The four-year development history of the cryptocurrency industry is also the four years when cryptocurrencies grew most rapidly.
In 2020, due to the money-making effect of new stocks of star companies such as Nongfu Spring, Smoore, and Kuaishou, Hong Kong stocks were once popular and became a hot spot pursued by many investors. Although the Hong Kong Stock Exchange requires KYC, its regulatory approach of turning a blind eye has given investors the opportunity to exploit loopholes.
During that period, many investors known as "hundred-household marquises" appeared in the Hong Kong stock IPO market. They opened multiple brokerage accounts to increase their chances of winning the IPO, and some even had hundreds of accounts. It was not a problem for a family, relatives and friends to open thousands of accounts together, increasing the chances of winning the IPO.
Behind the feast of Hong Kong stock IPOs is actually the art of account management. By operating a large number of accounts, the winning rate can be increased, thereby obtaining a higher return on investment. This operation mode allows many ordinary investors to feel a simple and effective arbitrage opportunity. As the saying goes, "Learn three or two more tricks, and the leek will become a sickle." In that wave of Hong Kong stock IPOs, account management and arbitrage were one of the two or three tricks.
The same gameplay has been copied and iterated to the extreme in the cryptocurrency circle. Here, this operation is called "rubbing the hair".
Unlike stock IPOs, which have a fixed platform to participate in, in Crypto, if you want to get new cryptocurrencies, you need to interact with each project's products. Getting the project's token airdrop is the only goal of the swindlers. To give an inappropriate and unrealistic example, it is like buying and selling things on Pinduoduo when it was just established, in order to get the stocks that Pinduoduo will issue later. The tokens airdropped by the project can be circulated and exchanged for money, and the swindlers will have actual benefits.
This is not a native industry of cryptocurrency. Compared with investment institutions and individual cryptocurrency traders, the history of coin flippers has only been 4 years since 2020. Unlike investment or speculation, coin flippers are more like doing business. Basically, there is no need to understand the so-called new concept of Crypto, and only focus on costs and benefits.
In the past four years, the scale and voice of Lumao's business have grown, from an individual to a studio and even a company, becoming an extremely important part of the cryptocurrency industry. Of course, a crowded track means considerable profits, and there are many examples of people getting rich by Lumao, just like speculating in cryptocurrencies, and the returns are even more amazing than those from speculating in cryptocurrencies.
However, the cryptocurrency cycle is four years, and the wool-pulling industry, which has already gone through a cycle, is facing its own difficulties: the benefits given by the project parties to wool-pullers are no longer as generous as in the early days, there are more and more conditions, and the costs and benefits are not growing in direct proportion.
Especially the recent superstar projects have brought extremely little benefits to the people who have done the math. The time and money costs are completely disproportionate to the benefits. I wonder if the four-year development of math will go downhill this year.
I want to use this article to record the development history of LuMao. These may be the 4 years when cryptocurrency has grown most rapidly.
Uniswap airdrop, LuMao has its place
The origin of the wool-pulling industry was the Uniswap airdrop in 2020.
As the world's largest decentralized exchange, Uniswap's addresses that had interacted with the platform before September 1, 2020 were eligible, and each address received at least 400 UNI tokens. By the beginning of 2021, the value of these 400 UNI tokens had climbed to about $12,000.
"Money is not earned, it is blown by the wind." Because of UNI's airdrop, such voices have become more and more common.
Uniswap's airdrop made everyone realize the importance of multiple addresses and batch addresses, which is the essence of wool pulling. In the world of the cryptocurrency chain, there is no KYC (identity verification). A person can have countless addresses and use these addresses to earn more income. It is this that makes wool pulling a relatively stable and high-yield method, which is more certain than speculating in coins.
It was also from Uniswap that the wool-pulling craze began. In those years, everyone was a "wool-pulling party", and everyone had dozens or even hundreds of wallet addresses, wanting to replicate the next "wool-pulling riches" like UNI.
2021 and 2022 are the sweet years for the money-makers, as the wave of crypto airdrops continues to push up a group of newly wealthy people. dYdX and Ethereum Domain Name System (ENS) conducted large-scale airdrops in September and November 2021, respectively. The success of these projects has created many legendary stories of getting rich overnight. For example, a college student directly received 46,000 ENS tokens for his contribution to ENS, which was equivalent to more than $620,000 at the price of $13.63 per token at the time.
Among the past few batches of independent studios, the most common "origins" are Uniswap, dYdX and ENS.
However, with the advent of the crypto bear market, the number and size of airdrops began to decrease. During the bear market, many studios could only rely on the monthly unlocked token shares to barely survive, but most studios were not so lucky and disappeared from the cryptocurrency circle.
It was not until 2023 that some studios survived the "winter" and ushered in a brief recovery thanks to the issuance of tokens by several major projects, Arbitrum (ARB), Celestia (TIA) and Blur.
With the development over the years, the Luyangmao Studio has also gone through many tests and the survival of the fittest. Those that remain have been tempered and reached an unprecedented level of maturity.
This year may be the most glorious year for LuMao Studio after 2020.
With the approval of the Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin broke through $72,000, setting a new record high. The arrival of the bull market has driven more projects to issue coins, and has also brought new life to the LuMao Studio. In recent months, well-known projects such as Merlin, Unisat, ionet and ZKsync have successively issued coins. Although the market value is slightly inferior to the airdrops in previous years, these airdrop projects still attracted widespread attention.
Unlike the past, the hair-pulling industry has also experienced many evolutions and new challenges. Today, the hair-pulling business is more competitive, professional and commercial than ever before. The threshold for newcomers to enter this industry is getting higher and higher, and the competition is becoming more and more fierce. In the past, "hair-pulling" was a place where every grassroots hero could venture into, but now it is more like a high-threshold commercial game.
Grassroots heroes play business games
A typical LuMao studio, in addition to daily operating costs, such as water, electricity, rent and other expenses, also needs to pay the salaries of executive staff. "These have to be settled every month, about hundreds of thousands. So basically all the studios are in second- and third-tier cities to reduce staff consumption and venue rental costs." Xiao Zhi (@shut_nice1) is in a LuMao studio team, he revealed to BlockBeats.
In order to obtain more resource support and liquidity support, some studios will also register for business licenses and apply for government subsidies.
With the development of the cryptocurrency industry, the once free and undisciplined grassroots industry has gradually become industrialized, networked and corporatized. It now operates like a small startup company. It is no longer a grassroots heroic era where a few people get together, but a professional system. These studios have a clear organizational structure and division of labor. Through refined management and operation, they can maximize the use of resources and steadily increase profits.
Startup company configuration
"In terms of studio configuration, different teams have different genes, but there is no doubt that the most critical parts of the team are investment research and execution." Damon (@Damon_btc) is the manager of SohaDao studio. Their current focus is mostly on the Bitcoin ecosystem.
As the think tank behind the LuMao Studio, investment research colleagues are responsible for analyzing market trends and project data, identifying the most promising projects, and formulating the best LuMao plans. Investment research also has to do cost control and strategy optimization.
In terms of strategy formulation, Damon's team usually starts from the results and works backwards to figure out the steps needed in the middle. "Suppose we have a project with the goal of obtaining a 1% to 10% share. We will first study the token model, predict the number of addresses in the market, and then work backwards to figure out how much money and resources are needed to achieve this goal." Damon said that such backward calculations can help the team determine the cost of the initial investment and make adjustments every month to ensure a balance between the input cost and the output benefit.
“But I think the role of investment research will gradually weaken in the future. First of all, the information gap in the entire market will become smaller and smaller. The content shared between KOLs or paying groups is now very homogeneous. So execution is the way to differentiate. Originally it may be 70% investment research and 30% execution, but in the future execution will gradually be greater than investment research, forming a 50-50 ratio,” said Damon.
Looking at the execution section, the execution team is divided into two parts: program development and manual operation.
The program development team is a technical support, similar to the technical development team in a startup company, responsible for developing and maintaining tools such as automated scripts and data crawling programs to ensure the stable operation of the system and improve the efficiency of the software. Programmers must not only be proficient in code, but also understand the relevant technologies of blockchain and cryptocurrency, quickly develop tools that meet market needs, and enhance the competitiveness of the studio.
Manual operation members are like frontline soldiers, who specifically implement the strategy of making money, ensuring that each airdrop project can participate in time and maximize the benefits. They are responsible for daily operations and maintenance of various accounts, handling transactions and transfers. The execution team needs a high degree of execution and responsibility to ensure that every step of the operation is accurate and correct, and maximize the benefits of making money. Qi Fite is currently a self-employed person, but he also knows many studio friends. After communicating with them, he has some insights: "The standard for recruiting manual execution members is not to recruit too smart, nor to recruit not smart at all."
Like startups, some mature studios also accept investments from investors. "Profit sharing is a common cooperation model. The studio is responsible for execution, and the investor provides funds. After the airdrop, the profits are divided in proportion." The specific profit sharing ratio depends on the negotiation between the two parties. If the execution is difficult or fundraising is difficult, the profit sharing ratio will increase. The profit sharing ratio also needs to consider the risks that both parties can bear. The party with higher risks may get more profit sharing, Qi Fite mentioned.
In addition to investment research and execution, the CEO of this "small startup company" is generally called the "manager", who coordinates the overall situation and is responsible for the overall operation and strategic planning of the team, decision-making and execution, to ensure the achievement of team goals and long-term development planning.
According to BlockBeats' observations, LuMao Studios now also need KOLs as external spokespersons to expand the studio's influence through social media and community activities, establish connections with other project parties, investors and media, increase their voice, and also have the opportunity to obtain more "inside information".
In the cryptocurrency world, the role of KOLs is similar to that of influencers or reviewers in traditional industries, who can use their influence to help promote projects.
"The influence can be bigger, but the team should not be bigger. This is one of my appeals." Damon said that he hopes to improve efficiency and professionalism by streamlining the team. At present, his studio is in its infancy, and social media such as Twitter have just started operating, and the influence needs to be further improved.
"I think 10 people is enough for a proper executive team, because a large team may not necessarily make money." Damon explained that his experience working in a large company made him realize that a team that is too large will lead to involution and reduced efficiency. However, he emphasized the importance of influence, believing that expanding the influence of the studio is more valuable than expanding the size of the team. By increasing influence, more resources and information can be obtained, thereby improving the competitiveness of the studio.
A sideline business derived from hair-pulling, the studio's path to industrialization
The industrial structure of hair-pulling studios is no longer limited to the single hair-pulling business. In order to reduce costs and increase profits, they have explored and opened up more channels and paths, thus deriving multiple profit models.
Damon explained that due to his experience working in the Web2 Internet, "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" is like a gene engraved in his bones. People with a financial background, especially an actuarial background, can calculate and control costs more accurately.
The "three-piece set" can be said to be the "jargon" of the cryptocurrency circle's crypto gurus, referring to three basic tools: a virtual private network, a multi-account management tool, and a virtual machine/fingerprint browser (there is also a saying that the three-piece set is Twitter, DC, and Gmail accounts).
Account multi-opening tool, source: Lumao Diary
Multi-account management tools can help the money-grabbing party manage multiple accounts, including batch registration, login, and automated operations. Common tools include browser extensions and scripts to reduce the time and error rate of manual operations. Fingerprint browsers can simulate different browser environments to prevent the platform from detecting that the same device is operating multiple accounts. Virtual machines can create independent operating system environments to further isolate operations of different accounts.
When choosing these tools, studios usually shop around for price and features. Damon mentioned: "Although you can make money by investing more money, you can significantly reduce costs through careful calculations." This means that by calculating, you can save half of the cost, and then the odds will be completely different.
In order to ensure the lowest cost at every stage, some studios will try to find the "source of goods" at the front end. "For example, someone might buy a Twitter account for two dollars, but we can do it for only 20 cents. These trivial accounts are actually very important in the long run."
After finding the cheapest purchasing channel in the market, it also means opening up another profit model - selling supply. In this way, they have derived scalper resources in multiple channels, such as selling Google accounts, hardware, cloud servers, etc., forming a complete industrial chain.
In terms of revenue channels, LuMao Studio will also earn some "referral rewards". In this case, the role of KOL can be reflected. When KOL performs recommendation tasks, if they have greater influence, they can get more points and cashback.
In addition, some studios may also get involved in OTC over-the-counter trading business. Xiaozhi is a typical example. Everyone in his team has his own responsibilities, and his focus is on over-the-counter business.
Because of the need for these channel resources, scalpers in the world of scalping are like people who were "born in Rome" and have a unique advantage in running a studio. "My boss started out as a scalper, and using the scalper's mindset to operate Web3, he can be said to have a lot of skills," Xiao Zhi told BlockBeats.
Capital preservation and payback period
Like all traditional businesses, "breaking even" is important to the studio.
For the studio, the most important thing is to keep the funds safe and try not to lose the invested funds. "Every step of our studio is taken step by step. It is not easy to accumulate funds, but a wrong decision may make all the wealth disappear." Xiao Zhi continued to explain their strategy: "In the cryptocurrency circle, the most important thing is to keep the principal. We only need to play the role of porters and ensure the basic docking of the project. We do not pursue subsequent profits. It is also a good result if there is no profit drawdown or loss of funds."
Cryptocurrency circle return on investment meme, source: Internet
During the communication with the LuMao Studio in the cryptocurrency circle, BlockBeats found that "payback period" is a frequently mentioned keyword.
After "leaving" the big company, Whale (@yuanch0914) also has his own studio. In the past two months, he has continued to follow up on ionet and prepared 273 macmini M2s. While many people lost money, he still made hundreds of thousands of dollars. This review article about ionet has received nearly 300,000 views.
In Whale's review, he also mentioned that long-term projects such as ZKsync have potential, but the time nodes are uncertain and it may take several years to bear fruit. Short-term projects, such as ionet and Merlin, have a cycle of only one or two months, with fast capital recovery and rapid profit realization. "My preference is for short-term, flat and fast projects, which means that the expected returns, coin issuance time and realization time are relatively clear. After the capital is invested, it can be recovered quickly, and then invested in the next project. In this way, the income will be more stable and the mentality will be easier to maintain a stable state of mind."
It's like flipping a coin. The result of flipping it once or twice may not be heads and tails, but if you flip it 1,000 times in a row, it will most likely be heads 500 times and tails 500 times. "So if your winning rate is high, the more projects you do, the more stable your income will be," Whale continued to explain to us.
Damon also mentioned their selection of projects, which is somewhat similar to Whale. "We don't choose projects based solely on long-term performance, but rather choose projects that can get results the fastest."
For a studio, the winning rate is the key to driving its healthy development. Many studios may still exist two years ago, but because they only focus on long-term projects like ZKsync, they drag it out for two years and the entire studio only does this one thing, which obviously does not work. Therefore, the studio needs to accumulate profits in the short term and then slowly do some long-term projects.
Behind the million-dollar earners born after 1995: the secrets of LuMao Studio
In the cryptocurrency world, the business of swiping money has a low threshold and high returns, which has attracted a large number of young people to participate. BlockBeats found that most members of swiping money studios were born after 1995, and there are even many born after 2000, and most of them have achieved an annual income of one million this year.
Although there are top players (called A8 in the cryptocurrency jargon) with incomes of tens of millions, this situation is relatively rare. These people often choose not to continue to make money, but to sell their studios and become shareholders or investor consultants to enjoy more stable returns.
With flexible strategies and high execution capabilities, young people have risen rapidly in this emerging market, achieving incomes that are difficult for ordinary white-collar workers in traditional industries to achieve. What are the secrets to wealth for these young people who are thriving in the wool-pulling business?
"If I were the project owner"
"Think about the problem from the perspective of the project party" is a sentence that many studios know, but only a few can actually do it.
When the project side formulates the rules, they must not only ensure the rationality of these rules, but also consider how to send more tokens to their own hands, which is the so-called "rat warehouse". However, they must ensure that these rules appear fair and reasonable on the surface, and cannot be easily found by community members. "The project side will not just throw money at everyone, they will design some rules to screen out the best users," said Whale.
“For example, why ZKsync was criticized so much this time? Because some addresses were found to have obvious signs of witches, with exactly the same amount of money deposited in them, but in the end all these addresses were airdropped. I think this kind of rule-making is a failure, because it cannot convince the public, and then it will affect the consensus of the tokens, and no one will be willing to take over.” Whale cited the example of ZKsync being criticized recently.
Most project developers want to make money while not being criticized. To achieve this goal, they must be extremely cautious and outstanding in formulating airdrop rules and strategies to prevent witch attacks. Project developers need to select 100,000 high-quality addresses from 1 million addresses, just like selecting admissions to top universities. In this case, they must carefully design rules to ensure that only truly valuable users can receive airdrops while avoiding large-scale arbitrage by the "money grabbers".
“This actually involves a lot of so-called resources or information gaps. In Web3, information gaps are everywhere,” Xiao Zhi explained. “This information gap allows some people to get relatively first-hand information, thus gaining an absolute advantage in the competition.”
Just like wanting to enter a top university like Peking University or Tsinghua University, if there is an information gap, you will know that there are many ways, which is much easier than the crowded college entrance examination. But the key to the problem is how you get this information gap. In the cryptocurrency circle, having connections and resources is sometimes even more useful than in traditional industries.
Xiaozhi also pointed out that in projects represented by ZKsync, account balance and pledge requirements have become new screening criteria: "The balance requirement of ZKsync is 50 US dollars. For those bulk accounts, 10 US dollars per account is already a lot. If one account has to put 100 US dollars, then 10,000 accounts have to put 1 million US dollars, which is very risky for them."
The shilling industry is shifting from POW (proof of work) to POS (proof of stake). This requirement for fund retention makes batch operations more difficult and raises the threshold for shilling work. Although there are many batch accounts, they cannot bear the risk of large amounts of funds, especially in an environment with frequent hacker attacks. The pledge and retention of high amounts of funds has become a "barrier" for studios.
Many people hate rat trading and think that all good projects should be distributed to real users, but Whale believes that the reason why the wool-pulling industry has excess profits is because of the existence of rat trading. If there is no rat trading, the project party and even the investors behind it will never be able to distribute such lucrative profits in the form of airdrops. "Objectively speaking, it is actually the investment institutions and project parties who are eating meat, and the wool-pulling people who are drinking soup in the back, but there are often some meat scraps falling into the soup." Whale's view on the wool-pulling industry is clearer than most people. In order to deal with the screening rules of the project party, users also need to think in reverse.
As the hair-pulling industry becomes more and more professional, studios must also find their own place in this process. The tutorials on the market are all teaching TX and large-scale interactions. Either you roll more than others, or you do something differentiated and make full use of your own advantages, so as to increase the chances of getting airdrops.
Qi Fite said: "Airdrops are like dividing a cake. How to get more shares is to keep adding more addresses. Of course, the standard for adding more addresses must comply with the airdrop rules of the project. If the rules are unclear, we can only think about how the project may draw the line. If there is a rat trading, how can our address "smuggle" into the rat trading standard. "
The fur industry has also begun to pay attention to the "craftsman spirit"
Plundering is like fishing, the waiting time is always the longest. What is needed in the process of plundering is not only skills, but also patience and determination. "The most suitable person for plundering is actually someone who can keep calm. Such people can go further." Damon said.
When she just resigned from Web2 last year, Qi Fite was indeed a little anxious. When she was working alone, her life and work schedule were very irregular, and she often went to bed late and got up late. But fortunately, she and her friends got the Sui project, and the shares unlocked and sold every month were equivalent to the "monthly salary", which greatly alleviated her anxiety. "But I can't live on this salary alone. After all, the token is unlocked once a month, and it will be gone after a year. I have to find a way to make a living."
So during that year, in addition to playing with the money, Qi Fite also kept his composure and studied hard. For example, he learned option trading, gained an in-depth understanding of the Bitcoin ecosystem, and seized some opportunities in the second half of the year.
Three years later, the "craftsman spirit" of the bots was gradually polished, and the operation strategy was adjusted. From the early days of random interactions to get airdrops, to now running a code group studio, the bot industry has gradually developed a more delicate and sophisticated operation method while pursuing efficiency, emphasizing that "the best account is the best", and the address of the best account is regarded as a "gold mine" and "mine".
Qi Fite told BlockBeats: “I don’t recommend using synchronizers when using fingerprint browsers. Although synchronizers are indeed very convenient and can operate multiple addresses at the same time, doubling the efficiency, it is easy to make the behavior tracks of the addresses the same, increasing the risk of being identified as a witch.”
Damon also emphasized the importance of manual operations: "Today, many studios have a lazy mentality and use scripts or automation to do things on their own. From the perspective of ZKsync, this approach has a high probability of being "killed". Therefore, some room for error tolerance should be left. For example, 20% of the work depends on code and synchronizers, and the remaining 80% depends on pure manual operations."
Whale's view is similar. For example, on ZKsync and Starknet, machine brushing is basically annihilated, because Starknet uses AI to find witch clusters with similar behaviors (including withdrawal time, amount, interaction path, interaction order, etc.). ZKsync uses amount retention. If you run it in batches with scripts, you will instinctively ignore the above two points in pursuit of efficiency. Therefore, due to the randomness of manual operation (not efficient enough) and the consideration of operation cost (no frequent movement of LP funds), there are almost no witches on these two projects.
In addition to manual operations becoming mainstream again, refined data analysis has also become the core competitiveness of many successful studios. Whale emphasized that in the cryptocurrency circle, the market value and distribution of tokens for each project need to be estimated in detail. Although this estimation seems simple, it is actually very complicated and time-consuming. "There are too many projects, and it is very tiring to calculate the cost, income and input-output ratio of each one. But I have always adhered to this habit to ensure that the investment and income of each project have a rough estimate," Whale explained.
Whale's multidimensional table example
To ensure the accuracy of the estimate, Whale not only relies on public information, but also digs deep into non-public data, such as the TVL of the protocol, the number of interactions, and the number of unique addresses. "Many people only look at public information, but I will go further to analyze it, such as checking the data of the contract address through the block browser to estimate the expected return of the project."
For example, the expected market value of a project invested by Binance is usually not less than 1 billion. Whale explained: "If a project is invested by Binance and the amount is not small, then the probability of listing on Binance is very high." Then, Whale will further analyze the project's activities, such as the token distribution ratio and the number of participating addresses, and use these data to estimate the potential benefits of each user.
LuMao Philosophy: The Art of Surviving and Thriving in the Cryptocurrency Circle
In the process of playing, Whale gradually formed his own "subtraction" philosophy. He believes that "choosing what not to do" is more important than "choosing what to do", "this is the only way to ensure my winning rate."
Whale wrote in his Twitter signature: "To learn is to increase, to pursue the truth is to lose." He explained that this means that the acquisition of knowledge and information should continue to increase, while the pursuit of things should be less and less. Reducing useless information and unnecessary pursuits is the key to success. For him, a project must have a clear reason to do it, rather than doing it because there is no reason not to do it.
The older you are, the more popular you are. "Everything can be reused," this is Xiaozhi's belief. By reusing successful strategies and experiences in different projects, you can reduce the cost of trial and error and improve execution efficiency.
Xiaozhi's team dug CHIA's hardware three years ago
"In 2021, we worked on the CHIA project, which also required us to install machines and configure the network ourselves. We had a lot of trial and error experience, which was well reused when mining ionet, so we got started quickly."
The rise in the price of CHIA coins that year attracted many "miners" and studios to purchase large-capacity hard drives to mine coins in order to obtain rewards. This caused many people to speculate on hard drives and hoard them, causing large-capacity mechanical hard drives and solid-state drives to be out of stock and increase in price for a while.
Xiaozhi's team's ionet machine configuration
Xiaozhi also mentioned that before entering Web3, his team had also participated in the IPO of Hong Kong stocks. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Xiaozhi's team is one of the Hong Kong stock 100. "We decide whether to invest in new stocks mainly based on the situation of the investment institutions and their winning rate. These logics can also be well reused in Web3."
"At that time, the subscription cost for new Hong Kong stocks was 10,000 to 20,000 Hong Kong dollars, which is a bit like the gas fee on the chain now." Xiaozhi remembers that in the most glorious week, their profits from new stock subscriptions could reach between 700,000 and 800,000.
In the process of making money, everyone’s strategy is different. Xiao Zhi explained: “Each project has different strategic dimensions, such as which protocols you interact with, how your monthly, weekly, and daily active users can be maintained, how much funds in your account and on-chain funds you can reach, your mortgage and loan amounts, etc. These are all uncertain factors.”
The formulation of strategies needs to be based on experience, which boils down to the management of multiple accounts. Xiao Zhi said: "If one account transfers money to 100 accounts, it will be easily detected and banned."
Although it is impossible to win every time, it is very important to formulate a reasonable strategy, and the most important thing is to ensure the strict implementation of the strategy. The strategy is unchanged. This is like playing Texas Hold'em. Strictly follow the strategy. Even if you lose a game and fail to reach the local optimum, it is the overall optimum from an overall and long-term perspective.
In the process of contacting the studio, we also found some interesting observations. The cryptocurrency industry has always been a very polarized industry. Those who work on projects are usually elites from the world's top universities, while most cryptocurrency speculators and coin flippers are more like talented people doing business in the market. English is an extreme point of this polarization.
After making money, talented people from grassroots backgrounds want respect the most, not to be called "nouveau riche". Learning English has become a kind of "respectability", with a stronger symbolic meaning than practical significance. Just like businessmen from "small towns" in 2000 began to wear suits to do business overseas, they are using language and behavior to shape their new identity, seeking higher social recognition and respect.
Nowadays, like KOLs, LuMao studios are also experiencing a generational change. After making a big profit, some people choose to leave, and new studios take over from the old ones and continue to pursue wealth in this market.
"My friend has become financially independent after this round of hair-pulling and is preparing to close his studio and retire. I am discussing with him that I will take over the business. This way, the price is the most suitable for both of us." This kind of inheritance after getting rich has also added some special continuity to the hair-pulling industry.
As time went on, the studios began to develop a "brother" relationship, forming the LuMao Alliance and the LuMao Matrix.
The voice of LuMao Studio has been continuously improved with this organization and alliance. From the beginning, LuMao Party was sometimes despised by the project party and the community, and even self-deprecatingly called "black slave losers". Nowadays, the project party actively cooperates with LuMao Studio, and sometimes the studio even gives suggestions to the project party in return.
These changes are not just superficial. The "voice" of the LuMao party can now have a huge impact on the entire industry. Their opinions can change the attitude of venture capital (VC), affect the price of coins, and even influence whether trading platforms will list coins. This influence comes not only from their number and funds, but also from their gradually accumulated expertise and operational experience in the industry. It can be said that LuMao Studio has evolved from a simple business model to a highly organized and influential cryptocurrency industry force today.
As for the future of the wool-pulling industry, many people will speculate whether it will disappear like the "Hong Kong stock IPO" business because IPOs are no longer profitable.
In fact, as more and more projects fail to deliver as expected after issuing tokens, the benefits of airdrops are gradually decreasing, and the studios’ winning rate has begun to decline. The previous article mentioned many profitable studios, but in fact, many studios have long disappeared in the torrent of competition.
The survival time of the coin-making industry depends on market trends. A bear market is more like a season of cultivation, while a bull market is a time of harvest. The cryptocurrency industry is still in its early stages, which means that the entire coin-making industry may have a longer lifespan. However, as competition intensifies, whether or not one can find the "art of coin-making" will become the key to success or failure.
The cryptocurrency industry is gradually moving towards the "28th Rule", where only 20% of people make money. How to become the 20% who make money is a huge challenge facing all the cryptocurrency traders. For them, this is not just a game about technology and strategy, but also a business field about wisdom and patience.
