Online wealth in the crypto world is always at the very top; many people instinctively identify with it.

A6—between 100k and 990k. If you have a bit of savings, your life is quite comfortable.

A7—between 1 million and 9.9 million. You step into the upper tier of the middle class; it’s a decent answer to the struggles of ordinary people.

A8—starting from 10 million. It’s the “financial freedom threshold” that many people talk about.

A9—starting from 100 million. That’s not a story about ordinary people’s wealth; it’s a whole different world.

A9+, for most ordinary people, it’s basically impossible to reach in a lifetime—if you’re not an ordinary person, you ignore it, right?

I used to think the hardest part was going from A6 to A7. You have to save money, support a family, handle kids’ expenses, mortgage payments, car loans, and all kinds of costs at home—cutting back and scrimping to squirrel away your paycheck little by little. But after actually experiencing it, I realized: moving from A7 to A8 is the real chasm. And from A8 to A9 is another game in which ordinary people can hardly even get to see the card table.

First, let’s talk about A6 to A7.

In this stage, what you’re competing on is your ability to make a life. Two people work steadily, don’t overspend wildly, avoid big pitfalls, don’t run into major unexpected events, and after ten-plus years, many families can reach their goals just by lifting their toes. It comes from selling your time and earning through labor—your efforts get visible feedback. If your salary rises a bit, your savings grow a bit, your mortgage payments reduce a bit, and your assets will gradually move upward. It’s hard, but the difficulty lies in persistence and self-discipline.

But once you’re standing on the steps of A7 and want to rush toward A8, the rules of the game change immediately.

Just saving by dead wages is almost impossible. A million isn’t something you can accumulate by taking a few extra jobs or skipping a few meals. To jump to A8, you often need dividends from the times: appreciation of property, a surge in entrepreneurship, or betting correctly on investment opportunities. But none of these are things ordinary people can control.

Holding several million in the hands of a middle-class household, the burden is heavy. Parents need retirement care, children need schooling, and future medical risks are right in front of you. You fundamentally can’t risk your family’s base assets on high-risk opportunities. Most people can only choose conservative investing. Stable returns are bound to make it very difficult to achieve a tenfold leap in assets.

So from A6 to A7, with hard work and self-discipline, you have a chance to clear the level.

From A7 to A8, effort alone isn’t enough—you also need luck and opportunities. The margin for error is extremely low. Step wrong once, and the family assets you’ve painstakingly built up may even shrink back.

What about A8 to A9?

A8 is in the tens-of-millions range; A9 is in the hundreds-of-millions range. Many people think it’s only one more zero, but that’s not true. From A8 to A9, it’s no longer a matter of “earning a few tens of millions more.” It’s a comprehensive gear shift in your sources of wealth, asset structure, social resources, and risk tolerance.

Once you reach A8, many people aren’t short on food and clothing anymore. They may have a house, a car, and some financial products—even one or two investment properties and a small slice of company shares. But rolling from 10 million to 100 million purely through investment returns is almost unrealistic. If you can turn 10 million into an 8% annualized return, that’s 800,000 per year. After covering living costs, taxes, and drawdowns, it would take many years to reach 100 million—and you still can’t make big mistakes. A more realistic path is to hold productive assets that are replicable and scalable, can be valued, and can be exited: enterprise equity, businesses at scale, scarce resources, capital operations, or catching a once-in-an-era big opportunity.

From A8 to A9, it’s no longer about personal diligence, but about:

1. Do you have a company or equity that can keep generating profits and can be priced by the capital markets?

2. Are you willing to add leverage during a critical cycle—and add it in the right direction?

3. Have you entered a circle where you can access projects, capital, policies, and talent?

4. Can you withstand failure—even multiple failures?

5. Do you have luck in the times: industry booms, asset revaluation, IPOs and acquisitions, and windfall benefits from the headwinds?

The brutality of A8 to A9 is this: from A7 to A8, you add effort and maybe touch it; from A8 to A9, you often need to “place the right bet once over a major cycle”—and if you bet wrong, you might fall from A8 back to A7, or even A6. People at A8 may look safe, but many of their assets are paper wealth—illiquid, with high leverage, and when the cycle comes, they shrink. A9 isn’t about saving money, or relying on wages. It’s not even just about investing. It’s about systems, organizations, capital, and rules. People at A9 often make money because their assets and team are making money for them.

So which stage is the hardest?

For the vast majority of ordinary people, A7 to A8 is the hardest. Because it’s a class breakpoint. A6 to A7 is linear accumulation—you can grit your teeth and get there. But A7 to A8 requires switching engines: from labor income to assets, equity, and the dividends of the times. The margin for error is extremely low.

For people who are already at A8, going from A8 to A9 is another cliff—perhaps even more mystical. It’s not just about money; it’s about resources, circles, capital, the era, nerve, and even fate. A9 isn’t “a richer middle class.” It’s a different kind of wealth.

Online everything is busy portraying “tens of millions in wealth and freedom” as if that’s the endpoint you should reach just by working hard. The truth is: each layer has thresholds, and the higher you go, the less it depends on brute force.

To get through A6 to A7, it’s about getting by day to day,

From A7 to A8, you rely on switching tracks,

A8 to A9 is about systems and the era.

Ordinary people, don’t let anxiety about A9 take control of you first. If you can steadily cross from A6 to A7, you’ve already beaten many people. If you can seize one opportunity from A7 to A8, that’s real fortune from the times. As for A8 to A9—that’s a game for a few. Just take a look; don’t make it your daily goal and torture yourself with it. Friends, happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Take the red envelopes along and wish everyone all the best #美联储10月加息概率升至69.7% #比特币24小时跌3.3%失守83000美元