Money That Worked is my column about positions that have already played out, not paper backtests. This time it’s two real deposits of $10,000 over roughly 2.5 years: one into Bitcoin as the “old king”, the other into WBT, the exchange coin of WhiteBIT. Same horizon, same starting capital, same zero-leverage, buy-and-hold approach - but very different outcomes.
Bitcoin: the base layer that did its job
In the fall of 2023, with Bitcoin trading around $28,000, I put $10,000 into a simple spot buy and got 0.357 BTC. No futures, no 20x circus — the idea was boring on purpose: in a couple of years, the asset should still be alive and trading above my entry.
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 a 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.
If you want a deeper dive into how liquidation engines actually work on derivatives platforms, there’s a solid breakdown on HackerNoon.
On the numbers, Bitcoin did exactly what it was supposed to do. $10,000 at $28,000 became 0.357 BTC worth about $23,384 at a price near $65,477: roughly +$13,384, or +133.8% over ~2.5 years with zero leverage.
If the story stopped here, you could say the base asset delivered once again - but from day one there was a second $10,000 ticket in the same portfolio, and that one rewrote the scoreboard.
WBT: same $10,000, different engine
In parallel, I put another $10,000 into WBT at around $5.6, picking up roughly 1,786 coins. If Bitcoin in the portfolio is the base layer that drags the whole market along, WBT was a bet on the exchange itself - its volumes, fees, and the ecosystem built around them. Unlike Bitcoin, with its 14+ years of history, WBT had been trading for barely a year since its 2022 launch. On paper, it was the younger, thinner, riskier asset.
What changed the perception for me was the way WBT behaved in stress. Several of its all-time highs landed exactly on the days when the wider market was being flushed by liquidations. The most telling episode came on June 13, 2025: geopolitics in the headlines, Bitcoin losing about 5% on the day, major alts down 6–10%, and roughly $1.2 billion in leveraged positions erased in 24 hours. On that same day, WBT printed a new ATH around $34 and showed up among the top daily gainers - and three days later, while the market was still shaky, it stepped higher again, spiking to roughly $52 and adding around 70% in market cap for the month.
In October, the pattern repeated, only harsher. Around October 10, the market took a wave of liquidations in the ballpark of $19 billion, with Bitcoin falling from above $120,000 to roughly $105,000. While headlines were still counting destroyed positions and BTC was trading about a third below its peak, in mid-November, WBT quietly set another ATH in the $63–65 range. During the time when many traders were busy repairing holes in their derivatives PnL, the exchange coin was making its next step up the ladder.
By late 2025, WBT was added in S&P Dow Jones crypto indices and by 2026 was listed on the US exchange Kraken. With capped supply, buyback-and-burn from fees, and use in products and discounts, it behaved like a standard exchange coin rather than a meme on leverage.
Digesting my numbers
On the same 2.5-year distance, with the same $10,000 starting point and the same passive “buy and hold spot” strategy, the scoreboard looks like this:
- Bitcoin: $10,000 at $28,000 → 0.357 BTC → about $23,384 now.
- Profit: ≈+$13,384, or +133.8%.
- WBT: $10,000 at $5.6 → ~1,786 WBT → about $85,700 at $48.
- Profit: ≈+$75,700, or around +757%.
In total, the two equal deposits of $10,000 each turned into roughly $109,000: about $13,400 came from Bitcoin, about $75,700 from WBT. Same capital, same horizon, but completely different growth geometry. The base asset did a clean x2+, while the younger exchange coin delivered something much closer to x8 on its slice of the curve.
Finale: So what do you do with this?
This isn’t a story about “Bitcoin is over” - it remains the anchor of the portfolio, the thing you can hold through panic and still expect to be rewarded for patience. But the WBT case shows something less comfortable: sometimes an infrastructure coin, tied to real transaction flows and supported by broader listings like those on indices and global exchanges, can outrun the benchmark on the very same time frame.
Within Money That Worked, I’m not prophesying, I’m just counting. On this particular pair of deposits, the quiet bet on an exchange coin ended up outperforming the old king - especially on the days when the market was busy punishing everyone who thought leverage makes you smarter.