A 22-year-old KOL Vida published a long tweet on Twitter, detailing his story of making $10 million in the crypto market.
Financial success is no accident. With persistence, intelligence, execution and keeping up with hot topics, we can gain a lot of inspiration from Vida’s wealth accumulation process.
How does it feel to have a net worth of $10 million at the age of 22? This is a story about myself.
First things first, how do I build wealth? I've been in the web business since I was 14, and from the age of 14 to 19, I made money by setting up game servers and selling products from West to East, or East to West, which I call geographic arbitrage.
There are always message differences between China and the West, for example, labor costs in China are typically 1/7 of those in the West. The latest technology in the West is more advanced than in China, for example, now everyone in the West knows about ChatGPT, but most Chinese people don't.
The end result is that at the age of 19 I amassed a fortune of 500,000 and then I got into cryptocurrencies and I heard from one of my Chinese clients that he made hundreds from crypto mining and opening a crypto online casino Thousands of wealth. In 2020, I became a holder of $ETH and $BTC.
The puzzling question arises: my father is a trader (he made $2 million in real estate and stocks) and unfortunately he believes that cryptocurrencies are in a bubble in January 2021, so let I sold my $ETH and $BTC positions. Selling my $ETH at $969 was a big mistake with my portfolio only 3xed at the time.
But it was enough, and by the time I was 20, my net worth was about $1 million. There have been setbacks along the way, like when I shorted $BTC at $32,000 and was liquidated following the news of Tesla accepting Bitcoin, losing $50,000 at the time. That was probably my biggest loss as a percentage of my net worth.
But that incident made me think: retail investors bought after the news about Tesla. If I could get the news as soon as possible, buy and sell to those retail investors, I could make a profit from it.
So, I took a chance in March 2021, when the price of Dogecoin rose every time Elon mentioned Doge or dog-related keywords on Twitter. I had my developers build a monitoring bot to track every tweet from Elon. Then, when Musk tweets, I buy manually.
I made some successful attempts but then realized I had to automate trading to be competitive, so in April 2021 my developer built me an automated Dogecoin trading bot based on Elon’s tweets. It was a huge success and I made at least $500,000 from that robot.
I had a few successful trades but then realized I had to auto-trade this event to stay competitive, so in April 2021 my developer made me an auto-trade Dogecoin based on Elon’s tweets robot. It was a huge success and I made at least $500,000 from that robot.
In 2021, whenever Elon tweets, I buy Dogecoin and then dump it to retail investors a few minutes later, the same goes for other coins mentioned like $SHIB and $PEOPLE, making money from Elon alone at least US$1.5 million.
At the end of 2021, I found that it was not only Elon’s tweets that could move the market, but also announcements from some exchanges, especially the Big Three. If I can be the first to enter during these specific events, I can make a 100% profit. So I started working on building the infrastructure to snipe these events.
Finally, in 2022, I have one of the fastest bots on the market and I think of my business as being similar to MEV, where I get ahead and profit from people's mistakes, desires, and inefficiencies.
Through the bot business, in 2022, at the age of 21, I have reached a net worth of $4 million and a staff of 4 developers.
In the bear market of 2022, I continued to improve my delay advantage. The goal I set for myself at that time was to "work hard in the bear market and then gain in the bull market." I worked an average of 10 hours a day, building new bots, optimizing latency, and participating in trading on some major events, such as the FTX-Binance acquisition.
In 2023, my efforts in optimizing the bot, building infrastructure, and trading skills paid off, and I made a lot of money through the bot from news like token listings and Elon’s tweets. I also manually traded some major events like SVB federal bailout, $XRP case win, Ethereum ETF, Grayscale win.
After trading the Grayscale win a few days ago, I had a net worth of over $10 million at the age of 22.
Reaching this net worth is a milestone in my life, but I don’t think it’s my limit yet. I still work until 4am optimizing my bot to stay competitive.
I know the risks of reaching this net worth at this age are laziness, ego, portfolio concentration, and gambling. Just look at the unfortunate examples on Coinfessions. I won't make the same mistakes as those people.
I spend very little time having fun and most of my time working hard or learning new techniques and knowledge.
I know there are people who are better than me in different fields, so I like to associate with good people.
In addition to cryptocurrencies, I am also involved in traditional finance to diversify my assets.
60% of my assets are in cryptocurrencies, my current crypto portfolio consists of 90% $USDC and $USDT as I need stablecoins for my bot trading and news trading business, and 10% Bitcoin spot holdings as Long term holding.
40% of my assets are in traditional financials, including 10-30 year US bonds, China Index, Vietnam Index, China Technology, US Technology and a small portion of the S&P 500. I'm generally bullish on emerging markets and technology in 2023 because I don't think high interest rates in the U.S. will last much longer.
For me, I don't like gambling, but in cryptocurrency trading, it is human nature to gamble and trade. So whenever I want to prove I'm right on a trade that's uncertain, e.g. short $CYBER and buy PUT options on $NVDA, $COIN, I test with $1-10,000 to see if I'm 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.
Looking for arbitrage opportunities based on information differences, there are many opportunities here.
Outsource unimportant tasks to people whose time is cheaper or whose skills are better than yours.
Communicate more with people who make money, and stay away from general communities such as groups of specific currency holders.
Don't gamble or blindly follow the trend like ordinary people do, focus on the certainty of trading.
