Not VCs nor retail investors, who made money in this bull market?

Original author: Jademont, CEO of Waterdrip Capital

Editor's note: Today is June 18, the carnival of e-commerce, but for cryptocurrency users, it is not a happy day. Bitcoin and various altcoins are "falling continuously", and there is almost no sign of rebound. There are complaints on various platforms. Reference reading: "The third "519" this year is coming" . If everyone is losing money, where has the money gone? Waterdrip Capital CEO Jademont analyzed this on X, and BlockBeats reproduced the full text as follows:

Who has made money so far in this bull market?

First of all, it is definitely not VC. Most of the projects invested by VC have not started to issue coins yet. Even those coins with high FDV and low circulation that are criticized by the community seem to have a book value of dozens of times, but if there is no counterfeit bull market next, when the VC is unlocked, it is not much to fall by 90%.

Secondly, they are not retail investors. Most retail investors speculate on memes, play counterfeits, and open contracts. It cannot be said that there are no retail investors who make money, but they are very few, and the probability is about the same as playing the lottery.

Observation shows that there are several types of people who make money:

1. Bitcoin holder. Holding Bitcoin, the whole world will work for you. At this time last year, it was 25,000, and now it is 65,000, making a huge profit. It is also a very certain thing that it will rise to 100,000 within a year, but most people do not look down on this increase, so they cannot make money from BTC, which is reasonable.

2. Centralized exchanges. Exchanges have always been at the top of the food chain in the cryptocurrency circle, and the entire cryptocurrency circle is basically working for exchanges. Of course, working in an exchange also carries huge risks, with no fixed place to live, drifting overseas, with Yancheng inside and the SEC outside, and the risk is proportional to the return, which is reasonable.

3. CeFi platforms such as Tether. Tether made $4.7 billion in the first quarter, more than most exchanges. Of course, strictly speaking, this money was not earned from the cryptocurrency circle. In addition, some cryptocurrency financial service providers, such as custodial wealth management platforms, are also quietly making money happily. They provide good services to the cryptocurrency circle and make reasonable money.

4. The operating teams of some public chain/DeFi products.DeFi products such as Uniswap actually have a large flow of traffic, and the transaction fees have nothing to do with the holders of governance tokens. Almost all of them go into the pockets of the team. This income is actually considerable. The Base team may have tens of millions of dollars in fees contributed by a product called Friendtech. The Tron public chain also makes a lot of money from daily USDT transfers, and most of it goes into the pockets of the team. These projects do not make money by selling coins to retail investors, but by developing businesses. In fact, they are similar to traditional Internet businesses. They are the hope of the currency circle and are worth learning from all project parties. In particular, there is the example of MakerDAO, and Uni also has a proposal to prepare dividends. These are all Alphas in this round of bull market.

5. High-market-cap coin-issuing project parties whose main purpose is to sell coins, if they have already launched CEX, they have already made a lot of money in this round. They don't need any income. For example, some ZK projects only have two or three digit daily active users on the chain after the airdrop, which does not affect their market value of tens of billions or even hundreds of billions. Market makers happily help the team sell coins. Some other highly controlled DeFi coins are all GameFi coins with few active people in the studio. They are in a similar situation. These currency circle cancers are constantly sucking blood from the currency circle. The trading teams behind these cancers are of course also accomplices in making money. What's funny is that I saw someone bragging about how much money the trading project made on Twitter a while ago. This kind of spectacle only exists in the currency circle.

There are some others, such as quantitative teams, etc., who make hard-earned money, so I won't list them one by one. If anyone has more discoveries, please reply to the message to make me envious.

However, through the above analysis, you can consider building a currency circle permanent earning portfolio, and the main holdings are selected from 1-4, avoiding 5.

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