"Casual Chat About Investment, Funds, and Crypto"

“Casual Chat on Investment, Funds, Crypto”

#基金 #curator

Starting early in the morning, let’s have a casual chat about funds.

I wrote in my pinned article that in 2021 I was still a product manager, then I got involved in DeFi and became an institutional fund manager, and later went solo (you can call it freelance investing if you want to brag).

Since then, over the past two years, I’ve also tried some other things, like being a chain-based fund manager (DeFi Curator). But all of these basically wrapped up by the end of 2025. Why? I’ll explain later.

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

There’s an older brother who helped me early on, often sending me decks for fundraising. Of course, I’ve seen all kinds of decks from other sources too.

Unfortunately, out of nearly a hundred pieces of material I’ve reviewed over the years, I could tell at a glance that they were all junk, and I’ve never once given a positive investment recommendation. A somewhat blunt conclusion: any fund that needs to raise publicly, by my standards, is all junk.

How can an outsider simply understand financial institutions? There are actually only two roles.

One role is to find money externally. Brand, star fund managers, institutions. All the high-end, outward-facing stuff you see is just to attract more capital.

The other role is to operate that money, which is the water goods mentioned above. Their strategies are copied from others, choosing a good time cycle, producing some good simulated data, and then letting the fundraising role go out and raise money.

It’s not that they have no ability of their own, but these things are invisible from the data and cannot be linked. Especially the most important risk control capabilities.

Water is water, but it also has information and technical barriers. It seems like a reasonable model. In reality, it’s not.

Active types are easy to understand—gamblers. Using investors’ money to bet, sharing the winnings if they win, and losing only their own principal if they lose.

That’s human nature. When returns mainly come from sharing profits and there’s no downside protection, betting is inevitable—no exceptions.

Passive, arbitrage-type funds, make money from management fees. But the risk remains huge because most arbitrage teams can’t dodge black swans, their skills are insufficient, and black swans happen every year.

I’ve invested in others’ funds myself, and the result was the same—blown up by overconfidence. It’s quite funny when you think about it 😂

Let’s talk about DeFi Curator.

There are two motivations for doing this side hustle: one is to increase passive income, and the other is to see if the bull market can grow big enough to scale.

We have an advantage in doing this. Because we are the team that understands DeFi and risk control the best (at least one of them), knowing exactly where the risks lie, each black swan becomes a profit.

Plus, some friends are willing to help out, so we got it done quickly.

Initially, I had a beautiful vision: we would keep all decision details transparent, avoid conflicts of interest, openly review code with multiple parties, and even if something went wrong, we’d have no regrets.

Before 1011, our portfolio was among the highest-yielding ones. If something went wrong, we would definitely run faster than others and minimize losses.

After 1011, I felt the market was off, so I reviewed the portfolio again. Removed those “everyone is investing in” assets that we couldn’t practically or immediately control risk on through code.

Later, everyone knows what happened—DeFi Curator’s stablecoins blew up, but we were unaffected. The so-called veteran institutions are just land chickens and dogs.

At the same time, I also realized that the beautiful vision was just my wishful thinking—being fair and transparent is worthless if it’s not valuable.

People won’t understand you just because you’re just and open and mistake-free. People invest in you only because you haven’t lost money.

Conversely, as long as you don’t lose money, it doesn’t matter if you’re evil, corrupt, or fake.

The potential risk of others losing money is already a risk I don’t want to bear. Even if legally innocent, there are risks outside the law.

Keeping a loose structure means less pressure during bad times, which is also pretty good.

A few related thoughts at the end:

1. I think non-professionals’ understanding of investment shouldn’t exceed about 10% of their own money and energy. It’s better to focus on your main career.

Or if you plan to specialize in this field, then you need to understand every detail. From your learning experience, do you have such success stories or innate talent?

2. I’ve said many times that crypto has a huge value: it demystifies investing. In every aspect, inside and out. No other industry allows you to understand, get involved, and operate at the underlying level as deeply.

3. I love reviewing industry experts’ retrospectives, which is also a huge value of crypto.
   Some outsiders don’t understand what’s so interesting about these bragging stories.
   What I don’t understand is how these things can be free to read—great kindness indeed. (Including this article)