22 Years Old: Reflecting on My Journey to Earning $10 Million in the Crypto Market
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
22 Years Old: Reflecting on My Journey to Earning $10 Million in the Crypto Market
Still waters run deep; it's not about being first, but about the unceasing flow.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Vida
Translated by: TechFlow
A 22-year-old KOL named Vida shared a long thread on Twitter detailing his journey of earning $10 million in the crypto market.
Financial success is never accidental. Persistence, intelligence, execution capability, and staying close to trends—these are key takeaways we can learn from Vida’s path to wealth accumulation.
What does it feel like to have a net worth of $10 million at age 22? This is my personal story.
First, how did I accumulate this wealth? I started working online at age 14. From ages 14 to 19, I made money by setting up game servers and selling products either from West to East or East to West—a strategy I call geographic arbitrage.
There has always been an information gap between China and the West. For example, labor costs in China are typically about 1/7 of those in the West. Western technologies tend to be more advanced; for instance, everyone in the West now knows about ChatGPT, while most people in China do not.
By age 19, I had accumulated $500,000. Then I entered the cryptocurrency space after hearing from one of my Chinese clients that he had earned millions through crypto mining and running crypto gambling sites. In 2020, I became a holder of ETH and BTC.
Here comes a puzzling moment: My father is a trader (he made $2 million in real estate and stocks), but unfortunately, he believed crypto was in a bubble in January 2021 and advised me to sell my ETH and BTC holdings. Selling my ETH at $969 with only a 3x return was a huge mistake.
Still, it was enough. By age 20, my net worth was around $1 million. There were setbacks along the way—for example, I shorted BTC at $32,000 and got liquidated after Tesla announced it would accept Bitcoin, losing $50,000. That was likely my largest loss in terms of net worth percentage.
But that incident made me think: When retail investors bought in after the Tesla news, if I could get access to such information first, buy early, and then sell to these retail traders, I could profit from their actions.
So in March 2021, I seized an opportunity. At that time, whenever Elon tweeted about Doge or dog-related keywords, Dogecoin's price surged. I had my developer build a monitoring bot to track every single tweet from Elon. Then, when Musk posted, I manually placed buys.
I had several successful trades, but soon realized manual trading wasn’t competitive enough. So in April 2021, my developer built me an automated Dogecoin trading bot based on Elon’s tweets. It was a massive success—I made at least $500,000 from that bot alone.
I executed several profitable trades, but later understood automation was essential for sustained competitiveness. Thus, in April 2021, my developer created an automated Dogecoin trading bot triggered by Elon’s tweets. This proved highly successful—I earned at least $500,000 from that bot.
Throughout 2021, whenever Elon tweeted, I bought Dogecoin and sold it minutes later to retail traders. The same applied to other mentioned tokens like $SHIB and $PEOPLE. Just from tracking Elon’s tweets, I earned at least $1.5 million.
By the end of 2021, I discovered that not only Elon’s tweets moved markets—exchange announcements, especially from the top three exchanges, also had strong impacts. If I could be the first to enter during these specific events, I could achieve near-guaranteed profits. So I began building infrastructure to front-run these events.
Eventually, in 2022, I developed one of the fastest bots in the market. I see my business model as similar to MEV—I gain an edge and profit from others’ mistakes, desires, and inefficiencies.
Thanks to the bot business, by age 21 in 2022, my net worth reached $4 million, and I employed four developers.
During the 2022 bear market, I continuously improved my latency advantage. I set myself the goal of “working hard in the bear market to reap rewards in the bull market.” I averaged 10 hours of work per day—building new bots, optimizing latency, and trading major events like the FTX-Binance acquisition saga.
In 2023, my efforts in bot optimization, infrastructure development, and trading skills paid off. I made substantial profits through bots reacting to token listings and Elon’s tweets. I also manually traded major events such as the SVB federal bailout, XRP lawsuit victory, Ethereum ETF developments, and Grayscale’s legal win.
Just days after trading the Grayscale victory event, my net worth surpassed $10 million at age 22.
Reaching this net worth is a milestone in my life, but I believe I haven't reached my limit yet. I still work until 4 a.m., constantly optimizing my bots to maintain my competitive edge.
I know the risks of achieving this level of wealth at a young age: laziness, arrogance, over-concentration of portfolio, and gambling. Just look at the unfortunate examples on Coinfessions. I won’t repeat their mistakes.
-
I spend very little time on entertainment. Most of my time goes toward hard work or learning new technologies and knowledge.
-
I know there are people better than me in various fields, so I actively seek relationships with high-performers.
-
Besides crypto, I invest in traditional finance to diversify my assets.
-
60% of my assets are in crypto: 90% in USDC and USDT because I need stablecoins for bot and news-based trading operations, and 10% in spot Bitcoin as a long-term hold.
-
40% of my assets are in traditional finance: including 10–30 year U.S. bonds, Chinese indices, Vietnamese indices, Chinese tech, U.S. tech, and a small allocation to the S&P 500. In 2023, I’m generally bullish on emerging markets and tech, as I don’t believe high U.S. interest rates will last long.
-
I personally dislike gambling, but in crypto trading, gambling and speculation are human nature. Whenever I feel compelled to prove I’m right in uncertain trades—such as shorting $CYBER or buying PUT options on $NVDA and $COIN—I test with only $1,000–$10,000 to validate whether I’m right or wrong.
My advice to young people:
-
Find your passion and work hard—you must outwork your competitors to surpass them.
-
Look for arbitrage opportunities based on information asymmetry—there are many out there.
-
Outsource unimportant tasks to people who have lower time cost or higher skill than you.
-
Interact more with people who make money, and stay away from generic communities like groups of holders of certain meme coins.
-
Don’t gamble or blindly follow trends like ordinary people—focus on certainty in trading.
-
Identify market inefficiencies and exploit them.
It’s not about being first in the stream, but about flowing endlessly.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@Vida_BWE
