Biteye: From 3,000 to 3 million, what does a novice college student have to rely on?

Author: Biteye Junior Sister Kiki

Editor: Biteye Core Contributor Crush

Community: @BiteyeCN

*The full text is about 5000 words, estimated reading time is 10 minutes 0 1 Introduction

It is said that college students graduate and immediately face unemployment. The defiant junior sister ultimately could not escape this curse.

Being unemployed for a long time is not a solution. Seeing that my old company Biteye was still hiring, I mustered the courage to ask the boss if I could return, lamenting that I regretted leaving back then, blah blah blah—

Just in time, a previous intern senior left, opening up a position, and I quickly joined as an operator.

While I was still sighing about the harsh environment and worrying that it would be difficult to find a job after my senior left, a thunderbolt struck: my senior left because he achieved financial freedom, OMG!

The collective reset is certainly terrifying, but a colleague's success is even more heart-wrenching. Indeed, sometimes the gap between people is greater than the gap between humans and dogs!

In order to reach the shore like my senior as soon as possible, after my constant harassment (treating him to meals), I finally learned some details. 0 2 Senior's Entry into the Circle

My senior probably entered the circle in 2021. What major events happened in 2021? I believe those who have been in the circle for a while still remember.

That year, my senior had his hands in his pockets, unaware of what a competitor was.

From initially being recommended Shib to later hitting it big with Baby Doge, with a capital of 3000 yuan, he dominated various meme coin projects, and thanks to the zoo craze at that time, his assets once soared to a million.

Baby Doge in June 2021

Although this amount of money is nothing compared to some big shots, for a young person in their twenties, starting from scratch to reach a million in just a few months felt like a dream.

Indeed, it felt like a dream, and soon the day of shattered dreams arrived.

As the hype around meme coins waned, various tokens began to plummet one after another. My senior always thought he could pull off one last wave and then run, but each time the coin price hit a new low.

After going around in circles, he was ultimately brought back to square one.

At the beginning of 2022, my senior still had the same 3000 yuan to start a new money-making venture, but this time, he began to farm tokens. 0 3 First Bucket of Gold

Like many others, my senior's farming journey also began with the notorious Galaxy (the current Galaxy has betrayed the community and plans to charge users, receiving a lot of backlash).

Due to the small capital, he experienced what it felt like to have his legs broken right after entering the market.

At that time, everyone trading NFTs was basically on OpenSea. Although OpenSea had a large flow of users, it was quite centralized, charging high fees while quietly making a fortune without issuing tokens.

This was intolerable for the "decentralized" Web3 industry, so various projects often clamored to take down OpenSea. You’re not issuing tokens, huh? Then I’ll issue them for you!

Soon, the talk turned into reality, and a project named OpenDAO, similar to OpenSea, began to airdrop tokens to users, with the $SOS token worth several hundred dollars per transaction. The requirement was simple: just be an OpenSea user.

My senior said that on the afternoon he heard about the airdrop, he was waiting for the subway. While excited, he also felt a bit uneasy because at that time, NFTs on the mainnet were worth dozens of dollars, and he often hesitated to make transactions.

But at the moment he opened the airdrop page, all those complex emotions vanished, leaving only two words in his mind—"Regret, so damn regretful."

But this was actually expected. It’s like during school, there are always people who don’t work hard but fantasize about having a moment of brilliance during exams, or hope that the teacher will grade leniently and get lucky, then score high. How could that be possible?

After this setback, he said he no longer hesitated, embracing the mindset of "if I lose everything, I’ll just go work in a factory," and started following some airdrop influencers to complete Galaxy Girl tasks.

Although he still didn’t have enough money to operate on the mainnet, he completed all other tasks he could, and although he didn’t get the highest level Galaxy Girl NFT, he still earned several thousand dollars in airdrops, which was his first bucket of gold. 0 4 Small Gains

After having some capital, my senior started looking at some projects that seemed more upscale.

For example, at that time, a blogger on Weibo said to stake ATOM, and you could earn airdrops without doing anything. My senior said he was indeed tempted and planned to buy 100 ATOM to stake.

After researching, he found out that he also needed to download a Keplr wallet and had to deal with a bunch of chains, which felt quite troublesome, so he didn’t stake.

Fortunately, he didn’t stake that thing; ATOM, which was worth dozens of dollars back then, is now only worth 4 dollars.

Not to mention that there weren’t many major airdrops, the staking threshold also increased from 5 ATOM, and later many projects didn’t even airdrop to ATOM stakers.

If he had bought ATOM at a high price and held it until now, he would probably be in tears!

At that time, my senior still had little understanding. After giving up on staking ATOM, he didn’t know what else to do. Seeing other influencers starting to do layer 2 airdrops, such as ARB and ZK, he followed suit and created about ten accounts for each project.

A few months later, he began to study Starknet, but at that time he found it too laggy and difficult to use, only interacting with 5 accounts before giving up.

During this period, he also encountered some projects that went to zero, such as Aztec in the privacy sector, and while working on it, he found that the project disappeared.

The days without airdrops lasted about six months. He said he once thought about quitting the circle, feeling that the benefits of farming had disappeared, but he hadn’t earned enough and felt very unwilling.

The dull days were completely shattered in March 2023 when the great ARB airdrop brought huge rewards to farmers.

My senior's 15 accounts ultimately earned 30,000 tokens, and as soon as the exchange opened, he sold everything for nearly 40,000 dollars, enough to buy a Tesla.

My senior secretly told me that the cost of farming ARB was very low; it might only cost a few dollars per account. Calculating this way, each account had returns of hundreds of times, truly a big win.

Looking back at the current airdrops, not only are they fewer, but there are also various scams and tricks, making it a tragic situation.

With the end of the ARB airdrop, the entire airdrop industry entered a FOMO phase, with many studios and older individuals flooding into the airdrop space.

Seeing everyone getting more competitive, my senior didn’t dare to slack off. The profits from ARB hadn’t even cooled down before he immediately reinvested, creating dozens of ZK mainnet accounts, and he picked up his previous Starknet accounts to continue working. Every day was busy, and he really felt that being a step behind meant losing a lot of money.

Having just experienced a big win, my senior's overall state was noticeably better than before, and he was full of energy in completing interactions.

In the next two to three months, he basically focused on increasing the number of ZK transactions. During this time, he also encountered Cyberconnect issuing tokens. As a brother project of Galaxy, he naturally participated, although the airdrop he received was just a small amount, but it covered the interaction costs for ZK.

Later, some on-chain meme coin airdrops began to increase, such as Aidoge on ARB and Cheems on ZK, although the airdrops were small, the quantity made up for it, achieving negative-cost farming. 0 5 Single Project A7

The next turning point occurred in July 2023 when my senior saw some insider news that it seemed some big farmers were starting to farm Starknet. Could something big really be coming?

After seeing a significant increase in the number of addresses on the Starknet chain, and with Zksync still having no airdrop news, my senior gritted his teeth and decided to put all his assets into Starknet, whatever happens!

At that time, many studios were already using fingerprint browsers and synchronizers for operations. If you don’t know what that is, it doesn’t matter; it’s just a tool that can improve efficiency.

However, my senior always believed that manual operation was more reliable. Automation might save time, but if discovered, it would be a loss.

His strategy was to operate manually, making large transactions, performing small transactions and large borrowings, then transferring the funds out, and leaving some balance in each account, not transferring everything out, making it appear more like a real person, haha.

In the following two months of summer vacation, without academic burdens, it was a crazy account creation phase.

During one summer, he created a total of 100 new accounts, ensuring that each account had on-chain activity every week.

It wasn’t until September when school started that this frequency had to be reduced, changing from weekly activity to bi-weekly, and later to monthly activity. Fortunately, he persisted, and in the end, most accounts had interactions at least once a month.

In 2023, around that time, the junior sister also entered the circle. In fact, the second half of 2023 didn’t have much market activity. However, even so, my senior said he almost became rich again during the summer. (Hmm? Why do I say "again"? 555～)

It was probably during that summer when he interacted with a project called ethi, which cost 50 dollars.

At that time, he didn’t know what it was, but when it rose to 2500 dollars, he sold it. He said if he had held it until December, it could have been worth 100,000 dollars (Oh my, is this true…), this was the closest he had ever been to getting rich.

By the end of 2023, besides the inscriptions, the only other highlight was the social protocol Friendtech. (Recently, I saw in the news that Friendtech has given up contract permissions and is completely falling apart…)

It seems that my senior had become much more capable than before. He didn’t buy KOL’s keys but invested several ETH to create matrix accounts.

Although he encountered many troubles along the way, such as project parties changing rules and Twitter accounts getting banned, fortunately, most accounts survived.

Soon, after the New Year of 2024, good news from Starknet arrived.

My senior said he was more nervous checking the airdrop than waiting for his college entrance exam results. As soon as he saw the airdrop criteria and manually checked a few major accounts, he knew this wave was stable.

In the end, the results were gratifying; out of 110 accounts, about 100 were successful (the accounts that were brushed off were because they were too late, not active for three months, what a pity), totaling over 100,000 tokens.

I secretly checked the price of Strk on its first day of trading; it could be sold for at least 2 dollars each, meaning 100,000 tokens would be worth 1.5 million yuan, which is terrifying!

One of the airdrop criteria for Stark eliminated many people; it required each account to maintain a certain balance.

However, all of my senior's accounts met the balance requirement. I curiously asked him how he thought of keeping a balance. He said he was just thinking of leaving some money to facilitate transaction fees for future interactions, purely a lucky coincidence, but I feel he is being modest.

In any case, through a combination of chance and months of effort, my senior's total assets should have easily reached A7 by the year of graduation. (A7 means assets in the seven figures, with the minimum being 1,000,000. I also feel embarrassed to ask what number A7 starts with, especially since he reached A7.15 with Stark.) 0 6 Continuing to Harvest

Stark set a good tone for 2024, and in the subsequent market, my senior seemed to enter a money-printing mode, harvesting wildly.

He continuously farmed 10 Bitcoin Smiley NFTs and several hundred Babylons NFTs, each with profits of several thousand dollars.

In March and April, the cross-chain bridge Wormhole announced an airdrop. Although he only had one transaction over ten thousand dollars when crossing Sei, he still received an airdrop of 8000U per account.

The Friendtech airdrop quickly followed in May, and his previously laid-out matrix accounts received over 20,000 tokens, selling for around 30,000 dollars.

The Pizza airdrop in June was an even bigger surprise: when he drew the Bitsmiley whitelist in February, he split 100 wallets to participate in the OKX lottery. In early May, he consolidated these BTC to stake in Solv Protocol. As a result, almost every wallet had a transaction record, and by chance, he farmed 8000 Pizza.

This wave was like a pie falling from the sky; my colleagues said they enjoyed several days of feasting (the junior sister hadn’t joined yet, so she missed out 🙃).

After these waves of airdrop bombings, my senior finally felt like he had earned enough, so he chose to resign.

You all know the story that followed. Just like I wrote at the beginning, I quickly returned to Biteye after the interview, and we perfectly completed the handover, with everyone having a bright future. 0 7 No More Farming!

Good times don’t last long; the rise and fall seem to be an eternal law.

After three years of farming ZK, it finally couldn’t hold back from issuing tokens, but my senior wasn’t very happy.

Because he only had one major account that received over 10,000 tokens, most were marked "Not eligible," totaling only a few tens of thousands of tokens. The problem was, he still hadn’t sold those tokens…

The other cross-chain bridge project Layerzero seemed to be even worse, with even fewer tokens than the free Wormhole. The 30 accounts combined only sold for 1000U, which could be considered a reverse farming.

Indeed, most projects' airdrops in the second half of the year began to reverse farm, although he was lucky enough to avoid most of them.

However, the bleak market also caused his assets to suffer unprecedented depreciation: the few remaining Smiley NFTs seemed to be nearing zero, the 100 Babylon NFTs were worth less than 50 dollars each, and although Friendtech was converted to ETH, ETH dropped, and Pizza was converted to BTC, which also dropped. The little Stark left was almost gone…

With asset depreciation and no new airdrops coming in, although he didn’t mention resigning, I could clearly feel that he was somewhat regretful.

But regret is useless, haha. I can only wait for the next time I get rich to give my position back to my senior! 0 8 Conclusion

My senior always emphasized that he was just lucky, and it was the favorable farming market over the past two years that allowed him to farm some big wins.

While I also acknowledge that the market is indeed important, personal ability must have played a significant role as well; otherwise, why wasn’t I the one getting rich during the good times? 😭

In summary, I found that my senior's ability to farm big wins always relied on the following two skills.

One is the ability to filter. He can identify over 90% of scam projects, filtering out advertising and unhelpful KOLs, allowing him to focus most of his energy on reliable projects.

The other is execution. Manually completing interactions for dozens or even hundreds of accounts requires a lot of energy and perseverance.

At that time, my senior was a graduate student, and the academic pressure was not heavy. His strong filtering ability, sufficient time, and good execution allowed him to farm so many big wins.

Although the current airdrop space is sluggish, my conversation with my senior has indeed taught me a lot. I hope that one day when big wins come, everyone can seize the opportunity and reach the shore!