Casual Chat About Investment, Funds, and Crypto

《Let’s Chat About Investing, Funds, and Crypto》

#Funds #curator

Early this morning, and from there it all unfolds—just a casual chat about the whole fund thing.

My pinned post says: back in 2021, I was still a product manager. Later, I got involved with DeFi and became an institutional fund manager. Then I went out on my own (you can call it “bragging,” meaning free investor).

After that, over these past two years, I actually tried a few other things too—like being an on-chain fund manager (DeFi Curator). But by the end of 2025, all of this was basically wrapped up. Why it was wrapped up—I’ll explain later.

First, let’s go back to the original “Twitter/X fund” circles.

There’s an older brother who helped me early on. He often sends me Decks for fund-raising. Of course, there are all kinds of Decks through other channels too.

Unfortunately, among the nearly 100 pieces of material I’ve seen over all these years, every single one was clearly trash at a glance. None ever provided a single affirmative investment suggestion. Here’s a somewhat blunt conclusion: any fund that needs public fund-raising—by my standards, it’s all trash.

How can outsiders understand financial institutions in a simple way? Actually, there are only two roles.

One role is to go out and raise money. The brand, star fund managers, the institution—everything highbrow and outwardly impressive is there to attract more money.

The other role is to operate and manage that money—again, the “trash” mentioned above. The strategies are all copied from others: pick a good time horizon, produce a good simulated performance, then hand the work to the money-raising role to go find the funds.

It’s not that they have zero ability—it’s just that from the materials, you can’t see it, and you can’t connect the dots. Especially the most important part: risk management ability.

Trash is still trash, but there are also information and technology barriers. It looks like a reasonable model. In reality, it isn’t.

Active funds are easy to understand: gambling. Using investors’ money to gamble. If you win, you share the profits; if you lose, you don’t lose your own principal.

That’s human nature. When most of the returns come from profit-sharing and there’s no backstop, it’s impossible not to gamble—no exceptions.

Passive, arbitrage-style: you earn management fees. But the risk is still huge, because the vast majority of arbitrage teams can’t dodge black swans. Their level isn’t there, and every year there are black swans.

I’ve invested in others too, and the result was the same—I inflated, then gambled it away. Just think how ridiculous that is 😂

Now let’s talk about DeFi Curator.

There were two starting points for doing this side project: one was to add some passive income; the other was to see whether, in a bull market, we could scale up and grow bigger if we had the chance.

We had an advantage in doing this. Because we’re the team that understands DeFi and risk management best (add “one more” here), and we know exactly where the specific risk details sit. That way, every black swan becomes a source of profit.

Plus, friends were willing to help with the work—so it got done pretty quickly.

At the beginning, I had a beautiful vision: we’d leave all the decision-making details behind, not net out or “settle” interests privately; publicly review the code from multiple parties. Even if something went wrong, we’d feel no guilt.

Before 1011, our portfolio was among the highest-yield ones. If anything happened, we would run faster than our peers and suffer the lowest losses.

After 1011, I felt the market wasn’t right, so I reviewed the portfolio again. I removed the assets that “everyone is investing in,” but that—on the code level—we couldn’t actually control, immediately, in terms of risk.

Soon after, what happened is something everyone knows: the stablecoins that the DeFi Curator teams invested in blew up, and we had no impact. What they call “old-school institutions” are just nonsense.

At the same time, I also figured it out then: that beautiful vision was my own wishful thinking; feeling “no guilt” is worthless ——

Other people won’t understand you just because you’re fair, open, and never wrong. People invest in you only because you haven’t lost money.

On the contrary, as long as you don’t lose money, even if you’re evil, embezzling, or faking things—none of that matters.

The risk that other people might lose money is already risk I don’t want to bear. Even if you’re legally fine, there are risks beyond the law.

Keeping a looser structure, so there’s a bit less pressure when the market’s bad—also isn’t a bad thing.

Final thoughts that connect to each other:

1. I think a non-professional’s understanding of investing shouldn’t exceed 10% of their own money and energy. Better to keep that energy for your main job.

Or if you plan to specialize in this field, then you need to understand every single detail. Looking back at your learning career, have you had any successful experience or talent like that?

2. It should have been said many times: Crypto has a huge value—it lets people “de-mystify” investing. In every direction, inside and out. No other industry can help you understand, get exposed to, and practice the underlying workings of real-world tasks as deeply as this.

3. I really love watching the post-mortems and reviews done by高手 (top people) in the industry. This is another huge value of Crypto. What outsiders don’t understand is: what’s so interesting about all these bragging things? What I don’t understand is: how these things can still be watched for free. What a great person. (Including this article.)