Casual Chat About Investment, Funds, and Crypto

“Let’s Chat About Investment, Funds, Crypto”

#Funds #Curator

Early in the morning, let’s start off by chatting about funds. https://t.co/6dSNPF9P1P

I wrote in my pinned article that in 2021 I was still a product manager, later got into DeFi and became a fund manager for institutions, and then started my own venture (which I can boastfully call a free investor).

Later, in the past two years, I actually tried some other things, like being an on-chain fund manager (DeFi Curator). However, these were basically wrapped up by the end of 2025, and I’ll explain why later.

Let’s return to the original discussion about funds.

There’s an older brother who helped me early on and often sends me some fundraising decks for funds to review. Of course, there are also various decks from other channels.

Unfortunately, among the nearly hundred materials I’ve looked at over the years, all of them were clearly garbage at first glance, and not once did any of them provide a solid investment recommendation. I can draw a rather blunt conclusion: funds that need to raise capital are all garbage by my standards.

How can outsiders easily understand financial institutions? Actually, there are only two roles.

One role is seeking external funds. Brands, star fund managers, institutions. Everything you can see that’s high-end and external is all about finding more money.

The other role is managing that money, which is what I mentioned earlier as garbage. The strategies are all copied from others, picking a good time period, generating favorable simulated data, and then letting the money-seeking role go get the funds.

It’s not that they completely lack their own capabilities, it’s just that these things can’t be seen from the materials and cannot be correlated. Especially the most important risk control capabilities.

Water is still water; there are information and technical barriers, and it seems like a reasonable model. But in reality, it’s not.

Active funds are easy to understand; they are gamblers. They use investors’ money to gamble, split the winnings, and if they lose, they don’t lose their own capital.

This is human nature. When returns mainly come from profit sharing and there’s no need to cover losses, it’s impossible not to gamble, with no exceptions.

Passive, arbitrage-type funds simply earn management fees. However, the risks remain huge because the vast majority of arbitrage teams cannot escape black swans; their skills aren’t up to par, and black swans happen every year.

I’ve invested in others too, and the outcome was the same; inflated bets led to losses. It’s quite funny to think about. 😂

Now let’s talk about DeFi Curator.

There are two starting points for this side business: one is to increase passive income, and the other is to see if there’s an opportunity to scale up during a bull market.

We have advantages in doing this. Because we are one of the teams that understand DeFi and risk control the best, we know where the specific details of the risks lie, so every black swan event becomes a profit opportunity.

Plus, with friends willing to help with this, we quickly got it done.

At the beginning, I had a beautiful vision: we would keep all decision-making details, not mix interests, and publicly review the code from multiple parties, so even if something went wrong, we would have no regrets.

Before 1011, our portfolio was among the highest yielding ones; if something went wrong, we would definitely run faster than our peers, minimizing losses.

After 1011, I felt something was off in the market and reviewed the portfolio again. I removed those assets that “everyone was investing in,” but where we couldn’t control risks practically and immediately based on the code.

What happened next is well known: the stablecoins that DeFi Curators invested in crashed, but we were unaffected. So-called established institutions were just chickens and dogs.

At the same time, I also realized that my beautiful vision was one-sided, and having no regrets is worthless —

Others won’t understand you just because you’re fair, open, and without faults. They invest in you simply because you haven’t lost money.

On the contrary, as long as you don’t lose money, it doesn’t matter if you’re evil, corrupt, or fraudulent.

The potential for others to lose money is a risk I don’t want to bear. Even if there’s no legal fault, there are still risks outside the law.

Maintaining a loose structure is also good, as it puts less pressure when the market is bad.

A few final related thoughts:

1. I believe that non-professionals should not understand investment more than 10% of their money and energy; it’s better to focus on their main business.

Or if you plan to specialize in this, then you need to understand every detail. From your learning career, do you have any successful experiences or talents in this area?

2. I’ve probably said this many times: Crypto has a tremendous value in demystifying investment. In every aspect, inside and out. No other industry allows you to understand, engage with, and practically operate at such a foundational level.

3. I love reviewing the reflections of industry experts; this is also a huge value of Crypto. Some outsiders don’t understand what’s interesting about these bragging points. What I don’t understand is how these things can be accessed for free; what a generous act. (Including this article)