前币安上市BD：回顾1000个项目后，业内人士眼中的真实加密世界原文链接：https://www.techflowpost.com/zh-CN/article/30378编译：吴区块链嘉宾：Chase、前币安上市BD播客来源：班级代表李正原标题：比特币被操纵了吗？一位前交易所高管透露做市商如何在全球“宣称主权”发布日期：2026 年 2 月 10 日嘉宾背景：Chase 是前币安上市 BD。在任职期间，他审查了大约 1,000-2,000 个项目，并亲自监督了大约 100 个项目的代币发行。他处理的数据和交易流程质量极高，代表了行业的顶级内部视角。 核心洞察：他认为加密世界——尤其是在交易所环境中——是一个“不假装”的金融战场。与被收益报告和公司披露的形式包裹的股票市场不同，加密货币市场由流动性游戏和做市商操纵主导。他观察到，比特币的烛台图可以被主导者塑造成近乎完美的“人工模式”，以发出控制信号。
在这个市场上，信息、流量、关注度，本身就是资产。只要流动性存在，任何东西都可以定价。何一在X上回应称，Chase不是“上市经理”，而是属于BD（业务开发）团队。她澄清说，币安的上市团队负责项目分析和尽职调查（DD），不直接与项目团队沟通。合同条款由BD团队处理，但BD没有上市决策权。上市团队和BD团队分开运作，分线汇报。何一强调，不同的视角有助于公众形成独立判断，无需过度解读。她还在另一篇文章中评论了加密货币估值动态
Former Binance Listing BD: After Reviewing 1,000 Projects, a Insider’s View of the Real Crypto World
Original Link:
https://www.techflowpost.com/zh-CN/article/30378
Compiled by: WuBlockchain
Guest: Chase, Former Binance Listing BD
Podcast Source: Class Rep Lizheng
Original Title: Is Bitcoin Manipulated? A Former Exchange Executive Reveals How Market Makers “Claim Sovereignty”Over the World
Release Date: February 10, 2026
Guest Background: Chase is a former Binance listing BD. During his tenure, he reviewed approximately 1,000–2,000 projects and personally oversaw the token launches of around 100 projects. The data and deal flow he handled were of exceptionally high quality, representing a top-tier, insider perspective of the industry.
Core Insight: He believes the crypto world — especially within the exchange environment — is a financial battlefield that “doesn’t pretend.” Unlike the stock market, which is wrapped in the formalities of earnings reports and corporate disclosures, crypto is dominated by liquidity games and market-maker manipulation. He has observed that Bitcoin’s candlestick charts can be shaped into nearly perfect “artificial patterns” by dominant players to signal control. In this market, information, traffic, attention, and even inside information are assets in themselves. As long as liquidity exists, anything can be priced.
Yi He responded on X that Chase is not a “listing manager,” but rather belongs to the BD (Business Development) team.
She clarified that Binance’s listing team — responsible for project analysis and due diligence (DD) — does not communicate directly with project teams. Contract terms are handled by the BD team, but BD does not have listing decision authority. The listing team and the BD team operate separately and report through different lines.
Yi He emphasized that different perspectives help the public form independent judgments, and there is no need for over-interpretation.
In a separate post, she also commented on crypto valuation dynamics, noting that short-term price movements are heavily influenced by liquidity, attention, and token structure. However, long-term survival depends on revenue generation, real utility, and supply mechanisms such as issuance and token burns.
She added that BTC, ETH, and BNB have already transcended the constraints of short-term liquidity-driven factors.
“The crypto industry has relied on storytelling for years,” she wrote. “The era of pure narratives is over — real utility must take the lead.”
Key Insights
Macroeconomics & Crypto Valuation Logic
• The Truth Behind the U.S. Equity Bull Market: Since the dot-com bubble, the S&P 500 has appeared to be in a prolonged bull market. However, when benchmarked against gold, the picture looks very different. The core driver behind this phenomenon is the continuous expansion of money supply.
• What Supports Asset Prices: Newly created money must find assets to absorb it. When the growth of goods and services (GDP) cannot keep pace with monetary expansion and credit growth, excess liquidity must either inflate bubbles or flow into new asset classes. Crypto, with its low-cost issuance and decentralized verification, has become an ideal container for absorbing global excess liquidity.
• Crypto Valuation Framework: Unlike traditional finance, which focuses on discounted cash flows, short- to mid-term crypto asset performance is determined by three factors:
1. Liquidity
2. Attention (traffic / narrative momentum)
3. Tokenomics (capital structure and supply dynamics)
Market Manipulation & “Dealer” Mentality
• Can Bitcoin Be Manipulated? Yes. Chase observed a week when Bitcoin rose for seven consecutive days with almost identical price increments and trading volume, followed by a sharp drop. This was not natural volatility, but rather a coordinated signal from dominant capital groups (market makers): “We control the rhythm. Those who understand, follow. Those who don’t, get absorbed.”
• Everything Can Be Priced: In the crypto world, information, traffic, and even inside information (such as prediction markets like Polymarket) can be assetized. When the majority forms a strong consensus, it often marks the moment when dominant players extract liquidity in the opposite direction.
• A Market That Doesn’t Pretend: Exchanges like Binance vividly demonstrate raw trading dynamics. While value-oriented participants exist, many players focus purely on liquidity structure and short-term profit. It is a financial battlefield that no longer pretends to be anything else.
Frontier Trend: AI Agents × Crypto
• The Measurement Problem of AI: In the future, AI agents may generate more economic activity than humans. However, existing GDP frameworks cannot measure AI’s micro-transactions — such as API calls and data exchanges.
• Crypto as Infrastructure: Crypto is naturally suited as financial infrastructure for AI. It enables precise measurement and settlement down to each micro-transaction without requiring the complex trust structures of traditional banking systems. Crypto may ultimately be designed more for AI economies than for humans.
Industry Insights & Wealth Opportunities
• The Profit Engine of Stablecoins: A significant portion of USDT is issued on the Tron network. Tether (the issuer of USDT) reportedly generates around $15 billion in annual profit — exceeding the combined losses of OpenAI and Anthropic. This model relies on interest rate arbitrage from U.S. Treasuries and represents the true cash cow of the industry.
• Capital Equality: One of crypto’s most profound changes to economic structure is “capital equality.” Regardless of who you are, as long as you meet the protocol’s standards, your capital can earn the same yield (e.g., in DeFi), breaking traditional banking’s preferential treatment between retail and high-net-worth clients.
• Career & Strategy Advice:
◦ On Sudden Wealth: The industry does contain periods of abundant opportunity. Ordinary individuals, through diligence (e.g., participating in airdrops), may earn more than in traditional manufacturing. However, the largest gains ultimately concentrate among top-tier players or get redistributed within the ecosystem.
◦ Advice for Newcomers: First understand two core pillars — Bitcoin (as asset allocation) and stablecoins (as payment transformation). Don’t focus solely on speculation; recognize the opportunities emerging from structural changes in the payment system.
◦ 2026 Outlook: Bitcoin will rise, but possibly in unexpected ways — driven by the pricing of information itself and complex liquidity dynamics.
Opening & Guest Introduction: The Power Behind Binance Listings
Host: Hello everyone, welcome Chase to the show — a rather mysterious but influential figure in the crypto space. Chase, could you introduce yourself?
Chase: Hi everyone. I used to be someone with real authority — now I’m stepping away, haha. I’m leaving to pursue my own dreams and giving up quite a bit of power in the process. I’m Chase. My most recent role was as a Listing BD at Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the industry. My job was to help founders mint and launch their tokens. During my time there, Binance’s annual trading volume was on par with Nasdaq, so the scale of operations was significant.
Host: Let me interpret that for the audience. If someone issues a token and wants it traded on Binance — which operates at Nasdaq-level trading volume — they have to go through your team. It sounds functionally similar to the role of a securities regulator deciding whether a company can go public.
Chase: Functionally there are similarities, but legally that’s not an accurate definition.
Host: How large was your team, and what was your specific role?
Chase: Our team was only a dozen or so people. About four of us were outward-facing — we would reach out to projects, answer their questions, and guide them through the process step by step (what to prepare and how to proceed). We handled coordination and communication, while the final listing decision was made by a separate listing/DD team.
Host: That background tells us a few important things. First, you’ve probably reviewed more crypto projects than almost anyone — simply because it was your job. Second, you held real decision-making influence, and since you’re leaving, there’s no conflict of interest anymore. Founders clearly valued your input, meaning you had access to first-hand, high-quality information. And third, through constant interaction with the industry, you must have formed your own framework and judgments. What do you feel you can share with us today?
Chase: What I can share is the model that formed in my head after absorbing that much data. And I’d say the data quality was extremely high. Over roughly two and a half years, I reviewed somewhere between 1,000 and nearly 2,000 projects. In 2025 alone, I personally supported about 100 successful token launches.
Host: Help us understand the magnitude of that number.
Chase: Reviewing projects is similar to what venture capitalists do — reading pitch decks, evaluating teams, taking calls, making judgments. A strong VC might review around 200 projects a year. I reviewed over 1,000 in a bit more than two years.
As for launches, when I first joined Binance, the entire company listed just over 20 projects per year. The following year it became around 50 to 60. By 2025, I personally handled around 100 listings in a single year. In total, that year Binance listed roughly 250–300 projects, and our outward-facing listing team consisted of only four people.
The selection success rate was about 5% to 10%.
Crypto Worldview: Services Economy and AI-Native Infrastructure
Chase: Let’s first help people understand this world. Many people who don’t know crypto can think of it as a virtual world with its own economic circulation. If you treat it like a “country,” it still needs U.S. dollars as its liquidity base. But what does it produce and “export”? Mainly services — it’s essentially a services economy (the tertiary sector). As for its “primary sector inputs,” what’s the equivalent of agriculture? Compute power and electricity.
Host: How should we understand “exporting services”? People often say things like “Can we buy pizza with Bitcoin yet?” — that’s not really the point.
Chase: The reason I call it a services economy is that while Bitcoin’s market share is huge — maybe 50% to 60% — it’s not the core of what this industry does. Bitcoin is a great place for bubbles to inflate, and it can serve as a store of value — basically a liquidity anchor — but it doesn’t provide many services. The real “services export” started after Ethereum: smart contracts enabled things like DeFi, which can seriously disrupt traditional finance. I also remember people discussing recently that within the next two years — 2026 and 2027 — most major Wall Street institutions could move on-chain.
Host: On DeFi — we previously invited Richard Youzhong (founder of Huma Finance) to talk about his project. The idea is to reduce financial friction for companies already doing trade — whether that’s FX exchange or lending — improving efficiency. That’s a very clear example of crypto delivering real “services” to non-crypto users.
Chase: Exactly.
Host: What other major “service” areas do you think matter?
Chase: What you said is correct — crypto does export services and value outward. But there are also features unique to this industry. For example, flash loans. Most people haven’t heard of them. In traditional lending, you either need collateral or a strong credit profile — you need something to convince a bank to lend. A flash loan allows borrowing with no collateral, while the lender takes essentially no risk, because the borrowing and repayment happen atomically in one transaction. A lot of crypto payment and financial use cases can be enabled by this kind of mechanism.
Chase: The most important topic — and something I’m likely to write a paper on soon — is crypto’s relationship with AI. Imagine five years from now, if AI continues to scale under today’s scaling laws, the number of AI agents will definitely exceed the human population. Then how do you measure the economic activity between agents? If you call an API, sure — today it’s often subscription-based. But many times I might only need a very specific long-tail dataset that only you have or only I have. How do you settle payment for a single call? The data exchanged might be extremely small, and existing banking systems can’t efficiently settle these micro-transactions. All of this economic activity needs: first, measurement; second, trust. That’s exactly where crypto can enable — and collaborate with — AI. That’s why many people in the industry think crypto might not ultimately be designed for humans; it may be designed for AI.
Host: When I interviewed Richard, he said something I still remember: AI is productive forces, and crypto is production relations.
Chase: Crypto actually touches both productivity and production relations. But where crypto truly changes production relations is what I’d call — at a more ideological level — capital equality. For example, if you live in mainland China, you’re used to Alipay and money-market products where your cash automatically earns yield — that feels normal. But in North America or Europe, you may need to go to a bank, meet thresholds, and still get very low rates. Crypto “equalizes” this globally: money is just money. I don’t care who you are — if you meet the protocol’s standards, you can earn the same yield.
Macro Perspective: U.S. Equities, Gold, and the Monetary Illusion
Host: Earlier we talked about payments being a major system where crypto provides value, and about how it can reshape production relations. Beyond that, what do you see as crypto’s bigger value proposition?
Chase: To put it more realistically, crypto helps countries with excessive liquidity issuance absorb more liquidity — without directly impacting consumer inflation.
Host: So essentially, as a store of value. How is that different from gold?
Chase: That’s a very good question. Let me ask you something first. From the dot-com bubble until today, would you say the U.S. stock market has been in a bull market or a bear market?
Host: A bull market.
Chase: Right. If you look at the S&P 500, it’s clearly a bull market. But if you benchmark it against gold, it’s effectively been a bear market. The chart I shared with you illustrates exactly that.
Host: Interesting. So you’re saying money printing pushed up the S&P 500, but it still didn’t outperform gold in terms of inflation resistance?
Chase: That research was published by Lyn Alden — she’s well known for this framework. I can send you the link later.
Host: That really changes how I think about investing. I was trained in traditional economic theory — discounting future cash flows and so on. That logic still has merit. But then I started wondering why people kept predicting that the U.S. stock market bubble would burst every decade — and it never really did. Why? Eventually I realized: once you print that much money, it has to go somewhere.
Chase: Exactly. Real goods and services might grow at, say, 5% a year. But money supply expansion and credit growth far exceed that rate. So excess money either becomes a bubble or flows into new services and new assets to be priced.
Why can new assets keep emerging? Because in crypto, assets can be issued continuously at extremely low cost. And crucially, you don’t need a central authority to verify their legitimacy. As long as enough people believe the asset has value, liquidity will flow in to price it and absorb the excess capital.
Host: So it only needs “you” to verify it first.
Chase: It only needs individuals to make their own judgment.
Host: Not you personally.
Chase: (laughs) Not me personally. I’m just an employee. Just doing my job.
Universal Pricing: Polymarket and the Assetization of Information
Chase: A project that’s been getting a lot of attention recently is Polymarket — I’m guessing you’ve heard of it.
Host: I’m not familiar. I’ve heard the name, but I never looked into it. Honestly, it sounded kind of scammy to me.
Chase: The first time it really took off was during the Trump election cycle. Basically, it’s a prediction market — though if we’re being precise, it functions more like a binary option. People seemed to “know” the outcome a few hours before the official result.
The core logic is simple: he believes that in this world, someone always has inside information about an event.
Host: Agreed.
Chase: And if inside information exists, it should be priced.
Host: Right.
Chase: Polymarket is simply a market designed to price that information.
Host: Okay, so it’s not a scam. That actually makes a lot of sense — one sentence convinced me.
Chase: (laughs) Exactly. More broadly, in a de-globalizing world, crypto is one of the sectors that remains strongly globalized. It puts information onto the same network, where it can be priced.
Information can become an asset. Traffic can become an asset. Any transaction, any idea, can become an asset — and as long as there is liquidity, it can be absorbed and priced by the market.
Measuring the AI Economy and Why GDP Breaks Down
Chase: Back to why I want to write an AI paper: I believe that in the future, the “GDP” or total economic activity generated by AI agents will exceed that of humans. When that happens, without a proper measurement system and the right infrastructure, you simply can’t account for it. And the most readily available infrastructure today is crypto.
But in economics and academia, there still isn’t a clear index that describes what an agent economy really looks like. Right now we can only estimate AI’s future scale indirectly — through things like Google’s financial reports, OpenAI’s funding data, or the CapEx numbers from companies like Oracle building data centers.
Host: Got it.
Chase: If you think from first principles, the right approach is to measure every agent and every transaction, precisely.
Host: Let me translate that for my audience. I think there are two core issues. First: how valuable is AI — is it “worth money”? That’s hard to price. If you only look at OpenAI’s revenue, it doesn’t look huge. But someone (Dai Yusen) proposed an interesting thought experiment, and I even ran a survey at an event: “If I buy out your future right to use ChatGPT — you can never use ChatGPT or any new AI again — how much would you accept?” Even at $100,000, only one person raised their hand out of more than a hundred people. At $1,000,000, many still didn’t. That suggests the value is enormous — but we don’t have a way to measure it.
Second: how much productivity is AI actually generating? GDP is very hard to use for that.
Chase: Exactly. GDP is fundamentally wrong for AI. “G” stands for gross, but it’s not truly gross — every API call can be measured precisely. “D” stands for domestic, but AI isn’t domestic; it’s global. And “P” stands for product, but AI isn’t a single finished product — it’s made up of many intermediate states.
So every word in “GDP” is wrong if you use it to measure AI. That’s why we need a new index — at minimum, a micro-level measurement framework. And on top of that, it would be important to derive a macro index as well. We’re already working on this and have a framework.
Host: I get the micro–macro link. But whether OpenAI will even allow you to measure that is another question.
Chase: You’re right. But as the number of agents grows and one or two killer apps emerge, you might not need OpenAI to manage or collect your data. You could locally host your own agent. For complex tasks, your local agent can call cloud agents; for daily tasks, you can run everything at home.
For example, I have two machines — a MacBook and a Mac mini — and I can connect them and run a Qwen 31B model locally. My data stays local, and it works extremely well.
Bitcoin in 2026 and Market Control: When the “Whales” Stop Pretending
Host: We’ve drifted back into value creation again. Let’s talk money first — everyone cares about that. Make a prediction: in 2026, will Bitcoin go up or down?
Chase: Up. Definitely up. It will hit a new all-time high. But how it happens will probably be in a way you don’t expect.
Host: Why?
Chase: It goes back to what I said earlier: everything — especially information — can be priced. In crypto, anyone can be priced on this network. Once the crowd forms a consensus, that consensus itself gets priced, and there will be people betting against it and cashing out on you.
This might sound a bit abstract, but if you’ve worked as a market maker or understand quantitative trading, you’ll see it’s always big fish eating small fish. When the majority forms a strong consensus, it becomes a target. Someone will price that target.
Host: So when everyone thinks it’s going to drop, it goes up instead. The moment you “know” it will fall and you’re convinced, the general public has already been socially engineered. It’s not new — this is how stock-market “dealers” operate too.
Chase: Exactly.
Host: But can someone really control Bitcoin? It’s huge. Is it actually that big?
Chase: Bitcoin’s market cap is around two to three trillion dollars, so it’s not small — roughly one-tenth of gold. But yes, it can be controlled.
Around last year — roughly between February and April — there was a week where if you looked at the daily candles, Bitcoin moved up for seven consecutive days with almost identical price increments and similar volume, and then suddenly dropped. What does that mean? Patterns like that usually show up when a dominant player can control the chip distribution and the rhythm. In other words, a person or a group wanted to announce to the world: “Guys, I control this now.” That’s it.
Host: So it’s not just control — it’s an explicit signal.
Chase: Right. And what do they want? They want you to join them. They want the people who can read the signal to come along — so they can take liquidity from the people who can’t.
Host: Damn. Which day was that? I need to look it up.
Chase: I’ll find it for you — haha. This industry is extremely interesting.
Host: Who is this person?
Chase: There isn’t a single “person,” and you’ll never know who it is. There are many market makers. Traditional finance market makers and crypto market makers overlap a lot. These players don’t look at fundamentals; they look at liquidity and the signals they believe in. Once certain signals appear, their systems trigger.
The kind of behavior I described can happen if market liquidity at that time was dominated by a few players running similar algorithms — so they effectively validate each other: “Alright, we’re on the same side.” Or it can happen because they believe other big holders won’t step into the game during that window.
It was about a year ago — some specific day. I’ll dig it up and send it to you.
Host: Great — once I find it, I’ll send it to you. So Bitcoin showed a pattern that insiders recognize as professional “hands” operating. If that’s the case, it means they can harvest liquidity this way — people just need to understand that.
Valuation Framework: Liquidity, Attention, and Tokenomics
Host: Earlier you said Bitcoin functions more like a store of value within the crypto ecosystem — almost like a vault, similar to gold. The real opportunities to make or lose big money are mostly outside of Bitcoin. Even if Bitcoin hits a new all-time high, it might only be up 30–40% from here. Beyond leveraged trading, where do you see the real action?
Chase: This goes back to what you learned in traditional economics — price is driven either by valuation (fundamentals) or by liquidity. But crypto has a different valuation framework.
In crypto, short- to mid-term price is determined by three things:
1. Liquidity
2. Traffic / Attention
3. Tokenomics — the overall chip structure, supply schedule, unlocks, distribution
These three components almost entirely determine how an asset behaves in the short to medium term. Nobody is really looking at the long term.
Host: How short is “short to medium term”?
Chase: Typically 7 days to 3 months — that’s enough to see the direction of an asset.
Take Richard’s project as an example. Fundamentally, it’s a very strong project. But when they launched the token, they didn’t have much prior experience in token issuance, so the launch itself wasn’t executed optimally. Long term, it’s worth paying attention to.
For instance, they recently introduced a new feature — essentially allowing users to apply leverage to assets they consider very low-risk, at the smart-contract level, without exposing users to direct downside. The result is roughly 16–17% annual yield. That’s highly attractive, and there’s no strict capital cap — you could deploy several million dollars and generate meaningful passive returns.
Chase: And this is a perfect example of why a strong underlying product doesn’t automatically mean a strong token price. Once a token is circulating in the market, the team no longer controls it — it becomes purely market behavior.
Host: Right.
Chase: The participants who price the token are either retail investors who don’t fully understand the fundamentals, or market makers with large capital who don’t care about long-term value — they care about short-term profit. So everyone gravitates toward short-term trades instead of long-term positioning.
If you’re someone from traditional finance — or even someone like me now — who wants to take a longer-term view, you usually enter after the first speculative wave is over. Once liquidity and attention have cooled down, and the token is no longer driven primarily by hype cycles, valuation becomes relatively fair.
For example, Richard’s project Huma might currently be valued at around $300 million. In my view, $2 billion wouldn’t be unreasonable — it’s just waiting for the right macro wind. The speculative phase is largely over.
Host: Exactly.
Chase: Yes — that wave of speculation has already passed.
Host: Watching crypto trading on Binance really makes visible what’s usually blurred in stock markets — the distinction between value, trading, speculation, and market control. In crypto, it’s much more obvious.
Chase: Exactly. It’s very transparent — nobody pretends.
Host: Nobody pretends.
Chase: Nobody pretends. Since many tokens aren’t formally defined as securities, regulatory constraints are limited. That creates room for misconduct — and it’s hard to avoid.
Industry Figures: Justin Sun, Tether, and the Reality of Massive Profits
Host: Since we’re on this topic, let’s bring up someone very representative in the industry — Justin Sun. He seems to be everywhere in crypto, and it’s hard for outsiders to tell: did he simply extract value from the market, or is he genuinely that wealthy? How does the industry view him? Any insider perspective?
Chase: I can’t share any real “inside information,” and I don’t have personal interactions with him, so I won’t speculate too much. But one thing is widely recognized within the industry: he is genuinely wealthy. For people outside the space, that might still be a question mark. Inside the industry, however, it’s considered almost certain.
Host: What does the industry base that judgment on? Is it public information — like on-chain addresses?
Chase: Yes, it’s visible on-chain. He’s associated with the public blockchain Tron. You know USDT — the largest parking space for USDT liquidity has historically been on Tron. In that sense, Tron and USDT have had a symbiotic relationship.
If you look at the data: Tron currently has around $4.7 billion in total value locked (TVL). USDT circulating on Tron is around $80 billion. For context, Ethereum holds roughly 46–47% of USDT supply, and Tron about 43%. That’s more than 80% combined between the two chains.
Chase: As for Tether, the issuer of USDT, their annual revenue is around $15 billion. That’s profit on a scale where — if you compare — OpenAI loses tens of billions per year, Anthropic loses tens of billions per year. Even combined, their losses don’t exceed Tether’s profits.
Host: Where does Tether’s revenue actually come from? Transaction fees?
Chase: No. Tether is the issuer of USDT. The model is simple: you give Tether one dollar. They use that dollar to buy U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills). Then they issue you one USDT token. For you, it’s a one-to-one exchange — you can use the token freely in the market. For them, every incoming dollar generates Treasury yield. As long as the scale is large enough, they continuously earn the interest spread — roughly around 3–4% at current rates. With sufficient volume, that translates into around $15 billion a year.
Host: So he really is wealthy.
Chase: Yes, he is. I’m not close to him personally, and I won’t get into gossip. If you’re curious about controversies, there are public sources you can check — but it’s not appropriate to speculate in a public setting.
Wealth Distribution and the “Cultivation” Metaphor
Host: That makes sense. Let’s talk about the stories of sudden wealth in crypto. We’ve discussed its structure and its “no pretending” nature — it’s a very transparent trading arena. The underlying logic is actually quite clear. So who are the people in this space? What kind of group is it?
Chase: Crypto is like its own separate world — almost like a country. It contains the entire spectrum. On one extreme, you have people connected to the highest levels of political power. On the other extreme, you have people who’ve gone to prison for large-scale fraud. It attracts every type of personality and motivation.
Host: From my perspective, I understand technology and have covered Web3 before, but I’m not really “in” the circle. Aside from owning one Bitcoin, I’m mostly outside of it. I see people around me working in Web3. It feels like only a minority actually make real money, but once someone understands the game rules, they can scale wealth very quickly. What percentage of participants truly “figure it out”?
Chase: First, the barrier to entry isn’t that high. If you’re diligent, even a high school student who understands how to navigate the internet can potentially earn tens of thousands of RMB per month.
Host: Through what — trading?
Chase: Through participating in new projects, like airdrops. It’s essentially a form of traffic monetization. Because there’s abundant liquidity — or even bubble-like conditions — the economic return on the same time investment can be higher than in traditional industries like manufacturing.
Host: So it’s like the environment is full of “spiritual energy.” When the top cultivators are fighting, beginners can at least collect some leftover resources.
Chase: That’s roughly the idea. It’s not as crowded as it looks. Binance may have around 300 million registered users, but truly active participants across the entire industry might be under one million.
Host: Besides collecting “leftover rewards,” what else is there?
Chase: There are many speculative cycles. Take NFTs in the previous cycle — essentially digital images, similar to the Dutch tulip mania dynamic. Many people participated, and some experienced overnight wealth.
But wealth distribution in crypto is dynamic. New entrants who are diligent can earn average income comparable to others at their knowledge level. Even if someone achieves sudden wealth, if they stop evolving or improving their understanding, that wealth often redistributes within the ecosystem. If capital isn’t realized or spent, it’s just numbers on a screen — not fully “real.”
Chase: That’s also why I say crypto can absorb excess liquidity without necessarily affecting real-economy inflation. The money stays within the system — people trade it among themselves.
Host: Like arcade tokens. Similar to tulip mania, just more variations.
Chase: Yes, more variations. And anyone can create their own “tulip.” There’s still an element of capital equality in that.
Host: What about the top-tier players?
Chase: They’re divided into factions. Some are value-oriented investors. Some focus on cash flow and industry positioning. Others are hacker-builders — working on advanced technologies like ZK (zero-knowledge proofs) and FHE (fully homomorphic encryption).
These technologies are actually meaningful. Without crypto, large-scale real-world adoption of things like ZK or FHE would be extremely difficult because the infrastructure investment is massive and uncertain. But in crypto, if something is perceived as a public good or valuable innovation, it can be priced immediately. That’s part of the industry’s appeal.
Host: But it still sounds like the biggest money is made by traders and market operators rather than builders.
Chase: That’s often true.
Host: And for the big narratives to work, they require huge technical investment. But it seems hard to incentivize truly technical talent. Either the money isn’t large enough, or being too close to the money creates its own risks. The noise, temptation, and predatory behavior make it hard to survive.
Chase: That reflects how most people feel. It’s still a frontier stage — not fully standardized or regulated. But the industry is maturing. For example, Binance has obtained global licenses in jurisdictions like Abu Dhabi. Compliance is gradually improving.
Advice for Newcomers: Bitcoin and Stablecoins
Chase: For individuals, my first advice is to clear away distractions and really understand what this industry is about. What does it actually do? Why is there so much capital here? Why are so many talented people entering this space? It’s a sector with high talent density and high capital density.
If you don’t understand it, it’s probably not the industry’s problem — it’s yours. That’s why I once convinced myself to spend eight years diving deep into this field.
It’s also particularly friendly to young people. It doesn’t care about your background or status — it cares about whether you put in effort and whether you genuinely study and research. At the very least, you can earn a living, and in many cases, your early income can exceed what you’d earn in a traditional job — especially for fresh graduates.
Host: One final question. For a typical viewer of our channel — say someone in tech who has accumulated some savings from employment — if their goal is simply to make money in crypto (not necessarily to build in the space), what would you suggest for 2026?
Chase: My advice is to first understand two core pillars of the crypto market.
First: Bitcoin (BTC) — treat it as part of capital allocation, almost like digital gold. You can consider building a base position. (This is not investment advice.)
Second: stablecoins. I’ve been telling my team since two years ago that stablecoins would see a major breakout. Last year confirmed that thesis; this year we’re seeing implementation. Stablecoin-based payments will challenge traditional banking systems across C2C, B2B, and B2C use cases.
Host: My understanding is that stablecoins are great transaction tools, but not necessarily strong investment vehicles. Is that fair?
Chase: If you’re thinking from an investment perspective, you could look at U.S.-listed companies such as Circle, Robinhood, and Coinbase. In my view, some of them are still undervalued.
More broadly, you need to understand why stablecoins challenge traditional finance. It’s not only about going long — you can also position against incumbents that fail to adapt quickly enough. When you recognize a structural trend early, there are multiple strategies you can deploy based on that information.
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