Original author: Jademont
Who has made money in this bull market so far?
First of all, it is definitely not VC. Most of the projects invested by VC have not started to issue coins yet. Even those coins with high FDV and low circulation that are criticized by the community seem to have a book value of dozens of times, but if there is no copycat bull market coming next, when the VC unlocks, a 90% drop is not too much.
Secondly, they are not retail investors. Most retail investors speculate on memes , copycats, and open contracts. It cannot be said that there are no retail investors who make money, but they are very few, and the probability is about the same as playing the lottery.
From observation, there are several categories of people who make money:
1. Bitcoin holder. If you hold Bitcoin , the whole world will work for you. It was 25,000 this time last year, and now it is 65,000, which is a huge profit. It is also very certain that it will rise to 100,000 within a year, but most people don’t think this increase is worth it, so they can’t make money from BTC, which is reasonable.
2. Centralized exchanges. Exchanges have always been at the top of the food chain in the crypto , and the entire crypto is basically working for exchanges. Of course, working in an exchange also carries huge risks, with no fixed place to live, drifting overseas, with Yancheng inside and the SEC outside. The risk is proportional to the return, which is reasonable.
3. CeFi platforms such as Tether . Tether earned $4.7 billion in the first quarter, more than most exchanges. Of course, strictly speaking, this money was not earned from the crypto. In addition, some crypto financial service providers also quietly made money happily, such as custodial financial management platforms, etc. They provided good services to the crypto and made reasonable money.
4. The operation teams of some public chain/ DeFi products. DeFi products such as Uniswap actually have a large flow, and the transaction fees have nothing to do with the holders of governance tokens. Almost all of them go into the pockets of the team. This income is actually considerable. The Base team may have tens of millions of dollars in fees contributed by a product called Friendtech. The Tron public chain also makes a lot of money from daily USDT transfers, and most of it goes into the pockets of the team. These projects do not make money by selling coins to retail investors, but by developing businesses. In fact, they are similar to traditional Internet businesses. They are the hope of the crypto and are worth learning from for all project parties . Especially with the example of MakerDAO, Uni also has a proposal to prepare dividends. These are all alphas of this bull market.
5. For high-market-cap coin-issuing projects whose main purpose is to sell coins, if they have already launched CEX, they have already made a lot of money in this round. They don’t need any income. For example, some ZK projects have only two or three digit daily active users on the chain after the airdrop, which does not affect their market value of tens of billions or hundreds of billions. Market makers are happy to help the team sell coins. Some other highly controlled DeFi coins are all GameFi coins with few active people in the studio, and the situation is similar. These cancers in the crypto are constantly sucking blood from the crypto. The trading teams behind these cancers are of course accomplices in making money. What’s funny is that I saw someone bragging on Twitter a while ago about how much money the trading project made. This kind of spectacle only exists in the crypto.
There are some others, such as quantitative teams, etc., who earn money through hard work. I will not list them one by one. If anyone has more discoveries, please reply to the message and let me envy you.
However, through the above analysis, you can consider building a permanent profit portfolio in the crypto, and choose the main holdings from 1-4, and avoid 5.
