Yes, even I do stupid shit sometimes.
But this stupid thing did in fact make my investing strategy even stronger.
Here’s what happened.
As an investor who actually has the balls to put himself out there in public, and be open to all of the criticism and hatred from people who are scared shitless to make 100% of their crypto investments known, I’ve actually done very well in the crypto space.
Who knew a heavy amount of research into the things that actually matter, buying when things are cheap, and smart money management on the way up would have worked so well?
But everybody, literally everybody has clunkers.
Even Warren Buffet, who also has the luxury of being the biggest market manipulator of all time, has had huge losses.
Hopefully, in the grand scheme of things they won’t matter.
So far so good.
But let’s dive into the reasoning behind the one crypto token I bought that literally sits at zero (rounded) right now.
And maybe you can learn from my screw-up.
“You See, It’s Called a Non-Fungible Token”
In 2021, NFTs went wild.
Back then, it was mainly “PFP’s” or “Profile Pictures”.
Think monkey jpegs that people would use to represent themselves on social media sites, mainly Twitter and Discord at the time.
I thought (and still think, while we’re being candid here), that they are one of the most ridiculous trends I had ever seen.
Hastily drawn cartoon pictures, that grown-ass men were calling “so cuuuute” and going crazy over like it was fucking Beatlemania.
Things weren’t adding up.
It was a disturbing sequence of events, every single time.
- Go to a random name generator and type in “adjective” followed by “name of random animal”, and just run with whatever it spits out.
- Create a series of really shitty cartoon jpegs that take you anywhere from 1-10 minutes to create per jpeg. Nobody is ever going to gaslight me into thinking 99% those things weren’t extremely low-quality “artwork”.
- Make less of some of them and call them “rare” or “legendary” to make people think they really got something special even though they didn’t.
- Fire up the Twitter bots to promote them because people will fall for anything
- (Optional) pretend like you have big future plans for the series it just took you a whole six hours to create
- Sell out of them immediately, and make tons of money off of a bunch of man-children and bad investors who will all end up holding the bag at some point.
And I can’t even hate on it. It’s the same thing every time…
Money moving from the dumb to the less-dumb.
Now there is no reason to get upset at my thoughts on pfp NFTs, a lot of people felt the same way. Are you going to go and get all mad at them too? That sure would take a lot of energy.
Plus, one series out of every 2000 actually went on to do very well and still holds their value today. If you took the chance and it paid off, you deserve it.
But most of them, predictably, crashed in value.
I even warned you to sell them years ago.
But some people didn’t, and some even lost everything they had by investing in these things.
You would see videos about these people sometimes, and the only thing I was really amazed by was that they would actually come forward publicly with something like this.
“Hi, I’m a complete idiot who lost his life savings on a crappy picture of a dinosaur because a Twitter bot army told me it was a good idea. My credit score should be 12 for the rest of my life.”
I didn’t feel bad for them at all.
This needed to happen. For their own good. Maybe they’ll be less of a numbnuts next time, who knows?
…..and then it also happened to me.
A New Era
Gary Vaynerchuk, who I still listen to today (and I don’t care what you think about that), is deep into the NFT space.
I was watching him right at the genesis of this craze, and he said it perfectly…
“Look, I don’t really understand NFTs right now, but I do understand markets. And this is very real.”
I didn’t understand it much either, but I did know that the technology at least was here to stay.
What if I could find a more broadscale way to play this entire market, without risking it on something ridiculous like a Jizzy Jaguar pfp?
Who seems to be at the forefront of this movement right now, as early as it may be?
This was back when companies like Chiliz and Sorare were popping up and signing huge deals with professional sports teams in the US, but they had already run up a lot in price.
There was however, this company called Bondly, who were already dropping big money to make their name known.
Bondly has teamed up with Logan Paul, one of the biggest YouTube stars alive, to promote their line of Pokemon NFTs, amongst other projects.
Logan was boxing at the time, along with his brother Jake. And Logan especially was known to be a heavy player in the high-end collectibles game.
Here he is walking into the ring with his limited edition Charizard card.
Again, the movement at this point still didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but neither did Mumble Rap, and that shit lasted for nearly a decade.
At least this company seemed to really be trying, and already landed one of the biggest social media stars of our time.
I mean, at the end of the day, who is more impressionable and gullible than a Logan Paul fan?
(Side note, Logan’s time with NFTs overall has been….sordid to say the least)
But we’re not talking about Flatulent Foxes here, we’re talking about friggin Pokemon!
So let’s go ahead and put some money behind Bondly, and I can be done with this stupid movement forever, while still profiting off of it.
LFG!!
Aaaannd, It’s Gone
I couldn’t even tell you how we went to zero here, but we did. And quickly.
I mentioned my Bondly purchase on Discord, and put it into my blog post where I update all of my movements in the crypto market.
Thankfully, I wasn’t yet at the point where I was posting all of this on Twitter as well (I’m like 99% sure of this), or more people may have taken this backwards ride with me.
The company has since rebranded to Forj, even though they still use the $BONDLY token.
There is also another company called “bondly”, but they appear to be something completely different.
The $BONDLY token currently sits at .004975 on CoinGecko.
I bought in at 80 cents.
As I said in the portfolio blog, there’s no reason to sell now and recoup my $4. For what? This wouldn’t even cover the gas fee to swap it out.
I’m just going to sit back and see if by some miracle this thing can get back to 10 cents in the next mega bull market for no good reason and I can limp away with something I can roll over into a current holding — whatever seems undervalued at the time.
I’ll let you know.
But in all likelihood, this will just go down as a big L, even though I do see it as beneficial in the long run.
Here’s how.
What I Did Right
Not much, but even with such a bad decision, my methodology was still intact thankfully.
- I did my homework, even though there wasn’t a lot to do with such a new company.
- I bet on the race instead of the horse. You always have a better chance of winning this way.
- This was one of many investments I already had in the crypto space. If you add in my other investments outside the space, $BONDLY was about .3% of my investable capital at the time, even though it was a standard amount for purchase, just like my Uniswap and Chainlink purchases were for example.
I felt 100x worse that I gave it out to my readers, because who knows what their methodologies are.
If I were to play the odds, I would say probably not as strict and prudent as mine.
What I Did Wrong
I’ve never made these mistakes ever again BTW, so long-term, I consider this experience to be a W.
A big one actually.
But let’s go over the bad mistakes I did make with this one.
- I FOMO’d. No two ways about it. I saw this new technology that seemed to go from zero to 1000 in record time. I knew it was likely here to stay, but I completely abandoned the “Boom, Bust, Echo” sequence that every single mania ends up going through at some point. I tried to catch a wave I didn’t completely understand on the way up, and I paid for it.
- It wasn’t a “grown-up” purchase. It was a hype purchase at the end of the day. Not as hype as buying a bunch of animal pfps, but that doesn’t excuse what I chose to do here. I like to make grown-up purchases that have real staying-power, and this was certainly not one.
And even though I have made lots of purchases since, I never made these two mistakes again.
Win or lose, at least I can say with confidence that I became a better investor as a result.
Conclusion
To this day, I own hundreds of NFTs.
Unless it was gifted to me, or won in a game of Cardania Marbles, none of them are pfp’s. They are all in-game assets to projects I believe in.
And even though I did my homework and understand the risk/reward here, they are easily the riskiest things I own.
Except for $BONDLY, I guess. I do still own it technically.
But at least with them, I can only lose 4 more dollars at this point.
And if that alone isn’t a huge W in and of itself…..
— VP