In this bull market, most retail investors speculate on meme coins and futures contracts, with very few examples of making money. Besides these methods, what other ways are there to accumulate wealth in a bull market? This article is based on an article by Waterdrip, compiled, translated, and written by PANews.
“Is the era of ‘picking up money’ over? Is it getting harder for retail investors to make money through cryptocurrencies?”
In this bull market, who has actually made money so far? First of all, it is definitely not the VCs, as most of the projects they invested in have not even started issuing coins yet. Even those coins with high FDV and low circulation that are being criticized by the community may seem to have increased several times on paper, but if there is no incoming bull market, when the VCs unlock, a 90% drop is not uncommon.
Secondly, it is not the retail investors either. Most retail investors speculate on memes, play with altcoins, trade futures, and although there are some who have made money, they are very few, similar to the probability of playing the lottery.
Observing closely, those who have made money fall into these categories:
1. Bitcoin holders. Holding Bitcoin means the world works for you. Last year at this time it was at $25,000, and now at $65,000, a huge profit. It is highly probable that it will reach $100,000 within a year, but most people do not pay attention to this price increase and therefore do not make money from BTC, which is reasonable.
2. Centralized exchanges. Exchanges have always been at the top of the cryptocurrency food chain. The entire cryptocurrency market is essentially working for exchanges. Of course, running an exchange also comes with significant risks, as they are always on the move, facing uncertainties, both domestically and internationally, but risks and returns are proportional, which is reasonable.
3. CeFi platforms like Tether. Tether earned $4.7 billion in the first quarter, more than most exchanges. Strictly speaking, this money is not earned from the cryptocurrency market. In addition, some cryptocurrency financial service providers have also quietly made good profits, such as asset management platforms, etc. They provide good services to the cryptocurrency market, making their profits reasonable.
4. Operating teams of some public chains/DeFi products. DeFi products like Uniswap have a large user base, and transaction fees are not related to token holders but mostly go into the team’s pockets, which is quite substantial. The Base team’s fee income from Friendtech products may be tens of millions of dollars. The Tron public chain generates substantial income from daily USDT transfers, most of which also go to the team’s pockets. These projects do not rely on drawing pie charts to sell tokens to retail investors but rather on developing businesses to make money, similar to traditional internet businesses. They are the hope of the cryptocurrency market and all project parties should learn from them. Especially with MakerDAO as a role model and Uni preparing for dividends, these are the alphas of this bull market.
5. Projects with high market value whose main purpose is token sales. If they are already listed on a centralized exchange, they have made a lot of money in this round. They do not need much income, for example, some ZK projects, even if the on-chain daily active users drop to two or three digits after the airdrop, it does not affect their market value of tens to hundreds of billions, and market makers are happily helping the team sell tokens. Similarly, for some DeFi tokens with high control but few active team members, it is a similar situation. These are the cancerous tumors of the cryptocurrency market, constantly sucking blood from the market. The manipulation teams behind these tumors are also accomplices in making money. It is ridiculous to see people boasting on Twitter about how much money they have made from manipulating projects, a phenomenon unique to the cryptocurrency market.
There are also some quant teams, etc., making hard-earned money, but they are not listed one by one. However, through the above analysis, it is worth considering creating a cryptocurrency portfolio that can earn money consistently, mainly selecting targets from 1-4 and avoiding 5.
Related reports
10X Research sees four obstacles to the market: Ethereum leveraged positions still high, large number of meme coins unlocking, net outflow of funds…
No inter-trading! Analyzing this round of meme coins in the bull market using Ponzi’s “Three Disc Theory”
AMA Highlights: Revealing the bottom line of the bull market! How top institutions and analysts envision the second half of 2024-