Welcome to Money That Worked - my column about investments that have already played out. In this issue, there are two $10,000 deposits over a 2.5-year horizon: one I sent into the “old king” Bitcoin, the other into the youngster, infrastructure coin WBT. Both are currently in profit, but their growth turned out to be very different, and that is the most juicy part.
Bitcoin: a basic asset without gimmicks
In the fall of 2023, when the feed was alternately burying and worshipping the crypto market, Bitcoin was at $28,000. I deposited $10,000 and bought 0.357 BTC - no leverage and no game of “I’ll wait a bit longer, maybe it will be 20.”
I deliberately stayed out of futures: I had seen too many people lose both their deposit and their confidence to a single candle. I needed an asset that, a couple of years later, would simply still be alive and trading above my entry.
A year of cascades: pain for leverage, noise for spot
Then came a period when the market was regularly shaken by cascading liquidations. On August 18, 2023, roughly $1 billion in positions was wiped out in 12 hours, more than $800 million of it in longs.
On March 5, 2024, after setting a new high, Bitcoin dropped to $61,000, and another wave of liquidations again knocked out over $1+ billion in derivatives in a day. Against this backdrop, BTC kept drawing new highs and pullbacks, and the leveraged market was regularly cleaned out by these spikes.
For me, sitting in spot with 0.35 BTC, it looked different. Yes, the PnL was swinging up and down, but there was no one to liquidate me as long as I didn’t hit “sell” myself. Over the distance, these are just big waves on the same upward curve.
How much Bitcoin made in the end
If you strip away the emotions and leave only the numbers, the picture is simple. In the fall of 2023, I put $10,000 into Bitcoin at $28,000 and received 0.357 BTC. At the current price of $65,477, this position is worth $23,384. Net profit - $13,384, i.e. +133.8% over 2.5 years with zero leverage.
TradingView Source: WhiteBIT chart BTC/USDT (1W)
This is normal behavior for a base asset: live through hysteria, ETF euphoria, record liquidations and still double the capital of someone who didn’t try to outsmart the market every week.
If the story ended there, you could say: okay, Bitcoin once again did its job. But from the very beginning there was another asset in the same portfolio - one that would end up outperforming it by some indicators on the very same time frame.
The same $10,000 in WBT: my bet on infrastructure
In parallel, I put another $10,000 into WBT - the WhiteBIT exchange coin at $5.6, picking up about 1,780 coins. If Bitcoin in the portfolio is the base asset that pulls the entire market along, then WBT is a bet on the exchange itself, its volumes and its fee business. Over 2025, that “infrastructure bet” turned into very specific moves: a Vision 2030–linked cooperation agreement with Saudi holding Durrah AlFodah and a sleeve-partner deal with Juventus FC, plus a stronger push into cards and mining inside WhiteBIT.
And there is also the age factor. By the time I entered this position, Bitcoin had already gone through roughly 14 years of market history - it has been trading since 2009. WBT, launched in 2022, had barely a year of trading behind it.
Many investors still treat Bitcoin as the untouchable benchmark: you can match it, but you rarely beat it. Yet on this exact time frame, there is at least one asset that would have made you more on the same $10,000 starting capital - and in my case, that asset is WBT.
Pattern Recognition: WBT ATHs During Market Storms
One thing that caught my attention is that several of WBT’s all-time highs came on days when the wider market was being flushed by liquidations during a broader geopolitical storm in global markets. The first major cascades of this cycle had already appeared in 2023–2024: in August 2023, about $1 billion in positions was liquidated in 12 hours; in March 2024, as Bitcoin fell to $61,000, derivatives again lost more than $1 billion in a day.
But the most telling stress test for my WBT position came later. On June 13, 2025, the market is red again: against a backdrop of geopolitics, Bitcoin loses about 5% in a day, major alts drop 6–10%, and about $1.2 billion in leveraged positions is wiped out in 24 hours. On that same day, WBT updates its ATH around $34 and enters the list of top assets by daily growth, and just three days later, while the market is still shaking, it draws the next step - a high around $52 and roughly +70% in market cap for the month.
In the fall, the story repeats itself even harder. On October 10, crypto catches a wave of liquidations of about $19 billion, and Bitcoin falls from $120k+ to the $105k area. And a little more than a month later, on November 18–19, when BTC is still trading roughly a third below its peak, and the media are still tallying aggregate losses, WBT sets a new ATH in the $63–65 range. While the market is digesting the October crash, the exchange coin makes yet another step up.
The shift is happening beyond the chart as well: WhiteBIT Coin has been included in S&P Dow Jones crypto indices since late 2025 and is now live on US exchange Kraken, extending the move from pure price action into broader market infrastructure.
Source: Kraken chart WBT/USD (1h)
WBT math and my conclusion on the asset
My $10,000 put into WBT at $5.6 turned into a bundle of ~1,786 coins. At the current price of $48, that’s about $85,700 - i.e. +$75,700 and roughly +757% over the same 2.5 years in which Bitcoin delivered its +133.8%.
In total, from the two $10,000 deposits, I ended up with about $109,000: BTC brought roughly +$13,400, WBT about +$75,700. Same starting amount, but completely different growth geometry.
That performance sits on top of a hard cap of 400 million WBT with no inflation. WhiteBIT runs a weekly buyback-and-burn funded by a share of trading fees and other platform revenues, and WBT itself anchors fee discounts, yield products, and the Nova debit card inside the ecosystem.
From here comes the most controversial but honest conclusion: if you had invested equal amounts in Bitcoin and WBT 2.5 years ago, today WBT would have delivered the higher return. Over this period, Bitcoin showed a clear base-asset growth, but the younger WBT went through the same bear market and the same cascade liquidations — and still aggressively outperformed it in terms of results.
TradingView Source: WhiteBIT chart WBT/USDT (1W)
Final: What should an investor do with this?
Bitcoin remains the base layer of the portfolio, the anchor that survives cycles and reasonably rewards patience. But my WBT case shows something else: infrastructure coins can not only live in BTC’s shadow, but in specific cycles actually outperform it in returns with equal allocations — especially when the market is shaking so hard that leveraged traders are being wiped out by the billions.
Within Money That Worked I’m not prophesying, I’m counting. The numbers have already added up: over one horizon the base asset delivered a fair x2+, while the native coin did about x8. If after that you still want to live with BTC only, that’s a perfectly valid choice. Just don’t call it an “optimization of returns.” It’s a choice of peace of mind, not of the maximum.
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