Bottom line: I didn’t get rich or become free—I sold way too early. This was a lesson that cost nearly 10 million yuan.

On January 28, 2026, I invested 4,000 U in the Preferred Round on the launchpad and at one point held 500,000 $BTW. Later, I treated it like an ordinary project and sold it all. I bought back in near $1.10, but couldn’t hold on to that either. Today’s price on CMC is about $2.61, making those 500,000 tokens worth around $1.3 million at the current price.

I don’t have much skin in the game now either, but I did once, and I’m grateful for that experience. It gave me a chance to look back and figure a few things out.

Good thing I didn’t get rich. I recently finished listening to the podcast episode with Shao Allen and Justin Sun—it was over four hours long. I also picked up three terms that have been trending lately: “Sunology,” “lean muscle,” and “blondie.” There was one line that I thought was the most important: get free first, then get rich. Before your understanding reaches that level, coming into wealth too early—wealth you can’t control—is actually a terrible thing. It magnifies the darker parts of your personality and directly harms your health, lifespan, and overall well-being. For ordinary people, train your brain before your body. Raise your level of understanding first, and wealth may follow.

Back to $BTW: many people are focused on control of the supply. My current view is that the key question is whether the team wants to turn the token into a vanity project and a store of wealth. If they just want to pump it once and walk away, they won’t care if it drops to zero. But if they have other sources of cash flow and don’t rely on selling tokens to make a living, they could easily hold most of their tokens indefinitely without dumping them, treating the token as an anchor for their net worth. That gives it a very different ceiling. In the tokenomics, about 20% allocated to the team and 16.33% to backers are still locked up, while roughly 30% is in circulation. TRX has a market cap of about $31.4 billion. My guess is that Bitway founder Shane Qiu would rather make BTW into a giant on the scale of TRON, like the TRX in Justin Sun’s hands. This is just my judgment; I haven’t found any publicly verifiable ledger to confirm it.

This is a retrospective. DYOR; this is not investment advice.