rebound, held the position all the way, and finally stopped out at the peak of the rebound, losing 20% of my principal. This was similar in essence to going long the ETH/BTC ratio at the beginning of the year. Ultimately, it was human nature at play, failing to follow trading discipline, defeated by greed and fear.

All past experiences have shaped who I am today.

3) My Most Used Features on Bitget: Contract Trading & TradFi

I still love trading, enjoy the博弈 (game/contest), and am willing to keep improving.

Bitget's contract experience in execution, depth, and stability allows me to focus more on judgment and risk control, rather than being interrupted by the tool itself.

As for TradFi, especially precious metals, volatility increased dramatically at the end of 2025. I have to say Bitget was a timely rain, making it easier for users to participate in the precious metals行情 (market trend).

I increasingly feel the world is entering a chaotic era, financial markets are becoming more chaotic, and crypto is declining. In this situation, US stocks and precious metals might be better choices. Diversification itself is also a form of defense.

Finally, I must mention Bitget Launchpool. There were 33 rounds in 2025. As a BGB Holder since 2024, all I can say is, the passive income from LP is稳稳的幸福 (steady happiness)～

4) My Mindset Changes, Growth, and Summary in 2025

In 2025, I finally truly accepted three things:

Acknowledge Chaos: The market is not a predictable system; many "correct outcomes" are just one realization among probabilities.

Accept Probability Trading: We are not predicting the future, but judging probability distributions and deciding whether to bet and how much to bet.

Change the Goal from "Make the Most" to "Lose the Least": When you try your best not to lose money, what remains is only a question of how much you make; survival itself is an advantage.

When I stopped obsessing over "winning big once" and instead focused on "staying at the table," trading actually became simpler.

Slow is fast. I've started to truly believe in the power of compound interest.

The suggestions given by GetAgent based on my annual statement were the same. Looking at the results, my 2025 was built on the slow accumulation of multiple small positive returns. There was a single 20% drawdown during the year, but overall, positive returns were maintained.

This in itself illustrates one thing: What truly determines the outcome is not whether I judged correctly once, but whether I let mistakes spiral out of control.

5) Outlook for 2026: Left for the Next Year, and for the Readers

I believe the main narrative for 2026 will be RWA. I'm watching two things: first, gold tokenization driven by the World Gold Council; second, stock tokenization driven by Nasdaq.

Real-world asset tokenization has been discussed for a while, but the market is a mixed bag, filled with many劣质项目 (low-quality projects) that wear the RWA cloak but are actually backed by垃圾资产 (junk assets) at their core.

I believe 2026 will see the大浪淘沙 (the tide washing away the sand), with RWA accelerating onto the right track, tokenizing优质资产 (quality assets) and allowing them to flow more freely.

Writing this, I'm reminded of a line from *The Three-Body Problem*:

The primary goal of civilization is not expansion, but survival.

Those civilizations that truly survive are not the most radical, nor the most dazzling, but the ones that first accepted reality, lowered expectations, and proactively adjusted their own structure. In a highly uncertain, almost unpredictable universe, survival itself is a victory.

The market is actually no friendlier than the universe.

It is equally indifferent, equally unexplanatory, and will not change its way of operating because of your effort or belief. What you can do is always limited: you cannot control when volatility appears, nor decide when a narrative is established or collapses, nor even guarantee that one correct judgment will definitely bring the corresponding result. The only things you can control are your own exposure, your betting method, and whether you have an exit when things go wrong.

After 2025, I no longer try to understand every fluctuation, nor do I expect to seize every opportunity. What I care more about is, when my judgment fails, liquidity contracts, and emotions are rapidly amplified, whether my account can still withstand it, whether I still have the qualification to participate in the next round of博弈 (game/contest). As long as I can stay in the game, let time continue to flow, let compound interest continue to happen, even if the pace is slower, the returns seem less dazzling, it is still a path worth walking.

For me, this is what truly remained from 2025: no longer treating trading as a war that must be won, but seeing it as a relationship that requires long-term coexistence. Defend first, then attack; survive first, then talk about expansion.

Humans are ends, not means. I want to become myself.

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