Who is really making money in the crypto world? Let me lay it out for you.

Honestly, most people enter the crypto space to lose money. Whenever someone is making a profit, they can usually be categorized into these three types.

**Type 1: Traffic Harvesters**

These folks never touch primary or secondary market coins; they sustain themselves through information asymmetry—big influencers run paid group chats, earning referral commissions of $100 to $1,000 per person; teams that dominate search engine rankings can earn millions monthly during bull markets; top content creators earn millions annually just from referral rebates from major exchanges. Their secret is simple: they don’t profit from coin price movements, only from commissions based on user numbers.

**Type 2: Skilled Traders**

Price fluctuations of coins like $ZEC, $BTC are opportunities for arbitrage. Programmers use scripts to farm airdrops and run MEV arbitrage bots, earning over a million dollars monthly; some focus on riskless arbitrage between CEXs and on-chain prices; others monitor whale movements with crawlers, effectively having a "x-ray vision" of the market. Even more impressive are those doing news arbitrage—getting news a few minutes before retail investors and capitalizing on the information lag. These traders either master technology or data, but the key is they are faster than others.

**Type 3: Market-Making Operators**

Shitcoins like $RVV are played ruthlessly by market makers—accumulate enough tokens, then pump 10x to attract retail investors, then dump, dropping 50% but still profiting. The primary market is even darker—issuers generate new tokens with hot concepts at the push of a button, create fake trading volume, buy KOLs to lure retail investors in, and eventually either slowly unload or run off with the funds. The reason they can play so aggressively is that many places lack clear definitions of "market manipulation," with no real legal constraints like "market manipulation crimes."

So you'll find that truly stable profit-makers either control traffic, master technology, or set the rules of the game. Retail investors spend every day debating whether to buy $ZBT, while these players are already earning effortlessly. That’s the reality of the crypto world.