"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 a free investor if you want to brag).

Since then, over the past two years, I’ve also tried some other things, like being an on-chain 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 decks from various 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 definitive investment recommendation. A somewhat blunt conclusion: any fund that needs to raise public funds, by my standards, is all junk.

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

One role is to seek external funding. Brand, star fund managers, institutions. All the high-profile, outward appearances are just to attract more money.

The other role is to operate that money, which is the so-called junk mentioned earlier. Their strategies are copied from others, choosing a good time cycle, producing some good simulated data, and then letting the fundraising role do the money-raising.

It’s not that they lack ability; it’s just that these things aren’t visible from the data and can’t be linked. Especially the most important risk control capabilities.

Junk is junk, but there are information and technical thresholds. It seems like a reasonable model. In reality, it’s not.

Proactive types are easy to understand—gamblers. Using investors’ money to gamble, winning shares, losing doesn’t affect their own principal.

That’s human nature. When returns mainly come from sharing profits and there’s no downside protection, gambling 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 too, with similar results—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 into something bigger.

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: to keep all decision details transparent, avoid conflicts of interest, openly review code with multiple parties, and even if something goes wrong, we can hold our heads high.

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

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

Later, everyone knows what happened—DeFi Curator’s stablecoins collapsed, but we were unaffected. The so-called veteran institutions are just amateurs and amateurs.

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 fair, open, and error-free. They invest in you only because you haven’t lost money.

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

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

Maintaining 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, you need to understand every detail. From your learning experience, do you have such success or 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 practically 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 can these things be free to watch? Truly kind-hearted people. (Including this article)