Author: Vida
Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow
A 22-year-old KOL named Vida published a long tweet on Twitter, detailing his story of making $10 million in the cryptocurrency market.
Success in wealth is not accidental. Persistence, intelligence, execution, and keeping up with trends. We can gain many insights from Vida’s journey of wealth accumulation.
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How does it feel to have $10 million in net assets at the age of 22? This is my story.
First of all, how did I accumulate wealth? I started working in the Internet business at the age of 14. From 14 to 19, I made money by running game servers and selling products from the West to the East or from the East to the West. I called it geographical arbitrage.
There is always an information gap between China and the West. For example, the labor cost in China is usually 1/7 of that in the West. The latest technology in the West is more advanced than that in China. For example, everyone in the West knows about ChatGPT, but most Chinese people don’t.
The result is that at the age of 19, I accumulated a fortune of 500,000. Then I entered the cryptocurrency field. I heard from one of my Chinese clients that he made millions of dollars in wealth through cryptocurrency mining and running online gambling sites. In 2020, I became a holder of ETH and BTC.
There was an inexplicable problem: My father is a trader (he made $2 million in real estate and stocks), unfortunately, he believed that cryptocurrencies were in a bubble in January 2021, so he asked me to sell my holdings of ETH and BTC. At that time, my investment portfolio was only 3 times, and selling my ETH at $969 was a big mistake.
But it was still enough. By the age of 20, my net worth was about $1 million. There were setbacks on this journey as well. For example, I shorted BTC at a price of $32,000 and was liquidated after Tesla announced its acceptance of Bitcoin, losing $50,000. That was probably the biggest loss in terms of net worth percentage.
But that event made me think: If I could get the news right after the Tesla announcement and buy in, I could profit by selling to retail investors.
So, in March 2021, I seized the opportunity. Whenever Elon mentioned Doge or keywords related to dogs on Twitter, the price of Dogecoin would rise. At that time, I had my developers create a monitoring bot to track Elon’s every tweet. Then, when Musk tweeted, I would manually buy.
I made some successful attempts, but later realized that I had to automate the trading to be competitive. Therefore, in April 2021, my developers created an automatic trading bot for Dogecoin based on Elon’s tweets. It was a huge success, and I made at least $500,000 from that bot.
I had several successful trades, but later realized that I needed to automate these transactions in order to stay competitive. So in April 2021, my developer created a Dogecoin trading bot based on Elon’s tweets. It was a huge success, and I made at least $500,000 from that bot.
In 2021, whenever Elon tweeted, I would buy Dogecoin and then sell it to retail investors a few minutes later. The same goes for other mentioned coins, such as $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 drive the market, but also announcements from certain exchanges, especially 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 target these events.
Eventually, in 2022, I had one of the fastest bots in the market. I believe my business is similar to MEV, where I stay ahead and profit from people’s mistakes, desires, and inefficiencies.
Through my bot business, by 2022, at the age of 21, my net worth had reached $4 million, and I had four developer employees.
During the bear market in 2022, I continued to improve my latency advantage. My goal was to “work hard during the bear market and reap the rewards during the bull market.” I worked an average of 10 hours a day, building new bots, optimizing latency, and participating in major events like the FTX-Binance acquisition.
In 2023, my efforts in optimizing bots, building infrastructure, and trading skills paid off. I made a lot of money through my bots from token sales, Elon’s tweets, and other news. I also manually traded some major events, such as the SVB federal bailout, 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 is not my limit. I still work until 4 am, optimizing my bots to stay competitive.
I know that the risks of achieving this net worth at this age are laziness, arrogance, portfolio concentration, and gambling. Just look at those unfortunate examples on Coinfessions. I won’t make the same mistakes as those people.
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I spend very little time on entertainment. Most of my time is spent working hard or learning new technologies and knowledge.
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I know there are people better than me in different fields, so I am happy to interact with excellent people.
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In addition to cryptocurrencies, I also participate in the traditional financial field for asset diversification.
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60% of my assets are cryptocurrencies. My current cryptocurrency portfolio includes 90% USDC and USDT, as I need stablecoins for bot trading and news trading business, and 10% Bitcoin spot holdings for long-term holding.
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40% of my assets are in traditional finance, including 10-30 year US bonds, Chinese indices, Vietnamese indices, Chinese technology, US technology, and a small portion of the S&P 500 index. I am generally optimistic about emerging markets and technology in 2023, as I believe high interest rates in the US will not last long.
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For me, I don’t like gambling, but in cryptocurrency trading, gambling and trading are inherent human nature. So whenever I want to prove that I am right in uncertain trades, for example, shorting $CYBER and buying PUT options for $NVDA and $COIN, I test with $1-10,000 to see if I am right or wrong.
My advice to young people:
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Find your passion and work hard. You need to work harder than your competitors to surpass them.
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Look for arbitrage opportunities based on information asymmetry. There are many opportunities here.
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Outsource unimportant work to people who are cheaper or more skilled than you.
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Communicate with people who make money and stay away from ordinary community groups like holders of certain specific coins.
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Don’t gamble or blindly follow like ordinary people. Focus on the certainty of trading.
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Discover the efficiency of the market and take advantage of it.
The key is not to compete for the first, but to compete for continuous waves.
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