Original author: Jademont, CEO of Waterdrip Capital
Editor's note: Today is June 18, the carnival of e-commerce, but for cryptocurrency users, it is not a happy day. Bitcoin and various altcoins are "falling continuously", with almost no signs of rebound. There are complaints on various platforms. Reference reading: "The third "519" this year is coming". If everyone is losing money, where has the money gone? Waterdrip Capital CEO Jademont analyzed this on X, and BlockBeats reprinted the full text as follows:
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 VC unlocks, a 90% drop is not too much.
Secondly, they are not retail investors. Most retail investors speculate on memes, play 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. Last year, it was 25,000, 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 care about this increase, 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 cryptocurrency industry, and the entire cryptocurrency industry 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 in the city and the SEC outside, and 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 cryptocurrency circle. In addition, some cryptocurrency financial service providers also quietly made money happily, such as custodial financial management platforms. They provided good services to the cryptocurrency circle and made reasonable money.
4. The operating teams of some public chain/DeFi products. DeFi products such as Uniswap actually have a large flow of traffic, 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 earned tens of millions of dollars in fees from the contribution of 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 currency circle and are worth learning from for all project parties. In particular, with the example of MakerDAO, Uni also has a proposal to prepare dividends. These are all Alphas in this bull market.
5. For high-market-cap coin-issuing projects whose main purpose is to sell coins, if they have already been listed on CEX, they have already made a lot of money in this round. They don’t need any income. For example, some ZK projects only have 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, all GameFi coins with few active people in the studio, are also in a similar situation. These cancers in the currency circle are constantly sucking blood from the currency circle. 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 currency circle.
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 portfolio to make money in the cryptocurrency world, and choose the main holdings from 1-4, avoiding 5.
