Wang Feng Internal Sharing: Insights on Cryptocurrency Market Investing
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Wang Feng Internal Sharing: Insights on Cryptocurrency Market Investing
Be confident in your understanding, and accept the outcome willingly.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Wang Feng, Xiaoyin New Decade (Feng Wang)
This is an internal memo I wrote for my team on cryptocurrency market investing. Actually, I'm running a three-year experiment—how to understand trends, people, and assets in the simplest possible way. Today I manage a $10 million crypto fund; by year-end, I aim to manage $100 million; and within the next three years, who knows—maybe even a $1 billion fund.
Originally ten points, but once I started writing, I couldn't stop. I handwrote this draft during meetings on Thursday. This is the first version—might continue later. Feel free to skip if not interested.
1/ Focus on Pre-Secondary Market Investing
Crypto investing is fundamentally different from traditional internet investments like angel, VC, or PE deals. This most dynamic emerging market is built on secondary market trading, with primary market investments serving mainly as brand-building tools.
The key logic here is that we can participate in primary markets to conduct deep research and gain insider knowledge about projects, then leverage that intelligence earlier and more effectively in the secondary market.
Rather than waiting two to four years for lock-up periods to end, we should take advantage of native, decentralized, multi-channel liquidity—the unique appeal of crypto markets. Therefore, what we're really doing is pre-secondary market investing.
2/ Align With the Most Active Founders
Strive to align with the best projects. Build strong connections with top founders. Understand their thinking—they provide frontline market signals and serve as essential reference points. Only through such alignment can we develop better search and evaluation criteria to identify the next promising project. Learning directly from founders is invaluable. Emotionally, being in sync with them creates resonance, which is never a bad thing.
3/ Recover Your Principal Quickly
Early-stage projects are often extremely cheap, sometimes yielding 3x, 5x, or even higher returns—for example, via staking rewards. Even when your cost basis is low, quickly recover your initial capital. Avoid greed. Make it a habit. Especially for new projects not yet listed on major exchanges, liquidity is severely limited. If overall market sentiment turns negative, you might struggle to exit, risking long-term entrapment.
As long as you have recovered principal to reinvest, you’ll always have ammunition for the next bottom-fishing opportunity and new targets.
4/ Long-Term Hold Top-Tier Projects
Top-tier projects should dominate your portfolio—75–80%—especially absolute leaders in emerging sectors like base-layer protocols and trading platforms. Major investments aren’t driven by news cycles, but by real trends. When adjusting positions, it’s about replacing old leaders with new ones.
5/ Investing Requires Lateral Thinking
Founding a startup involves vertical thinking—going deeper and deeper. Investors, however, thrive on lateral thinking: identifying leading projects across different niches, then moving horizontally to discover the next market and its leader. Proactively seek new opportunities and themes. Don’t become obsessed with one sector. Some investors dive into a protocol niche, think they’ve mastered it, and keep buying related tokens layer after layer—but there’s no need. Just capture the leader and move on.
We often hear “invest in what you understand,” but nobody is born understanding anything. What you think you understand usually comes only after you’ve invested and learned along the way. Many investors enter a project only to realize it's completely different from their initial assumptions. In crypto, change happens faster. Success here depends on momentum in continuous learning, courage to act on insights, and flexibility to correct mistakes promptly.
6/ Prioritize Decision-Making Over Management
The essence of investing lies in focusing energy on "research and decision-making." Investing means pulling the trigger—the final step is direct response to gathered information. It’s not about management. I’ve seen small firms where managers believe having many talented people and organizing them well is enough. But meetings devolve into gossip sessions, which is disastrous. More people bring noise—not clarity. Too many voices create chaotic dissonance. You don’t need polished PPTs. If you truly love an investment idea—if it makes your heart race—you won’t need slides to convince yourself. Keep investment decisions simple.
In crypto, hesitation kills. Once you sense market movement, act immediately. Otherwise, by the time prices rise, your supposed courage evaporates halfway. Frustration follows, emotions spiral, and poor decisions compound.
7/ Ideal Team: Two Co-Founders
Like founding a startup, a two-person team is nearly ideal. Look at complementary expertise: One has product and technical skills; the other brings economics, finance—even sociology or psychology. From a capability perspective, one excels at resource mobilization, the other at influence-building. These combinations form golden partnerships.
If a team—two or more—lacks technical understanding, doesn’t tweet, and is invisible in communities, they’ll struggle in this chaotic industry. Every industry has noise, but thriving requires visibility and competence.
So, what’s your duo’s edge?
8/ Don’t Overtrust Your Expertise
In investing, beware of falling into endless chart-watching. Addiction leads to short-term bullish/bearish mental loops—just like a product team obsessed solely with coding, working hard but never engaging users, ultimately burning out pointlessly.
Some people become overly attached to a specific tool or method, mastering it so thoroughly that they rely exclusively on it. Once they ignore external changes and dismiss unfamiliar approaches as “magic,” they’re trapped in a beautifully decorated well—an unfit mindset for investing.
Whether building products or investing, one principle applies: adapt to circumstances. Never be overconfident in your specialty. Step outside. View the painting from beyond the frame.
9/ Why Is Placing Bets So Hard?
A great opportunity usually has few believers and limited holders. Once everyone owns it and it gains fame, the optimal entry window has passed. Thus, successful investing demands contrarian instincts and the courage to bet early—when no one cares. Last year, I asked a colleague to check a new Bitcoin asset protocol token. He saw fewer than 1,000 wallet addresses and dismissed it as too early. Then he went back to watching Bitcoin price charts. But we entered crypto precisely because of stories offering 100x returns.
Here’s something you can treat as a joke: After years of observing people, I’ve found those who feel excitement spending money tend to make good investors.
10/ Founder Mentality Matters
Having strong founder backgrounds adds significant value to an investment team. Regardless of past success or failure, great founders share one critical trait: hunger. This has nothing to do with age. Steve Jobs was spot-on with “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” Conversely, someone with a flashy big-tech background may actually be a liability.
Over the past decade, I've seen many underachieving or failed founders succeed brilliantly in investing. Meanwhile, some highly successful corporate executives fail as investors—they care about appearances, avoid real work. Why? Their career fulfillment is already complete. They carry big-company baggage, treating LP funds as retirement decoration.
11/ Manage Your Expectations
Investing is ultimately about returns—know when to exit. When selling, don’t worry about how brilliant the next buyer is or how much hype follows. “Sell when others are euphoric” is timeless wisdom. But when exactly is that peak? Focus on one thing: manage expectations. How many multiples has your paper return reached? Did you hit your original target?
Improving abilities—expertise, cognition, energy, charisma—is achievable through practice. Birth is fate, regardless of status. Getting rich requires luck. Making steady gains is skill. But ask yourself: how much do you actually want to earn?
Be pragmatic. Survive long-term. As long as you’re alive, you keep having chances to dream big.
As I kept writing, it got cliché. Five years ago, when I first entered crypto, I said I’d one day write “My View on Crypto Assets” as a summary. I never forgot that intention, but had no clue where to start. Now, five years later, though still far from mastery, I’ve picked up a few basics. These past five years were merely catching up on general knowledge of markets, economics, and finance. My only luck? An insatiable hunger.
Update / The following four “correct” opinions should be taken inversely.
Many of these once-popular conclusions are being dismantled year by year. What innovators need is confidence in their own judgment—and willingness to accept the consequences.
1/ NFTs are pointless!——Tokens are more direct. Non-fungible assets via digital images? Impossible!
2/ Bitcoin is perfect—enough!——Programmable expansion? Ethereum exists; no need to reinvent the wheel.
3/ Blockchain gaming has zero chance!——If I want to play games, why not use consoles or online games?
4/ Earlier, a seasoned crypto veteran told me personally: DeFi is just a passing Ponzi scheme. Never touch it.
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