If encryption were an online RPG game, how would you choose a profession and level up by defeating monsters?
This is the origin of the "monetized metaverse."Author: jez
Compiled by: 深潮 TechFlow
Traditional finance (tardfi) has decades of experience and a well-established regulatory system. These "investor protection" mechanisms, although often mocked, can effectively reduce risks. In contrast, the cryptocurrency space resembles the Wild West, a relatively niche arena where lessons are learned the hard way, often through painful experiences that echo the rules of traditional finance. In this environment, competition is uneven, and some individuals understand the "unwritten rules" better than others.
The purpose of this guide is to share these hard-earned lessons. Unfortunately, those who need this advice the most may be watching funny videos on YouTube or following lilmoonlambo instead of reading my article (that's what guide writers always think). However, I hope you, as an insightful reader, can find something helpful within.
I compare crypto to a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) because it truly shares many similarities: health points, levels, online friends, player versus player (PvP), player versus environment (PvE), a bustling town square, and an economic system—only here, the "gold coins" are worth more than those in World of Warcraft. This is the origin of the "monetized metaverse ."
The following content is sorted by the potential impact on your investment outcomes (if you haven't implemented or understood them yet).
Teamwork: Don't Be a Lone Wolf
Many who step into the crypto world are naturally contrarian thinkers or prefer to go it alone. After all, it takes a lot of courage to ignore the advice of family and friends (if they know about it). Moreover, once you taste a bit of success, it's even easier to feel like you're "the only one." "I just need to listen to the market!"—typical lone wolves say.
But I want to tell you to give up this "lone wolf mentality"! The market is lagging; it only tells you where you went wrong after you've made a mistake, and the pace of change in the crypto industry is so fast that there's no time for you to learn slowly from your errors.
You need to find a group of excellent teammates to fight alongside. These teammates should be ethical, hardworking, and like-minded "workers." The most important quality is resilience—make friends with those who are frustrated by their mistakes and take swift action, and stay away from those who only "self-soothe." A high-trust chat group can cover more ground than you can alone and can quickly tell you what's right and what's wrong. The most helpful feedback is often straightforward and may even be harsh—but even indifference is a form of feedback.
If you can't find a team, reflect on your "value proposition." Generally speaking, unless you know someone offline and make friends, invitations to join a team are usually based on "what value you can bring" and "whether you fit in." The best teams are made up of strong individuals—improve your skills and reputation until you can join the team you want on equal terms, rather than being "charitably" included.
Here are some types of "great teammates" I have around me:
Mentors: Those who provide valuable experience in the early stages, just like I'm doing by writing this guide.
Partners: Those who invest 10 hours a day together during critical moments, exchanging 2000 messages and making plans.
Signalers: Insightful partners who help you distinguish which ideas are viable and which are just "wild fantasies."
Explorers: Bolder partners responsible for discovering new opportunities for everyone to sift through.
Guides: Technical experts who solve various technical challenges.
Experts: Advisors who provide professional advice in specific situations.
Many people think that so-called "secret organizations" are mysterious conspiracy groups, but they are often just chat groups made up of friends. They grow together and now have a certain level of influence.
The Importance of a "Home Base"
Not all chat groups are the same. There is a special type of chat group called a "home base," which is the first place you log into every day, the first place you reply to messages, and most importantly, the first place you share information.
When deciding whether to invite someone to your high-trust chat group (to enhance team efficiency), there's a counterintuitive suggestion: try to avoid inviting high-profile accounts, as they often already have their own "home base." Instead, those who are still energetic and haven't found a fixed team—"newbies"—are the ones worth considering.
The Risks of Complacency
Every chat group has its lifecycle.
During its peak, most members in the chat group are filled with passion and desire. This motivation often comes from the new, smart individuals who have yet to achieve success but seem to have a bright future ahead.
However, over time, chat groups inevitably become complacent. Members gradually reach a higher level, and the "game" pace becomes slower and more organized. Daily discussions decrease, and topics begin to shift to life, politics, and other areas.
If you want to stay at the forefront of the industry, consider befriending those emerging, promising individuals and joining chat groups that are still in a "thirsty" state. Think about the passion and desire you had when you first entered the field, and immerse yourself in that atmosphere again.
Choosing a Career, Finding Your Strengths
To achieve long-term success in this field, you must cultivate a real advantage. Simply buying tokens that are rising during a bull market does not count as an advantage—what matters is being able to identify the signals of a bull market. Joining a chat group that teaches you hands-on may benefit you in the short term, but such advantages often fade quickly. The true advantage lies in being able to consistently and stably make money in a specific area of expertise.
Different strategies suit different personalities. If you are a patient and risk-averse player, you shouldn't enter the high-risk arena of "pump.fun"; similarly, if you are naturally adventurous, you may find it hard to stick around in liquidity mining, as you might quickly get distracted by other things.
Here are some successful skill categories organized by different risk preferences.
DPS - Traders
These players focus on directional trading, seeking high-risk, high-reward opportunities. The success stories often overshadow the losses of the majority. To become a DPS main, you need to have a high risk tolerance, excellent risk management skills, strong psychological resilience, and the ability to maintain your fighting spirit in the face of failure.
Trench Warriors
Shitcoin traders are a category with a huge disparity in abilities—those who perform poorly (or even at an average level) do so very poorly, while the top performers excel. Players like req and nbs can fully leverage on-chain information resources. If you consider yourself a "shitcoin trader" but haven't mastered your on-chain analysis tools, you still have a lot of room for improvement. In my view, this is the only true alpha in this field.
Although shitcoin trading is a popular entry choice due to its low capital threshold and high potential returns, this style is hard to scale to higher levels. The problem lies in liquidity—newly issued coins often have poor liquidity, and trying to trade with larger capital can lead to increased slippage. In fact, buying too many coins can even cause a price crash, as you bear greater distribution pressure. Shitcoin trading also cannot be horizontally scaled by increasing trading volume or frequency, as the failure rate is simply too high.
Those who successfully stand out from the shitcoin market advise against looking back easily unless in special circumstances or if you have a real advantage in it.
Hunters of Quality New Things
The strategy of "hunting for quality new things" centers on finding a new token with strong fundamental logic, entering early, and enjoying the subsequent appreciation. Unlike the "trench warriors," whose holding periods are measured in days or even hours, this strategy is based on fundamental logic and typically takes weeks to months to see results. Ideally, the market quickly recognizes this logic. This is also my personal favorite style, as it does not rely on "luck" and is more repeatable. The ideal operating range is to buy when a token's market cap is between $50 million and $100 million and exit when the market cap is around $1 billion. This strategy can easily scale to larger investment sizes.
Why choose new things?
The core logic here is "the market has not yet correctly priced this thing; it should be worth more." New things are more likely to achieve this compared to old ones, mainly for two reasons:
Time Factor: The market takes less time to price new things, so their value has not yet been fully reflected.
Capital Flow: There are fewer existing holders of new things, while there are more potential buyers, creating greater room for capital inflow.
Of course, this does not mean it must be a brand-new token. Some old tokens may also present opportunities if they have a clear transformation direction, but they may struggle to develop due to existing supply resistance.
How to find quality new things? The answer is "you'll know when you see it." But if you don't know where to start, you can refer to the following points:
Is it novel enough?
- This is the most important criterion. Pioneers often gain momentum beyond expectations, and their risk/reward ratio is very high. A completely new trend can spark new discussions about the industry, and all attention will ultimately return to the original thing.
Does it have a flywheel effect?
- The flywheel effect refers to a self-reinforcing cycle. For example, shitcoins naturally have a flywheel effect— as prices rise, holders become wealthier and more excited, telling more friends, thus creating a positive feedback loop. Other flywheel effects may be more complex, such as bonding curves, which can effectively kickstart project activity through deterministic early participation and guaranteed yield incentives.
Is there an entry barrier?
- Onboarding friction is an important aspect of validating investment logic. If there is no entry barrier at all, you need to ask yourself: why am I so lucky to buy in at a low price? Perhaps the current price is already reasonable. At the same time, the existence of an entry barrier also means that there may be opportunities to lower the barrier in the future. For example, Rollbit migrating from Solana to Ethereum, the expansion of ultra-liquid spot ecosystems, and even the launch of Bitcoin ETFs are all typical cases of lowering entry barriers. The reduction of barriers often attracts more capital into the market, and those who invested early usually benefit from this.
Meme Priests
If "gem hunters" rely on fundamentals for support, then meme priests completely discard these boring things. Meme priests are NFT traders in this cycle who intuitively capture market sentiment to seek alpha. Just like NFT investments, buying and then "lying flat" is usually the best strategy—until this strategy no longer works.
However, this path requires immense faith. You must be able to withstand the pressure of market pullbacks while also accepting the negative emotions that may arise from such pullbacks. The best meme priests can even change the odds of success through their actions. For example, baproll and spx6900, or dbl and fartcoin, are typical cases.
From another perspective, Bitcoin can also be seen as a massive meme on a larger scale. When I look back on my investment experiences, I find that if I had "laid flat" and done nothing after each meme purchase, my returns would often exceed those from "active investments." I wonder if this strategy applies to you as well? Perhaps this is a question worth pondering.
Leverage Wizards
Among all trading categories, leveraged traders face the highest risk of failure. Their behavior sometimes resembles that of "problem gamblers." In my experience, most leveraged traders' issues stem from using excessive leverage, holding losing positions for too long, and trading too frequently. I often joke, "There are no successful leveraged traders in this world, only those who haven't been liquidated yet."
Leveraged trading seems simple, and there are a few opportunities each year that make you feel it's "easy." For example, the approval of Bitcoin ETFs or certain major events. However, at other times, leveraged trading feels more like a brutal PvP battlefield. Even when profitable, the returns from leveraged trading often pale in comparison to straightforward asymmetric spot investment opportunities.
If you're considering this category, I strongly advise you to abandon it.
Farmers - Tanky Shields
Tank-type players are almost indestructible (unless faced with smart contract risks). Their losses are minimal, but their upside is also relatively fixed. Tank-style play is particularly suitable for those who are very patient, risk-averse, or have limited time.
Stablecoin Staking Players
By providing liquidity to users or projects, they can earn stable returns. Currently, there are several main sources of income:
Funding Rate Trading
When market demand is high (such as Bitcoin reaching an all-time high), the demand for margin trading surges, pushing up funding rates (the annualized interest rate paid by longs to shorts). For major coins (like Bitcoin and Ethereum), this rate can sometimes exceed 20% and permeate the on-chain stablecoin market.
RWA Returns
Government bonds are currently the most common and liquid RWA successfully introduced into the crypto space. In contrast, returns from real estate and other forms of real-world assets are not recommended due to poor liquidity and high risks.
Token Incentive Returns
Issuing token rewards to users providing liquidity is a significant innovation in the DeFi space. Although incentive mechanisms have become more complex today, there are still opportunities for unexpected surprises. This is a true "player versus environment" (PvE) model, as project teams are happy to exchange their printed tokens for liquidity.
Additionally, "market-making liquidity providers" are an emerging role in this cycle, offering high and stable returns. For example, GMX liquidity pools and projects like Jupiter and Hyperliquid are good choices.
Sybil/Wash Strategies
For those deeply involved in crypto projects, this strategy currently offers the best risk/reward ratio, as it typically requires minimal capital investment. The core idea is to participate in a new protocol (either as a user or by contributing trading volume), as long as the expected rewards exceed the costs incurred. However, this method is gradually losing effectiveness, as more projects have become aware of the exploitative nature of such "farmers" and have begun to adopt linear reward mechanisms to curb this behavior.
The essence of this approach lies in an implicit consensus—the project needs certain key metrics (like user count, total locked value TVL, and trading volume) to enhance its valuation and attract new users. Unlike users providing actual liquidity support, those engaging in Sybil/Wash (i.e., users faking identities or transactions) only create a false sense of prosperity. Even so, many projects are willing to pay with their issued tokens just to showcase a pretty data dashboard on Dune Analytics.
I've heard that the most radical operations are often automated and have been in a cat-and-mouse game with detection mechanisms. For instance, once I heard about an automated operating system consisting of 12,000 bots in a certain project, I decided never to touch zkSync again.
If you want to actually try this method, a feasible approach is to interact with a promising new project using a few accounts you normally use.
Support Players - Other Categories
These styles are neither trading nor staking mining, but they are unique enough to be categorized separately.
Insiders
There are many types of insiders; some are helpful for project development, while others may have malicious intent. Regardless, being an insider is a privilege, as their risks are much lower compared to ordinary investors.
So, what’s the difference between investing in insiders and seed round insiders? Typically, it’s the difference in project quality—historically, venture capital could serve as a signal of project quality, but this standard is changing.
In reality, most project founders are more willing to accept direct messages (DMs) than you might think, especially in the early stages of a project. For example, NBS's presale strategy: participating just before the presale ends while DMing the developers is also a reflection of insider strategy.
Builders
If you are a builder, my only advice is: stop reading this article and go back to building! Perhaps this article can help you better understand user personas, but nothing is more important than continuously iterating and seeking product-market fit (PMF). Think about the best builders you know—would they be reading this content?
Onchain Rogues
There are many underexplored opportunities in the blockchain space, and those with technical skills, curiosity, and energy can delve deep and profit from it. For example, sniping, sandwich attacks, randomness exploits, etc., are all edge cases waiting to be discovered and utilized by the keen.
Leveling Guide
In the process of trying to level up, you need to clarify whether you are in "speed run mode" or "hardcore mode."
Speed Run Mode: This mode allows for restarts after failure. It resembles "hypergambling" and is suitable for those with other income sources or students with high future income potential. Because the fear of failure is lower, speed run mode can take on more risks.
Hardcore Run Mode: This mode has a low tolerance for failure. For instance, if your funds are life savings, or you live in an economically disadvantaged area, or even need to support family members, you cannot afford the risk of losing all your funds, which falls under hardcore mode.
Four-Digit and Below Asset Stage
If you already have a job or are in school, you can skip to the next section.
At this stage, your time should be spent earning fiat currency— a minimum wage job is equivalent to a 150% annualized return (APR). And I believe you, dear reader, can do more.
In fact, for an investment portfolio of this scale, you cannot achieve sufficient returns to justify investing a lot of time. The only exception is Sybil farming airdrops, but this does not require full-time commitment. Opportunities for 10x returns are rare and should be pursued at higher asset stages.
If you live in an area with scarce job opportunities, consider joining a protocol as a community manager or another role they need. The simplest way is to become part of the community as the protocol develops, so when they need to hire, you are already a core member of the community.
Five-Digit Hell - Focus on Increasing Fiat Income
Welcome to the trench stage. At this stage, every dollar is as precious as ammunition on the battlefield—it's prepared to help you find that 10x return opportunity.
Many try to become "trench warriors" without truly mastering the necessary skills or risk trying to become "leverage wizards." These individuals often get stuck in five-digit hell until a bull market pulls them out—but they quickly fall back in.
However, I find that investors who hold MemeCoins long-term or are good at spotting "quality new things" often succeed in breaking through. Their strategy is simple: buy and hold spot assets firmly.
Whether you choose hardcore mode or not, Sybil farming airdrops are a low-cost way to participate. Just one large, non-linear airdrop opportunity is enough to graduate you from this stage.
Six-Digit Hell - Seeking 10x Returns
Seize the best points. When your capital reaches a certain scale, you can easily grasp a 10x return opportunity without worrying too much about capital size or slippage issues. As mentioned in the "new opportunity hunter" section, the ideal investment opportunity usually grows from a market cap of $50 million or $100 million to $1 billion.
I have personally escaped from six-digit hell four times and have been fortunate never to fall back. Each time, the strategy was the same:
Keep a close eye on new opportunities: Always be alert to promising new projects or trends in the market.
Test your hypothesis with small amounts: First, invest a small amount to test whether your investment hypothesis holds.
Concentrate and hold firmly: Once the hypothesis is confirmed, invest most of your funds and patiently wait for the strategy to validate.
Take profits when the market buzzes: When you find that everyone in the market is talking about this project, it's a good time to exit with profits.
Looking back on each successful experience, there is a common point: I bet on exchange tokens. After all, speculation has always been the most lethal product-market fit in the cryptocurrency market.
Seven-Digit Hell - Seeking Several 2-3x Returns
When your capital reaches seven digits, seeking some 2-3x opportunities is key to breaking free from the predicament. The overall strategy is similar to the six-digit stage, just requiring more patience and repeated actions. However, as the capital scale increases, the operational difficulty also rises, especially in maintaining flexibility amid market volatility.
At this point, the biggest challenge is how to allocate funds. You may find that some projects lack sufficient liquidity to support the investment scale you desire. This forces you to diversify your investments. In the six-digit stage, you could concentrate all your funds on the best ideas; but in the seven-digit stage, this approach often becomes unrealistic.
When there are not enough attractive new opportunities in the market, temporarily parking funds in stablecoin liquidity mining (Stable Farms) is a good choice. This method provides stable returns while giving you time to wait for better investment opportunities. Patience is particularly important at this stage.
Additionally, parking capital in stablecoin farming between different "quality new things" becomes more appealing. Patience is especially crucial at this stage.
Eight-Digit and Above
At this stage, what more is there to say? Those who reach this level only need to remember: "Don't mess it up."
Avoid Standing in the Fire Pit
Avoid the following common mistakes.
Avoid Trading When Emotions Are Out of Control
Learn to recognize your emotional changes. When you feel yourself starting to lose control, decisively sell your holdings and temporarily leave the market. Chasing losses never leads to good outcomes; calming down is the wise choice.
Avoid Reckless Bets After Big Wins
After a big win, it's easy to become overly confident and incur foolish losses. I refer to this situation as "euphoria trades." No matter what kind of victory you've just experienced, always maintain rigor in the trading process and avoid being swayed by emotions.
Avoid Circular Cashing Out
When trading, always ask yourself one question: "Who else will buy?" The essence of the market is the flow of funds, not stagnation. Sometimes, some assets may seem safe simply because everyone is holding them, but that doesn't mean they are truly risk-free.
Forgetting Floating Profits and Losses and Historical Highs
Obsessing over past mistakes only wastes your energy. Dwelling on these matters can cloud your thinking and affect your next decisions. Let go of the past and focus on future opportunities.
"Insider information often leads to the worst losses" -cl207
When you hear about so-called "insider information," carefully assess your position in the information chain. The further you are from the source of the information, the more likely you are to become the "bag holder" providing liquidity for those needing to exit.
Don't Add to Losing Positions
"Losers only add to failing investments" is a common mistake in the market. If the market has clearly told you that your judgment is wrong, do not continue to add to your position without sufficient reason.
Old Coins Are Bad, New Coins Are More Attractive
New projects often have greater growth potential, while old projects may have lost their appeal. You can refer to my previous detailed analysis on capital flow regarding this.
Traits of the Best Players in the Game - David Sirlin
David Sirlin is a champion of competitive fighting games who wrote a book titled "Playing to Win," sharing his strategies and insights. For anyone who has participated in high-level competitions, this content may not be unfamiliar. However, the traits he summarizes for successful players also apply to investors in the crypto space. These traits include:
Deep Understanding of the Market: Understanding historical trends and precedents helps you predict future market changes.
Love for the Market: You must love this "game" to be willing to invest enough time and energy to win.
Psychological Resilience: This market will put you through countless crashes, but you need to persist.
Correct Mindset: When faced with losses or misfortunes, do you choose to face them calmly or to complain in anger?
Technical Skills: Do you possess unique skills or advantages?
Adaptability: Can you flexibly apply your advantages to new environments or rules?
Yomi (Predictive Ability): Can you accurately predict the behavior of other market participants?
Evaluation Ability: Can you relatively judge the value and potential of things?
