Gate 2025 Year-End Community Gala. While Bitcoin plummeted 30% in the early morning, Li Ming was on his third cup of coffee.

His phone started vibrating, seven messages in a row, all from the same name: Zhao Jianguo. This retired steel mill accountant had exchanged his lifelong savings of 420,000 USDT and fully allocated to follow his “Principal Protection Follow Order$BTC ‌$ETH ‌$SOL ‌” strategy.

“Manager Li! The market crashed!”
“Is our contract still principal protected?”
“Manager Li, are you there?”

Li Ming didn’t reply. He switched to the background, watching his self-written “On-Time Repayment” algorithm automatically activate. At the first sign of market volatility breaching the threshold, the system froze Zhao Jianguo’s account and began executing the payout calculation.

He’s not a scammer. At least, not at this moment.

His peers all laughed at him for being naive. “Principal protection contract? Still need to pay out? Don’t you know what the crypto market is like?” But Li Ming insisted on writing that piece of code: when a follower’s loss exceeds 15%, automatically transfer funds from his margin pool to cover the difference.

Now, his margin pool was shrinking at a visibly rapid rate. One by one, payout requests from all thirteen follower accounts flickered in the queue. Zhao Jianguo’s was at the front, needing a payout of 190,000.

Outside the window, Shanghai was drizzling with freezing rain. Li Ming’s hand hovered over the mouse; with a right-click, he could terminate this automatic payout process—there was indeed a gray area in the contract, a clause allowing suspension in extreme systemic risk scenarios. He had written that line, naturally knowing how to trigger it.

Zhao Jianguo’s eighth message arrived: “Manager Li, I don’t seek profit, just want to keep my principal to pay for my kid’s down payment…”

Li Ming looked at the timestamp flickering on the screen: 04:17. In an hour, Zhao Jianguo would wake up, just like the past three months, first making porridge for his wife, then opening his mobile app to check his account. What would he see today?

The algorithm reached its final step. A pop-up appeared: “Confirm transfer of 190,000 USDT to account ZHAO_1949? This operation is irreversible.”

Li Ming lit a cigarette, smoke swirling in front of the screen. He thought of his father, also an accountant, who had entrusted his lifelong savings to some “principal-protected financial product,” only to lose everything in that year’s stock market crash. The image of his father staring blankly at the empty passbook was etched in his memory for twenty years.

When the cigarette burned to the end, he snuffed it out and clicked confirm.

Almost simultaneously, Zhao Jianguo’s message came again: “Manager Li, I just checked my account… there’s an extra ninety thousand? What’s going on?”

Li Ming finally typed a reply: “Mr. Zhao, this is the guaranteed minimum payout as per the contract. Your principal of 420,000 remains intact and undamaged. Please check your account.”

He switched back to his main account. After the payout, his balance was less than fifty thousand. But he then did something that made the monitoring system flicker with warnings: manually transferred to Zhao Jianguo.