As for the ups and downs of the cryptocurrency world, those retail investors who used to trade cryptocurrencies full-time are the ones who feel the most deeply. Zhang Zhang (pseudonym) is one of them.
Back to the day when the cryptocurrency circle collapsed, he stayed up all night. He said that as long as he closed his eyes, the past two years of day and night cryptocurrency trading life would flash through his mind.
Speaking of that experience again, Zhang Zhang described:
“It’s like two lost years.”
Zhang Zhang first came into contact with the cryptocurrency world in 2017, less than two years after graduating from college. On the recommendation of a friend, he registered for IOST, which was backed by investment tycoon Xu Xiaoping.
“As soon as I entered the market, I encountered a market that soared 80% in one day,” Zhang Zhang still remembers the details of his first transaction clearly. “I made several thousand yuan with a principal of more than 10,000 yuan, but I didn’t withdraw the money. In the end, I only had 3,000 yuan left before I left the market.”
However, this loss not only did not keep Zhang Zhang away from the cryptocurrency circle, but instead planted the seed of a gambler in his heart.
In 2018, Zhang Zhang made a small profit from his business; in early 2019, he entered the cryptocurrency world again, buying at a price of US$3,800 and continuously investing, investing more than 100,000 yuan. Because it happened to be a small bull market in the cryptocurrency world, he made tens of thousands of yuan.
After making money, Zhang Zhang felt that he had "good vision" and "picked up money every day". Later, he learned about some more exciting ways of playing: contracts and leverage.
At the beginning, Zhang Zhang opened a 5x leverage and started making money - losing money - making money - losing money over and over again. He started with making a few thousand dollars and losing a few thousand dollars, and developed to making tens of thousands and losing tens of thousands.
"I became numb and thought money was just a number," Zhang Zhang began to increase the leverage by 50 times, 100 times, and never lowered it again. "Later, I created my own 100x Stud Poker strategy, and stopped losses when the account was liquidated."
In 2020, Zhang Zhang became obsessed with the cryptocurrency world.
In March, the cryptocurrency market plummeted and he shorted his positions at a high multiple, resulting in a surge of several million on his account. However, he still did not withdraw the money and wanted to increase it tenfold again, so he went long again and ended up with a margin call.
After a margin call, he recharged his account, then did contract trading, then another margin call, and recharged his account again. Zhang Zhang soon lost all his savings and started borrowing money. The gap in his funds became larger and larger. In the end, he sold a house in Nanjing worth one million yuan to pay off his debts.
At this point, Zhang Zhang's state was close to insanity. In addition, the virtual currency market fluctuated 24 hours a day, so he was like many cryptocurrency speculators. He woke up at five or six in the morning, went to bed at one in the morning, and was extremely depressed.
“I was originally a long-term investor, but because I used leverage, I became a short-term speculator. From then on, I was up and down in the cryptocurrency circle, and the suffering was endless.”
By February of this year, Zhang Zhang, who was already heavily in debt, was still operating contract transactions at a high frequency, and had repeatedly rolled several thousand yuan of principal into millions through high leverage.
But he has never been able to escape unscathed. Until the eve of this crash, Zhang Zhang calculated that his losses from two years of cryptocurrency trading had reached more than two million.
The liquidation messages that came in the middle of the night finally broke Zhang Zhang down, and he decided to leave the cryptocurrency world forever.
“In the cryptocurrency world, many people get rich overnight, but few have a happy ending.”
Zhang Zhang described himself as a "rootless tree". He also said: "I know a civil servant who made more than 60 million yuan by investing in Litecoin in 2017. Now he is also in debt of millions. We are all people who will not have a good end."
