Just as late night talk show hosts dominate evening television airwaves, the web3 industry is becoming inundated with thought leaders and personalities who are providing tools and resources for people to climb aboard the crypto train.

One such voice ascending in the space is crypto VC investor and educator Dennis Liu—known online as VirtualBacon—who has quickly become one of the leading pundits in blockchain education and financial literacy, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers across YouTube and his social channels.

Quite the ascension for a man who began his cryptocurrency career mining Dogecoin (DOGE) in his college dorm room in 2014.

Now in his eighth year working within the blockchain industry, Liu focuses on educational content, something he’s immersed himself in the past three to four years.

Liu comes from a developer background—studying software engineering—and after his dorm room mining, worked briefly in development, which helped further his belief in the industry’s potential.

“I wasn’t sure how big it could really grow to, but even with my limited skills at the time, it felt much more empowering to be mining on my own with one computer and actually contribute to something as silly as Dogecoin,” Liu said to me during a recent interview. “You could connect with people from all around the world who had similar wallets and were contributing to running the network. Especially when Ethereum (ETH) came around, it became much more obvious that not only could you share assets, you could also share code and contribute to this world computer.”

After discovering a presentation from Vitalik Buterin, Liu was convinced blockchain was the future.

“I knew where the direction of general software was headed—cloud-based and AI—where you were contributing to a huge code base as one developer among 10,000,” Liu said. “All of a sudden, Vitalik came up with Ethereum, and now you could write literally 10 lines of code, and someone else across the world could use it within 10 minutes once your block was deployed. You could write anything—which for a developer—seemed really crazy. But if it could work, it would change the whole game.”

A large part of Liu’s success as an investor came from understanding tokenization and getting in early on initial coin offerings (ICOs) before they became popularized, a strategy he still employs to this day.

“In the very early version of Ethereum—along with the whitepaper—the two things that Vitalik himself wrote were tokenization and crowdfunding,” Liu said. “While Ethereum itself is a currency that runs on blockchain, you could create new coins that lived on the Ethereum blockchain. This was really the birth of tokens and the financialization of how you sell these tokens and exchange them with Ethereum itself.”

Liu soon realized that teaching others about ICOs and tokenization would be worthwhile.

“Specifically with Ethereum, there was a lot of education to be delivered that began coming out in late 2020, early 2021,” Liu said. “First for me was decentralized finance (DeFi) content and explaining to people things like how tokenization works, how to use wallets, and how to use Uniswap. Later on, it included understanding newer blockchains by themselves, how they differed from Ethereum and Bitcoin and if they offered anything new.”

Through his channels, Liu hopes to educate people on how to use and interact with crypto on a basic level and to help provide them with basic tools so they can become proficient in the space on their own.

Diversification is key

“Crypto is still a very new, niche industry that’s very high risk/high reward,” Liu said. “I try to balance preaching Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum as long term asset holdings—holdings that I have in my portfolio as well—with diving deep on the other side of the spectrum with what’s new in the space. I’m not fully technology focused on the channel alone but I do talk about technology to help people understand the basics. A lot of it comes down to how you protect yourself and also expose yourself to the newer developments.”

It’s like in traditional finance—having eggs in many baskets—while also having a core group of eggs sitting with your juggernauts to provide some “stability,” the irony being the instability of cryptocurrency.

“It’s definitely a barbell approach,” Liu said. “Half in BTC and ETH, half in everything else. But when it comes to my content versus my personal strategy, it’s a little bit different.”

From a creator viewpoint, Liu is always striving to cover the latest new thing, and there’s always more new things in crypto. Since he does cover everything, a lot of his approach is teaching people to find their own sectors of interest that they can really understand and have an edge in, which he believes is usually the safest bet for people.

As for the future of blockchain, Liu sees gaming as the sector with the most juice.

“The next frontier is going to be more computing related, high-frequency gaming with zero cost for transactions that you can do 10,000 times per second,” he said. “Those are use cases that have not yet been solved, so for projects and providers building in that sector, I think that’s still up for grabs.”

For Liu, he’ll be focused on creating more free educational content for people to consume and plans to generate more bite-sized content like “how to use a wallet” and “how to set up a MetaMask.” On the investment side, he also has an investment firm Momentum 6, which has been running five to six years in the market.

Stay in the game, if you can

“We do all kinds of investing and have been heavy in the gaming narrative since late 2021/early 2022,” Liu said. “We’ve made over 70 investments and more recently, we have an accelerator cohort that’s heavily focused on real world assets (RWAs), which is another narrative we see a lot of potential in: Projects that tokenize real world assets and bring them on-chain, taking that liquidity that’s usually inaccessible and making it very easily transferable and portable on-chain.”

But Liu’s biggest tip for anyone wanting to have success within the world of cryptocurrency? Perseverance.

“The crypto space is still so new that there isn’t much of a specific skill you really need to possess in order to enter it,” he said. “You just have to be able to think on your feet and be really adaptive. Ultimately, you have to be better than the next guy to come. What’s really happened amongst my coworkers and people who I entered the space with is that if you can survive long enough, usually you can come out on top. Because the space is so volatile and so new, if you just stay in it long enough, usually it works out.”