When was your first point of contact with crypto?
2019. I had just joined Twitter, and one of the first people I followed always tweeted about crypto. I didn’t pay him much attention until one day when he shared a story of how he made money from something called DeFi Degens.
What’s that?
That was the question that came to my mind too. I hit the internet and found out that DeFi Degens are people who take high risks in Decentralised Finance.
Before this moment, I hadn’t heard about Decentralised Finance. I had heard about crypto and Bitcoin, but I always thought that was where it ended.
I followed more crypto accounts on Twitter and subscribed to a few channels on YouTube. One thing was clear to me after the first few weeks of consuming as much information as I could — I wasn’t in it for the tech.
You were in it for the money?
Absolutely. Beyond that, it gave me something to look forward to. Let me explain what I mean: I was supposed to graduate from university in 2018, but I had issues and was held back for an additional year. Subsequently, school closures due to strikes and the pandemic delayed my graduation for an additional year. I finally graduated in late 2021.
With all the time that had passed, I felt my chances of easily getting a job after school had reduced. So when I heard about crypto, it felt like a lifeline of sorts — at least I could have something else that might fetch me money while figuring out life post-university.
However, this was 2020, and I was a broke university student, which meant I didn’t have enough money to put in crypto.
How did you navigate this?
I understood that I wouldn’t be broke forever, so I continued to consume as much information as I could about projects happening in crypto. In a sense, I was preparing for when I could invest in a project.
Did this happen?
Yes, it did. In September 2021, Don Jazzy hosted a series of giveaways on the Abeg App, and I helped a couple of Twitter people enter the giveaway. I didn’t win anything, but one of the people I helped won something and gave me ₦2k ($3.50).
But that wasn’t all. Someone I hadn’t interacted with slid into my DMs and said they were impressed with how I helped people enter the giveaway, and they would like to reward me. They asked for my account number and sent me ₦35k (~$58).
I didn’t see that coming.
Neither did I. But I figured I might as well use the money to kick off my crypto journey.
What did you do?
I had learned enough about Decentralised Finance to dive in, so I did that. I had been following a project called Peachfolio, and I put most of my money in their native token — $PCHF.
Can I ask why?
The project’s use case was solid. Peachfolio has an app that tracks crypto assets across Binance Smart Chain and the Ethereum network, which is a useful service that helps its ecosystem and the native token.
Now, I don’t remember the value of the token at the time, but $50 got me about 30,000 units.
Gotcha. How did it work out?
Man, it took off. I made 6x what I put in in less than two months.
Huge. So you had $300 in your portfolio.
Yes. But I made the first of many mistakes during that period. I was so excited about how much the value of the token had grown that I didn’t take any profit. The way I saw it, if it could do 6x in two months, then there was still a lot of ground to cover.
Uh-oh. I guess that didn’t happen?
No, it didn’t. Before November was over, the value of my tokens crashed down to $200. I took $100 and started looking for other projects to try out.
What did you find?
$HATTER on the Avalanche network. An influencer on Twitter had given it a seal of approval, so I put $100 in it.
It didn’t take up to a month before it imploded and my money went down the drain.
Do you know what happened there?
A rug pull. It’s a thing that happens when developers behind a project suddenly abandon it and disappear with investors’ money. As a result, the project suddenly loses value.
Whew. That had to hurt.
It did, but I kept it moving. I used the last $100 I had to invest in a couple of projects on the Binance Smart Chain network, even though I knew that they were shitcoins. My plan was to dump my positions as soon as I made some money off them. Sadly, this plan backfired because I entered too late. This was November 2021.
Man. That must have been an interesting three months.
It was. In retrospect, three factors contributed to this series of losses: I got greedy and didn’t take profit when I had the chance. Secondly, I gave in to FOMO and invested in a project because there was a buzz around it. Lastly, I got into some projects at the worst possible time.
These decisions cost me $300. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. Surprisingly, I wasn’t devastated — I chalked it down to a learning experience.
You were also back to zero.
I took it in good faith. I figured that the lessons would be useful to me going forward. But there was the small matter of finding new capital to rebuild my portfolio.
In November, during a conversation with a friend, I told him about everything that had happened in the past few months and what I had learned about DeFi. I guess something touched him because he gave me some money to start all over again.
Oh yeah? How much?
$283. The best part was that there were no strings attached. The money was all mine.
Interesting. Did you figure out what you wanted to do with it?
I decided to stick with DeFi. But this time, it was going to be yield farming.
Could you explain what it means to me like I’m five years old?
It’s like saving money in a bank account and earning interest on it. With crypto, you’re staking your assets and getting rewards — usually in the same token — over a period of time.
Ah, I see.
Anyway, I decided to go for projects in the Fantom network. For starters, the network is relatively new, so there are tons of exciting projects. It’s faster and cheaper to process transactions on the Fantom network than on the Ethereum network. Also, the guy behind the project — Andre Cronje — is well known in the DeFi community.
In December, I started farming a project in the Fantom ecosystem called $WIGO. Two months later, I added two more projects — $BRUSH and $SPIRIT.
Nice. How’s it going?
We’re in a bear market right now, so things are moving a little slowly. That said, my entire portfolio was worth about $300 the last time I checked. My plan is to be patient, wait for the market to recover and see what will happen.
Fingers crossed on that. Speaking of bear markets, how are you dealing with this one?
Man, if I had more fiat money, I would put it in crypto. The thing is, the market will always recover, so this is the best time to put as much money in. I’m missing out on this, but it’s fine.
Curious, what do you find most annoying about crypto?
I hate that there are Ponzi schemes and projects without use cases in crypto. These things can bring you down from 100 to 0 real quick. That being said, this is a bad actor problem, not necessarily a crypto problem.
I hear you. When you think about crypto in a couple of years, what do you see?
I see more projects with solid use cases taking over the space as more people are onboarded into crypto. The exciting thing about this is that the good projects will survive and the bad ones will phase out for the most part. I’m really looking forward to that.
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