Reviewing my journey of making 10 million US dollars in the cryptocurrency market at the age of 22.

My journey of making $10 million in the crypto market at 22.

Author: Vida; Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

A 22-year-old KOL named Vida published a long tweet on Twitter, detailing his story of earning $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 wealth accumulation journey.

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How does it feel to have a net worth of $10 million at the age of 22? This is my story.

First of all, how did I accumulate wealth? I started doing internet business at the age of 14. From the age of 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 has always been 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 in China. For example, everyone in the West now knows about ChatGPT, but most Chinese people don’t.

The result is that at the age of 19, I accumulated a wealth of 500,000 dollars. Then I entered the cryptocurrency field. I heard from one of my Chinese clients that he made millions of dollars 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 dollars 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 portfolio was only 3 times, and 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 about 1 million dollars. There were setbacks during this journey, such as shorting BTC at a price of $32,000 and being liquidated after the news of Tesla accepting Bitcoin, resulting in a loss of $50,000. That was probably the biggest loss I calculated as a percentage of net worth.

But that incident made me think: If retail investors buy in after the news about Tesla, if I could get this news first, buy and sell to those retail investors, I could profit from it.

So, in March 2021, I seized the opportunity. Whenever Elon mentioned Doge or dog-related keywords on Twitter, the price of Dogecoin would rise. At that time, I had my developer create a monitoring bot to track every tweet by Elon. 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 developer created an automated Dogecoin trading bot for me 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 I needed to automate the process to stay competitive. So in April 2021, my developer created an automated 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 sell it to retail investors a few minutes later. The same strategy applied to other mentioned coins 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 drive the market, but also announcements from certain exchanges, especially the “big three.” If I could be the first to enter these specific events, I could profit 100%. Therefore, I started building infrastructure to target these events.

Eventually, in 2022, I had one of the fastest bots in the market. I considered my business similar to MEV, where I took advantage of people’s mistakes, desires, and inefficiencies.

Through my bot business, by 2022, at the age of 21, my net worth reached $4 million, and I had four developer employees.

In the bear market of 2022, I continuously improved my latency advantage. My goal was to “work hard in the bear market and reap the rewards in 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 by trading tokens, news like Elon’s tweets, etc. I also manually traded in some major events such as SVB Federal Aid, XRP case victory, Ethereum ETF, and Grayscale victory.

A few days after trading the Grayscale victory event, at the age of 22, my net worth exceeded $10 million.

Reaching this net worth was a milestone in my life, but I believe it’s not my limit. I still work until 4 am, optimizing my bots to stay competitive.

I know the risks of achieving this net worth at such a young age: laziness, arrogance, concentration of investment portfolio, and gambling. Just look at those unfortunate examples on Coinfessions. I won’t make the same mistakes as those people.

• I spend very little time on entertainment. Most of my time is dedicated to hard work or learning new technologies and knowledge.

• I know there are people better than me in different fields, so I am happy to associate with exceptional individuals.

• In addition to cryptocurrencies, I also participate in traditional finance to achieve asset diversification.

• 60% of my assets are in cryptocurrencies. My current cryptocurrency portfolio consists of 90% USDC and USDT because I need stablecoins for bot trading and news trading operations, and 10% Bitcoin spot positions for long-term holdings.

• 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. In 2023, I am generally optimistic about emerging markets and technology because I believe the high interest rates in the US won’t last long.

• For me, I don’t like gambling, but in cryptocurrency trading, gambling and trading are part of human nature. So whenever I want to prove myself right in uncertain trades, like shorting $CYBER and buying PUT options for $NVDA and $COIN, I 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.

• Look for arbitrage opportunities based on information asymmetry. There are many opportunities here.

• Outsource unimportant work to people who are cheaper or better skilled than you.

• Communicate more with people who make money and stay away from ordinary communities like certain coin holders.

• Don’t gamble or blindly follow the crowd like ordinary people. Focus on the certainty of trading.

• Discover the efficiency of the market and take advantage of it.

The key is not to compete for speed, but to compete for a continuous and steady flow.

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