Blind Dev article
Just follow the whales? Why that is a bad strategy
My experience with Galxe quests and why copying trades without understanding risk and position size can fail.
Archived post dated 2026-01-20. Service features, prices and market data describe the original publication period; their current status has not been verified.
Not investment advice. This article describes methodology and risks.
Translated from the original Telegram post, published on 2026-01-20. This is an archived account, not a current verification of services or markets.
Why “just follow whales or influencers” is a bad strategy
This is also why I do not recommend investing just because I do. I have been through this myself. Here is my experience of copying others and the approach I have used for about three years.
In 2021 I subscribed to trading channels and sources describing activities to take part in. I did not have much money to trade, so I mostly watched. Airdrops were a different story.
Imagine opening Galxe, a quest platform, and starting the tasks. Some required fifty actions, including thirty likes and reposts, and sometimes tagging two friends. At some point you realise you are doing spammy social-media marketing in exchange for a promise.
It consumed a lot of time. In the end I received little, if anything. My main airdrop earnings came from an entirely different kind of activity. Even here, copying others wasted my time.
Trading has further problems
- Someone giving advice may be promoting their own underwater holdings, or a token whose team paid them. There are outright scams too: someone buys a token, promotes it, then sells after the price rises. The people buying last lose money.
- However professional an author is, they cannot know what the market will do. Suppose they like TAO: AI is relevant and they see promise in the project. But Bitcoin falls after very bad news—think of COVID in March 2020 or FTX’s collapse in 2022—and the token follows. The reader ends up disappointed with a substantial loss.
The project may survive, and a two-, five- or tenfold rebound from the low may be possible. But that does not necessarily make up for losses from panic-selling. Circumstances also change: a promising project’s functionality may lose demand, its price falls, and users leave. It could have looked promising when the analysis was written.
DeFi and portfolio context
DeFi is another area where people copy authors or whales. Do not be drawn in by a large APY or APR: higher yields come with greater risks, such as volatility in non-stable assets or a weak stablecoin mechanism.
Why group authors and whales together? With channel authors, you copy actions based on their words. With whales, you look at their portfolios, returns and transactions.
Suppose you see a whale earning 40% APY on a stablecoin pair and invest. For that whale, it might be only 0.1% of their portfolio, placed in an extremely risky AMM DEX on an obscure network.
What I do instead
I do not read investment tips.
- For airdrops, I weigh time against possible income. You must always allow for receiving less than $100.
- For purchases and investments, I analyse projects myself and look at different factors rather than following someone. Above all, I diversify; otherwise a hack of an old protocol, potentially assisted by AI, could wipe out a substantial part of the balance.
Why do I not give advice on investing in particular tokens or projects? For the reasons above. Human error is always present. It is better to study my analysis—or do your own—and then decide whether to participate.
Have you copied whales or influencers when investing? What were the results, and how long ago did you do it?