"Casual Chat About Investment, Funds, and Crypto"

《Casual Chat on Investment, Funds, Crypto》

#基金 #curator

Early in the morning, from here, let’s chat casually about funds.

I wrote in my pinned post: in 2021 I was still a product manager. Later, I got into DeFi and became an institutional fund manager. Then I went solo (you can call it “freelance investing” if you want to brag).

After that, in the past two years, I’ve actually tried some other things too—for example, an on-chain fund manager (DeFi Curator). But by the end of 2025, these basically wrapped up. Why they wrapped up—I’ll talk about it later.

Let’s first go back to the original tweet about funds.

There was an older brother who helped me early on. He would often send me decks for fundraising. Of course, there were also decks from all kinds of other channels.

Unfortunately, among nearly a hundred pieces of material I’ve seen over all these years, every single one was clearly recognizable as junk at a glance. Not once did they give a definite investment recommendation. I can draw a fairly blunt conclusion: any fund that needs to raise money publicly—by my standards—is all junk.

How can outsiders simply understand financial institutions? There are really only two roles.

One role is to look outward for money. Brand, star fund managers, institutions. All the lofty, external things you can see are all to get more money.

The other role is to operate that money—meaning the aforementioned junk. The strategies are copied from other people, pick a good time cycle, produce a good simulated dataset, and then let the “money-seeking” role go out and raise money.

It’s not that they have zero ability of their own. It’s just that, from the materials, you can’t see it—you can’t connect the dots. Especially the most important part: risk control capability.

Junk is junk, but there are still information and technical thresholds. It looks like a reasonable model. In reality, it isn’t.

Active strategies are easy to understand: gamblers. Using investors’ money to gamble—if they win, they share the profits; if they lose, they won’t lose their own principal.

That’s human nature. When most of the return comes from profit-sharing and there’s no downside guarantee, you can’t not gamble—there are no exceptions.

Passive, arbitrage-based strategies make money from management fees. But the risk is still huge, because the vast majority of arbitrage teams can’t escape black swans, their level isn’t enough, and black swans happen every year.

I’ve also invested in others myself, and the result was the same: inflated confidence led me to bet big and get blown up. Just think about how funny that is 😂

Let’s talk about DeFi Curator.

There are two starting points for doing this side project: one is to add some passive income, and the other is to see whether, in a bull market, we have an opportunity to scale up and grow bigger.

We have an advantage in doing this. Because we’re the team that understands DeFi and risk control the best (add one more “one of them,” I guess). We know exactly where the specific details of the risk lie—so every black swan ends up being profitable.

Plus, we had friends willing to help with this, and it got set up quickly.

At the beginning, I had a beautiful vision: we would keep all the decision details, not settle or “net out” interests, publicly open-source the review of the code by multiple parties—so even if something happened, we’d have a clear conscience.

Before 1011, our portfolio was among the highest-yielding group. If anything went wrong, we would definitely run faster than our peers, keeping losses to a minimum.

After 1011, I felt the market didn’t look right, so I reviewed the portfolio again. We removed those assets that “everyone was investing in,” but that, in terms of code, we had no way to actually and immediately control the risks.

Then, very soon, what happened is something everyone knows now: the stablecoins invested by the DeFi Curator teams blew up, and we had no impact. Those so-called veteran institutions are just paper tigers—nothing but dust and dirt.

At the same time, I also figured out then that the beautiful vision was just my own wishful thinking. Having a clear conscience is worthless——

Other people won’t understand you just because you’re fair, open, and without mistakes. When others invest in you, it’s only because you haven’t lost money.

On the contrary, as long as you don’t lose money, even if you’re evil, embezzling, or falsifying—none of it matters.

The possibility that others might lose money is a risk I don’t want to take on. Even if you’re not wrong under the law, there are risks outside the law.

Keeping a loose structure, so there’s less pressure when the market is bad, is also pretty good.

Final couple of related thoughts:

1. I think non-professionals’ understanding of investing shouldn’t exceed 10% of their own money and energy. Better to leave your effort for your main job.

Or if you plan to specialize in this field, then you need to understand every single detail. Looking back at your learning career—have you had any successful experience or innate talent like that?

2. This has probably been said many times: Crypto has a huge value—it lets people get “disenchanted” about investing. In every aspect, inside and out. No other industry can let you understand, get close to, and truly operate the underlying realities of hands-on affairs as deeply.

3. I really like watching retrospectives from top experts in the industry, and that’s also one of Crypto’s huge values.
   What some outsiders don’t understand is: what’s worth looking at about all this bragging.
   What I don’t understand is that these things can actually be read for free—what a great-hearted person. (Including this article)