Survival always comes first; chasing returns can only come second.

At 2 a.m., I received a video call. On the screen, I heard crying, and it was my cousin. Her eyes were swollen badly, and she choked out, "My thirty thousand yuan is now only eight thousand..." I immediately understood what was going on.

In the six years I've been in the crypto circle, I've heard too many stories like this. It's always the same pattern—someone takes their savings, listens to someone bragging in a group about a certain coin, and invests everything without doing any research. When it crashes, they lie flat, and sometimes they can't even tell how their money disappeared.

My childhood friend A Zhe was even more reckless back then. In 2019, he took out fifty thousand yuan from his part-time job savings and blindly bought a coin claimed to replace a major platform. Half a month later, his account was down to just two thousand yuan. But now, things are different—this guy's monthly earnings are stable, not relying on insider information, but entirely from lessons learned through market crashes.

**01 No matter how hot the trend is, always check first—don't foolishly become the last one standing**

The biggest mistake beginners make is taking group advice as gospel. My cousin is exactly like that—someone in the group shouted, "This coin is going to be listed on a top exchange," and she rushed in without even reading carefully. Later, she found out it was a project that hadn't even developed a product, just storytelling to fleece investors.

For projects worth engaging with, there must be actual operational assets and visible revenue models. I later taught my cousin a simple method: open a market data platform and first check the daily trading volume. Anything below one hundred million yuan, just pass—because projects with no popularity are like dead water; once you get in, the liquidity is terrible, and you can't even get out.