The crypto world has repeatedly experienced four waves of concentrated wealth creation over the past decade.

Written by: Claude

Edited by: angelilu, Foresight News

Can ten thousand become one million in 2026?

It can't be done "easily." But theoretically, it can still happen.

To elaborate on this judgment, one must first acknowledge one thing: the crypto market from 2023 to 2024 is a period that has lowered the threshold for "turning ten thousand into one million" to a historic low. Examples are abundant on-chain: Dogwifhat (WIF) rose from 0.0016 dollars at its mainnet launch in November 2023 to a peak of 4.83 dollars by March 2024, a 3,000-fold increase in five months; BONK had an extremely low early price, but multiple subsequent burnings reduced supply and drove the price up thousands of times; PEPE launched in April 2023 and quickly skyrocketed to nearly a hundred times its initial value within two weeks; Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) was incubated by an AI Twitter account in October 2024 and peaked at a billion-dollar market cap; ai16z grew from several tens of millions to twenty billion by the end of 2024.

But by May 2026, the table quietly changed.

The "Hundredfold" from Back Then

Looking back, there have been four waves of concentrated wealth creation in the crypto world over the past decade.

In 2017, there was ICO. Ethereum rose from 8 dollars at the beginning of the year to nearly 800 dollars by the end, exactly a hundred times. EOS raised 4.1 billion dollars in six months, claiming the largest financing scale in history. Some participants in the Chengdu Doubling Club invested just over ten thousand and exited with seven-digit profits that year.

In 2020, the Summer of DeFi. The token YFI from Yearn Finance was issued on July 18, 2020, with an initial price of under 30 dollars, reaching a peak of 43,000 dollars by September 12, a 1,400-fold increase in 41 days. Early participants in Compound, Aave, and Sushiswap turned thousands into millions.

In 2021, NFTs. CryptoPunks had a floor price of less than 1 ETH at the end of January 2021 and exceeded 100 ETH by August. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was minted for 0.08 ETH in April of the same year, and the floor price reached 50 ETH five months later. NBA stars, Hollywood actors, and venture capital funds queued up in the same OpenSea trading line.

From 2023 to 2024, there was the long tail of memecoins. This wave is the most special. It no longer needed white papers, narratives, or GitHub submissions. pump.fun launched in January 2024 and generated more than 300 million dollars in protocol revenue by the end of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing on-chain applications in history. Anyone could create a coin for less than 2 dollars in SOL, and the rest was left to luck and attention.

The four waves hammered the same fact into the ground: hundredfold returns are not rare. What is rare is to possess all three of the following: sufficient capital, sufficient courage, and sufficient time.

2026 is Not 2021

But the table has quietly changed. The crypto market of 2026 has several additional factors compared to 2021, each compressing the odds for retail investors.

The first is institutions. In January 2024, the U.S. SEC approved the Bitcoin spot ETF; in May of the same year, the Ethereum spot ETF was approved. By the end of 2024, just the BlackRock IBIT product had over 50 billion dollars in assets under management, with BTC spot ETF holdings accounting for over 5% of circulating supply. This is the first time Wall Street money has entered Bitcoin through compliant channels, resulting in a significant smoothing of Bitcoin's volatility; the annualized volatility of BTC dropped to around 45% for the entire year of 2024, only half of the peak in 2021. Lower volatility means lower leverage odds for retail investors and makes events with tenfold or hundredfold returns on mainstream assets like BTC and ETH almost impossible to occur again.

The second is VC-led issuance structures. In 2024, industry participants began to complain about "low liquidity and high FDV." Projects like Wormhole, Starknet, Ethena, EigenLayer, ZKsync, heavily backed by top-tier VCs like a16z and Paradigm, had fully diluted valuations of 5 to 10 billion dollars at TGE (Token Generation Event). Over 80% of the tokens from TGE fell below their opening price within the first 90 days, with an average drop of 30%. Shares acquired by VCs at just a few cents two to three years ago flooded into the secondary market once unlocked, leaving retail investors as the natural exit counterparties. The early profits from new coins have almost all been captured during private rounds.

The third is the lack of tools. In 2021, one could still use telegram bots to grab new pools on Uniswap, but starting in 2024, the on-chain became a battleground for sniper bots and MEV seekers. On pump.fun, within the first two seconds of a new token being listed, at least a dozen bots place orders simultaneously; by the time an ordinary user's wallet initiates the first purchase, it's usually already the third block after the market opened. Data from Jito in 2024 indicated that seekers on the Solana chain extracted over 100 million dollars in profits within a year, most of which came from back-peddling against ordinary traders.

The fourth is narrative saturation. AI agents, RWA (real-world asset tokenization), re-staking, decentralized physical infrastructure, prediction markets—these originally separate themes, which could have each taken a year to develop on their own, were compressed into just a year and a half between 2024 and 2025. Polymarket saw a total trading volume of 3.6 billion dollars during the 2024 U.S. elections; BlackRock's tokenized government bond fund BUIDL surpassed 500 million dollars in November 2024, and by early 2025, the overall on-chain size of RWA reached 20 billion dollars. The higher the narrative density, the shorter the space for any single theme to generate excess returns.

Combining these four factors leads to the conclusion that the era of hundredfold returns for mainstream assets like BTC, ETH, and Solana is effectively over; VC-backed coins reach their peak upon listing; the early rewards from new coins belong to bots; and even telling a new story must compete for attention with five equally new stories.

However, this does not mean that the path from ten thousand to one million is entirely closed off. It only narrows this path into three tighter openings.

Theoretically Existing Three Paths

The first path is to concentrate all chips on one or two targets where you have an information or cognitive edge, and accept the risk of total loss.

This path sounds like gambling, but it has been repeatedly validated with real examples in 2024. Among the early buyers of GOAT, some relied on constantly monitoring an AI Twitter account called Truth Terminal to make purchases. When the AI received a 50,000-dollar BTC tip from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the corresponding token immediately surged. The whole process lasted about 36 hours, with an ordinary Solana wallet growing from 800 dollars to 110,000 dollars, as some observers saved screenshots.

The capital for concentrated betting does not have to come from gambling. It could be setting aside a fixed 5% from your regular salary for a memecoin position and making single-point investments after confirming genuine community, real enthusiasm, and actual trading volume. With an initial capital of ten thousand dollars, if divided into five rounds of 2,000 dollars "all in," you only need one instance of reaching a hundredfold to push the account from ten thousand to two hundred thousand. The second round could take out 20,000 dollars from the two hundred thousand to focus on compounding two to three times to reach one million.

The cost is nine failures. 1 target makes a hundredfold + 4 targets drop to zero = net profit. But whether one can emotionally bear the feeling of four consecutive "total loss" events is another matter.

The second path is to use leverage to trade BTC and ETH along the macro cycle, deriving profits from win rate rather than odds.

From after the 2024 U.S. elections in November until early 2025, BTC rose from 67,000 dollars to 109,000 dollars, an increase of over 60%. During the same period, ETH rose from 2,400 dollars to 4,100 dollars. Anyone who went all-in with 5x leverage on BTC in early November and exited around the end of January completed a more than 3x growth of their account in a single operation. You could turn a ten thousand dollar principal into thirty thousand. With three rounds of 3x operations, theoretically turning ten thousand into 270,000; with four rounds, to 810,000; with five rounds, exceeding 2.4 million.

The real threshold for this path is not leverage but managing positions and emotions. Data from Binance and Bybit shows that the total liquidation amount across the entire network in 2024 reached 120 billion dollars, with approximately 70% coming from long positions. In a clearly bullish year, the vast majority of leveraged users still lost money, not because they misread the direction, but because they were washed out midway.

This path requires the executor to hold trend positions for at least three weeks, to not sell off when a 30% floating profit appears, and to not panic when a 15% floating loss emerges. It also requires acceptance of zero growth or even a drawdown during two to three years of consecutive failure. The path from ten thousand to one million theoretically requires four to six years, not something that can be achieved in a single cycle.

The third path is to transform from earning Alpha to earning fees.

The most notable wealth effect of 2024 did not belong to traders but to tool providers. As reported by Bloomberg in November 2024, the two founders of pump.fun, Alon and Noah, said that the protocol's annualized revenue reached 250 million dollars, with a team size consistently below ten people. On-chain trading terminals like Photon, BullX, and GMGN surpassed one million monthly active users in the same year, with monthly fee revenue between 5 million and 20 million dollars.

If a crypto practitioner has a principal of ten thousand dollars, treating it as seed capital to create a tool or community with real users is much steadier than throwing it into the secondary market to chase specific coin odds. Notable cases in 2024 included: one team creating a memecoin trading bot within three months on Telegram and being acquired by a competitor within six months, with each of the three team members earning hundreds of thousands of dollars; another KOL who produced content on Farcaster, solidifying followers into their small foundation and issuing a subsidiary token, seeing their net worth multiply by twenty in six months.

The commonality in these examples is that nearly all of the ten thousand dollars were used for servers, promotion, and community operation; the principal itself does not appreciate, but the established assets (users, content, brand, code, network effects) complete a 100-fold leap within two to three years.

So how to operate specifically in practice

Condense the three paths above into an operational framework suitable for the later half of 2026. But before proceeding, set out the expected price judgment for the next 12 to 18 months; otherwise, all the position arrangements below will lack an anchor.

Today, May 15, 2026, BTC's price is near 80,000 dollars, having retraced more than 30% from the peak of the cycle at the end of 2024 to early 2025. This round of retracement is milder than in 2018 (about 80%) and 2022 (about 75%), fundamentally because the existence of spot ETFs has raised the floor: institutional players like BlackRock and Fidelity have become constant buyers, and their capital flow is much more stable than native crypto traders. Each time it drops, it is consumed layer by layer.

My judgment is that by mid-2027, BTC will likely fluctuate between 70,000 and 100,000 dollars. If the lower bound overlaps with the Fed restarting rate hikes, consecutive net outflows of ETFs, or escalation of geopolitical conflicts, there is a probability that it could quickly dip to around 60,000 dollars, but it is very difficult to return to the level of 16,000 dollars seen in 2022. To break above 100,000, we need to wait for the next clear round of liquidity easing; the earliest time window would be in the second half of 2027. ETH would follow the rhythm of BTC, expected to range between 2,500 and 4,500 dollars, with catalysts coming from whether ETFs are allowed to join staking returns. Solana's range will depend on whether a new round of applications appears in its ecosystem, projected between 110 and 220 dollars.

This is the foundational premise for the upcoming operations. If you judge that BTC can create new highs in 2026, the positions must adjust; if you judge it will dip below 60,000, the entire table needs to be redone.

Based on this range judgment, the underlying asset allocation should consist of 60% BTC and ETH as the foundation, with the purpose of sharing macro beta. Gradually accumulate BTC below 75,000 dollars and ETH below 3,000 dollars; this is the most comfortable risk/reward position in this round and does not require complex timing abilities. As both approach the upper bound (BTC nears 100,000, ETH nears 4,500), retain 20% to 30% flexibility to reduce positions, leaving ammunition for the next retracement.

Two-tenths should be allocated to around three native blockchain project tokens, selected based on having real fee generation in the past 30 days, stable growth in active addresses, and teams that continue to release product updates. Protocols that have been validated to "make money," like Hyperliquid (HYPE), Aerodrome (AERO), and Pendle (PENDLE), provide better downside protection than new protocols that are just telling stories.

The remaining two-tenths are high-odds positions, spread across 5 to 8 memecoins or newly issued assets, with each not exceeding 3% of the total position. This portion requires mental preparation for total loss, but as long as any one of them runs up by 50 times, the impact on the overall account will be significant.

On the tool side, one should be proficient in using at least one terminal capable of real-time PNL tracking and smart money address monitoring, such as GMGN, Cielo, or Arkham. On the CEX side, be familiar with the tiered margin and funding rates of Binance and Bybit, understanding the limits of using 3 to 5 times leverage without being liquidated.

Regarding information sources, it's advised to allocate a fixed 90 minutes daily to three activities: browsing 20 to 30 high-quality accounts on Crypto Twitter; reading daily on-chain data reports from Messari, Artemis, and Token Terminal; and participating in at least one Telegram or Discord community in Chinese or English that provides information value.

In terms of time expectations, one must accept that a reasonable time window to turn ten thousand into one million is three to five years, not three to five months. An increase of 3,000 times occurring once in 2024 does not mean it will happen monthly in 2026. Compressing it into three years means a reduction in annualized expectations to around 360%; compressing it into five years leads to annualized expectations of around 150%. Both are difficult, but they remain within historically realistic sample ranges.

Finally, a set of numbers

Open Dune Analytics and look at several public dashboards for pump.fun wallet statistics: among the wallets that participated in Solana memecoin trading in 2024, the proportion of those with final balances higher than their initial investments is less than half; those with account growth of 10 times or more are less than 5%; and those with more than 100 times, according to estimates from multiple dashboards, roughly fall within the range of 0.2% to 0.3%.

In other words, in the memecoin feast of 2024 that was written about by countless people, out of every thousand real wallets participating, only about two or three managed to turn ten thousand into one million.

Who will represent that two-tenths to three-tenths in 2026?