"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, who often sent me decks for fundraising. Of course, I’ve seen decks from various other channels 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 given a definitive investment recommendation. A somewhat arbitrary conclusion: any fund that needs to raise funds 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 look for external funding. Brand, star fund managers, institutions. All the high-end, outward appearances you see 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 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.

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, sharing the winnings if they win, and losing no more than their own principal if they lose.

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 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 scale up.

We have an advantage in doing this. Because we are the team that understands DeFi and risk control 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 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, minimizing 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 collapsed, but we were unaffected. The so-called established institutions are just local chickens and dogs.

At the same time, I also realized that the beautiful vision was just my wishful thinking—being honest and transparent is ultimately worthless—

Others won’t understand you just because you’re fair, open, and flawless. They invest in you only because you didn’t lose money.

Conversely, as long as you don’t lose money, even evil, corruption, or fraud doesn’t matter.

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.

Maintaining a loose structure, with less pressure during bad market times, is also quite 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 stories or innate talent?

2. I’ve said many times that crypto has a huge value: it disenchants people from investing. In every aspect, inside and out. No other industry allows you to understand, get involved, and practically operate at such a deep level.

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 benevolent. (Including this article)