A 22-year-old KOL Vida posted a long tweet on Twitter, detailing his story of making $10 million in the crypto market.
Success in wealth is no accident. We can learn a lot from Vida’s wealth accumulation process, which involves persistence, intelligence, execution and keeping up with the latest trends.
What does it feel like to have a net worth of $10 million at age 22? This is my own story.
First, how did I build my wealth? I started doing Internet business when I was 14 years old. From 14 to 19, I made money by opening game servers and selling products from West to East and from East to West. I called it geographic arbitrage.
There is always information difference between China and the West, for example, the labor cost in China is usually 1/7 of that in the West. The latest technology in the West is more advanced than that in China, for example, now everyone in the West knows about ChatGPT, but most Chinese do not.
The end result is that I accumulated a wealth of 500,000 by the age of 19, and then I entered the cryptocurrency field, and I heard from one of my Chinese clients that he made millions of wealth through cryptocurrency mining and opening a cryptocurrency online gambling. 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 thought crypto was in a bubble in January 2021 and made me sell my ETH and BTC holdings. I only 3xed my portfolio at the time and selling my ETH at $969 was a big mistake.
But it was enough that by the time I was 20, I had a net worth of about $1 million. There were setbacks along the way, like when I shorted BTC at $32,000 and got liquidated after the news that Tesla accepted Bitcoin, losing $50,000 at the time. That was probably my biggest loss as a percentage of net worth.
But that incident made me think: retail investors bought after the news about Tesla, if I could get the news first, buy and sell to those retail investors, I could make a profit.
So I took the opportunity in March 2021, when the price of Dogecoin would go up every time Elon mentioned Doge or dog-related keywords on Twitter. At that time, I asked my developers to build a monitoring bot to track every tweet of Elon. Then, when Musk tweeted, I would buy manually.
I made a few successful trades but then realized I had to automate this event to stay competitive, so in April 2021 my developer built me a bot that automatically traded Dogecoin based on Elon’s tweets. It was a huge success and I made at least $500,000 from that bot.
In 2021, I bought Dogecoin every time Elon tweeted and then dumped it on retail investors a few minutes later, the same goes for other coins mentioned like $SHIB and $PEOPLE, making at least $1.5 million from Elon alone.
At the end of 2021, I found that not only Elon's tweets can move the market, but also some announcements from exchanges, especially the three major exchanges. If I can be the first to enter these specific events, I can make 100% profit. Therefore, I started to build infrastructure to snipe these events.
Finally, in 2022, I have one of the fastest robots on the market and I see my business as being similar to MEV, where I am ahead and profiting from people’s mistakes, desires, and inefficiencies.
Through the robotics business, in 2022, at the age of 21, I already have a net worth of $4 million and have 4 developers on staff.
In the bear market of 2022, I continued to improve my latency advantage, and my goal at the time was to "work hard in the bear market and then reap the rewards in the bull market." I worked an average of 10 hours a day, building new robots, optimizing latency, and participating in trading 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 from news such as token listings and Elon's tweets through the bot. I also manually traded some major events such as SVB federal bailout, XRP case win, Ethereum ETF, Grayscale win.
After trading the Grayscale win a few days ago, my net worth at 22 years old is over $10 million.
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 bots to stay competitive.
I know the risks of reaching this net worth at this age are laziness, complacency, portfolio concentration, and gambling. Just look at the unfortunate examples on Coinfessions. I will not make the same mistakes as those people.
I spend very little time on entertainment and most of my time is spent working hard or learning new skills and knowledge.
I know there are people who are better than me in different fields, so I enjoy interacting with outstanding people.
In addition to cryptocurrencies, I am also involved in traditional finance to diversify my assets.
60% of my assets are in crypto, and 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 a long-term holding.
40% of my assets are in traditional finance, including 10-30 year US bonds, China index, Vietnam index, Chinese tech, US tech, and a small portion of the S&P 500. I am generally bullish on emerging markets and technology in 2023 because I don't think high US interest rates will last long.
For me, I don't like gambling, but in cryptocurrency trading, gambling and trading are human nature. So whenever I want to prove that I am right in an uncertain trade, for example, short $CYBER and buy PUT options on $NVDA, $COIN, I will test it with $1-10,000 to see if I am right or wrong.
My advice to young people:
Find your passion and work hard at it, you need to work harder than your competitors to surpass them.
There are many opportunities to find arbitrage opportunities based on information gaps.
Outsource unimportant work to someone who can spend their time cheaper or with better skills than you.
Communicate more with people who make money and stay away from general communities such as groups of holders of certain specific currencies.
Don't gamble or blindly follow the crowd like ordinary people, focus on the certainty of the transaction.
Discover market efficiencies and exploit them.
Water does not compete for the lead, but for the endless flow.