Filled in 2 seconds! Apes Strong Together. WAGMI! Diamond hands! Don’t worry, Asia is waking up. No FUD, No Rug, Based Dev. LFG! CMC/CG listing soon! NFT Marketplace in the works! Pump it up!! To the Moon!! Wen Lambo?
Before GME and WSB, there was Uniswap. My friend, the wizard Apemaster, first joined the game during the bull run of 2017; he had witnessed the euphoric highs and melancholic lows - this time around, he was wizened and ready to win. I had heard about crypto before, but I had never paid any attention to it - my earliest recollection is a friend in my compsci program telling me to mine bitcoin in 2012 (the steps were too complicated so I didn’t do it). So in August 2020, when the Apemaster casually asked if I wanted to toss a few hundred dollars into an extremely speculative investment that he said had a lot of potential, I said sure, why not. He wrote out step by step instructions for me to download the Canadian crypto exchange app Shakepay, deposit a small amount via e-transfer, send the ETH to a metamask wallet, and do a swap on Uniswap, which had just launched V2 earlier that year, ushering in the start of the golden age of defi (decentralized finance). But I didn’t know any of this at the time; I just clicked the buttons in sequence, like an economy sim game. The Apemaster guided me through my initiation; I didn’t have the remotest idea what I was getting into.
A month later, the “investment”, a defi coin called Geeq, was going nowhere - its value was about the same as when I bought it. But late in September, the Apemaster told me to check my wallet - Uniswap had apparently given 400 UNI tokens to everyone who had performed a transaction on the platform. By the time I checked, the combined value was about $1000! I could hardly believe it - because he told me to click some buttons, I now had enough money for a return ticket to Tokyo. I had unknowingly taken part in what would become one of the largest distributions of cryptocurrency in history - the now immortalized Uniswap airdrop. I don’t know how many wallets the Apemaster had, but with a quick calculation, I was getting my first taste of fomo - what if I had made transactions on 5 or 10 or 100 different wallets? I missed out on tens of thousands!
[Sep 21, 2020 02:00:50AM] [AL] -> [apemaster]: the UNI coin thing is like 6 dollars now WTF should i swap to eth or no???
Soon afterwards, I sold 300 UNI for about $1300, and kept the other 100. If I waited for the peak in May 2021, they would have been worth about $17000. In any case, now I had a wallet ready to go, full of seed tokens to play with. Looking back, perhaps the most astonishing part was that this was the pool from which I subsequently aped - I never put in any more of my own money from my “real” job. It all started with the $500 CAD from Shakepay.
Of course, my other preoccupation during this period was weed. Deep into the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, all of us were in our own simulation bubble, and I would go down to the store every week to get more weed gummies. I was high basically every night, as soon as I got off “work”. It didn’t even feel like I was working anymore, since there was no physical office to go to; I had lost the motivation to compete with my coworkers a long time ago. I went to New York City for a few months in late 2020, rented an apartment there, and spent my days wandering through the empty apocalyptic streets. Then in early 2021, I moved back to San Francisco - I had found a tiny apartment on the top floor of an old building in Chinatown that I shared with my landlords, an old Asian couple, and another perpetually drunk tenant. I was sold by the panoramic view of Nob Hill from the window; for the next few months, I basically didn’t leave my room.
For most of the journey, there were four of us - the wizard and three of us high school friends. Towards the end, we were joined by other friends and acquaintances who had heard about our success, and the four of us took on mentoring roles. But our bonds were forged in fire and could not be broken. We went down the rabbit hole together, to the land of degenerate apes and magic internet tokens. Just like falling in love, it happened slowly, then all at once (as John Green once put it). The early days were a scattershot, as real life faded into obscurity and degen apeland became our universe. Early on there was the Linkswap airdrop; the Apemaster made 65 wallets - what if it was like Uniswap? Of course, no airdrop ever came close. We fell for fud (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that said the airdrop was cancelled, as well as more news saying the previous news was just to prevent people from making more wallets. The promised gains never materialized.
Binance Smart Chain, a fork of Ethereum, was quickly becoming the hotbed of degen activity. Ironically $WEED token was the name of first token we bought on BSC. God, we were so naive at the beginning. I even had to use a medium guide to set up metamask for BSC. BSC used pancakeswap instead of uniswap, BNB instead of ETH, but the game was basically the same - input the amounts to exchange, set a tolerated slippage, and submit the transaction. I was still under the impression that these coins were supposed to be held for a while, since my only experience with investing until this point was with boomer stocks and options. This notion was erased as $WEED died in a matter of days.
In my distorted worldview, the weed I consumed directly fueled the shitcoining; it was a symbiotic process of continuous world generation. The red and green charts came alive as dynamic dragons flying up and down, sometimes diving perilously into the depths, sometimes miraculously soaring up to the heavens. The coins sprang forth in a virtual field of a thousand splendid flowers blooming and withering.
The way to plug into this new universe was by joining all the different Telegram chats and discord servers for degen crypto trading. They had names like butcher’s snipersquad, gemcatchers, devoland, waronrugs. These chats and servers ran the gamut from shill chats where hundreds of low quality coins were being posted every day to public discussion groups where people talked about promising upcoming projects to semi-private chats and discords where knowledgable and hyper plugged in groups of people exchanged the latest and best alpha. The telegram and discord windows were always open on one of my monitors. We would constantly cycle between which chats to pin at the top and check most regularly, depending on which was giving good alpha. A swap window and shitcoin charts usually took up the other monitor. I used the browser on my Macbook screen. My entire life shrank to three screens filled with long scrolling chats of rocket emojis and pepe stickers and flashing red and green bars.
An example of a post in a shill group:
Alikhan Alikhan Guys, I have prepared a small list of upcoming projects, I want to share with you if you are interested POLKASTARTER 22 February Superfarm Public Price: $0.025 23 February Public Mint Public Price: $0.10 Private Price: $0.075 Initial Mcap: $1,600,000 24 February Polkamarkets Public Price: $0.03 Private Price: $0.025 Initial Mcap: $610,000 25 February Fractal Protocol Public Price: $0.10 Private Price: $0.10 Initial Mcap: $1,230,000 26 February Unido Uniswap Listing: $0.06 Private Price: $0.05 Initial Mcap: $487,813 2 March ApySwap APYSwap Public Sale On 2 March Public Sale Price: $0.1865 Whitelist Starts: 22 Feb Raising In IDO: $125K ICO DROPS 21 February HOPR Important: Pre-sale (Feb 21st-23rd): Goal: 500,000xDAI Max Personal Cap: $800 Price: 0.05xDAI DAO participants only Balancer LBP (Feb 24th-27th): 30m HOPR for sale Price: 0.3DAI Uniswap Pool (Feb 28th-Ongoing): 5m HOPR from the original Public Launch Allocation of 85m will be placed in the pool to provide liquidity mining incentives over a three-month period. https://icodrops.com/ DAO MAKER 18 February Xend Finance Public Sale Price: $0.075 Private Price: $0.06 Initial Mcap: $943,229 21 February My Neighbor Alice My Neighbor Alice has announced its First NFT sale on Bounce My Neighbor Alice is launching a 24-hour NFT sale on Bounce Finance. The auction will commence on Bounce Finance and NFTs will be launched sequentially. The first stage of the auction with a limited edition first batch on sale begins on February 21st, at 11:00 UTC. 22 February Yield Protocol Binance Smart Chain 22 February DEFI100 is coming at @bakery_swap DEFI100 - A Synthetic Index Fund Protocol February 22 9:00 AM UTC https://t.co/7onzDwDgYY COINLIST 1. @BosonProtocol 2. @clover_finance 3. @DePayFi 4. @MyShowcase 5. @Titan_Mining 6. @Virtue_Poker 7. @BabylonFinance TRUSTSWAP 24 February BitcoinVend POOLZ February - March Playcent Poolz announces Playcent as the next public sale (IDO) on its platform. In order to participate, POOLZ holders will have to stake their tokens in the IDO staking Pool. More details soon. Total Token Supply: 60 M PCNT Public Sale Price: $0.12 Private Sale 2 Price: $0.09 Private Sale 1: $0.065 Seed Sale: $0.045 Initial Token Supply: 4.8 M PCNT Initial Marketcap: $576,000 DUCKSTARTER 28 February Vortex Defi Public Price: $0.04 Private Price: $0.0275 Initial Mcap: $324,250 Ethbox IDO On DuckSTARTER Soon ! Recently Ethbox Farmcubation sold out in seconds on DuckFarm. Now Ethbox has announced it will have EBOX public sale (IDO) on DuckSTARTER in Q1. REPUBLIC Cere Network Public Sale On Republic Cere Network announced that its public sale will be held on Republic platform. Sale is scheduled for Q1 2021. Date and more details will be announced soon. https://twitter.com/cerenetwork ICO Drops ICO Drops - Calendar of active and upcoming ICO & IEO. Complete list with Token Sales ICO Drops contains a complete list of all ICOs & IEOs (Initial Exchange Offerings) in three columns "Active ICO", "Upcoming ICO", "Ended ICO" with rating and analysis.https://icodrops.com/
For a long time, we were glued to a discord server called Defi Degenerates. At first it was useful as a place for gathering alpha - these people were really plugged in, the chat was on fire 24/7; if something was happening in crypto they would know and meme about it. It started to provide more value than just alpha when we started to recognize many of the names who kept the chat going. There was Downsin, master ape, the founder of the server - he would always seem to end up on the bad side of most trades, with rare wins that kept him playing. Rooting for him was like constantly rooting for the underdog. He posted a picture of an ape every day in a channel - “an ape a day until $BTC hits 100k”. There was a group of crypto gurus, who made aping tools and sometimes launched their own coins and shared them in the server before sharing them outside, giving us privileged insider access - names like Shoostah, Achaean, Paulwebdev. Our frantic fomo regret and manic euphoria was mirrored, reflected, and amplified by their reactions. Every day was like being in a continuous chatroom with intimate strangers - we would wake up and check the chat, tuning into their antics. We started to empathize with their narratives on a human level. There were moments, in the downtime between tokens popping off, when anonymous degens would discuss the kind of person they were before, how they turned their lives around and paid off debt. They would talk about their goals for financial freedom. This would all be in between mountains of memes of course, but there was genuine solidarity amongst the rage faces and pepes. But we never said anything in the chat - we remained lurkers, hidden gleaners of alpha.
Our favorite person was Smiley. He was apparently a 13 year old when this bull run began. Now there’s no way of knowing for sure but we did hear him on voice chat several times and he did sound like a young (Arab?) teenager. Regardless, every day we would talk with love and reverence about him - especially when he started to develop his own coins and shill them in the chat. The first one was called Smiley coin - the logo was a simple smile emoji; he launched the coin and did the marketing and telegram moderation himself. It did several X’s. I think everyone in the channel had a love-hate relationship with Smiley - at times it felt like they were treating him like an annoying younger brother, poking fun at his immature emotional overreactions. At other times it felt like we were watching some kind of postmodern distributed cyber-bullying. Reading Smiley’s convos in the chat was the highlight of my day.
Shoostah shilled a coin in defi degens called Smokehouse. I think smokehouse.finance was our first long hold - several days - because there was staking. Our eyes were glued to the charts - the price spiked and plunged; SMOKE was an inflationary token, continuously being generated with a staking mechanism whose APY decreased exponentially the more people had tokens staked in the contract, but also each day more people joined the telegram and bought in. There were several different game modes to play, different tokens created for essentially no other purpose than obfuscating the ponzi logic; each with different APYs corresponding to a combination of contract logic and how many people had what amount of tokens staked in each token pair. The rewards you’d get were proportional to how many tokens you provided to the liquidity pool - for example, the BNB-SMOKE pair - which allowed more people to trade, i.e. join in the casino. You could also just directly stake your SMOKE tokens to earn more SMOKE. I don’t think any of us left our houses during the whole time except briefly - we didn’t know the right time to sell and couldn’t miss the pump.
[Feb 14, 2021 11:20:48PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: I kept everything in bnb
[Feb 14, 2021 11:22:09PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: To prepare for more degen gambling!!!
[Feb 14, 2021 11:22:16PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: Im ready!!
[Feb 14, 2021 11:22:18PM] [rex] -> [moviecrew]: yeah foreals
[Feb 14, 2021 11:22:38PM] [rex] -> [moviecrew]: my life is simultaneously reinvigorated and ruined
[Feb 14, 2021 11:22:50PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: its not too late to turn backk
[Feb 14, 2021 11:26:28PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: fever dream
After Smoke was a series of coins with similar staking mechanisms. Someone else in defi degens made a safu coin called Crudeoil, and its sequel, Diesel; they all used the same solidity contract and the same website template, with different colour graphics and a new logo - everyone knew it was the same game repackaged. In fact, all the games we were playing had already been rotated through in ETH before making its way to BSC - food farms like smoke, and rfi forks (to come).
Keep in mind that we were just getting into this game, but defi in general, with its grandiose promises, had been around for at least a year at this point on Ethereum. A year in this space meant decades of traditional financial evolution. It still had a reputation as the “wild west” of finance though- infinite ways to make and lose money. As the saying went, “gain your salary in 3 days, lose your salary in 3 minutes.” But there was a lot of “serious” investment happening in the space as well. “Professionals” in the crypto space were building “real” products that were actually meant to upset the traditional banking order. We were hearing news like the Iron Bank hack - in February 2021, a significant exploit targeted the defi protocols Alpha Homora V2 and CREAM Finance's Iron Bank, resulting in the loss of approximately $37 million.
But this world was already way too far removed from us - we were degens! Leave it to the professionals to try to remake the financial system in a decentralized way. We knew all that stuff was mostly scams, and even well meaning developers can’t prevent all the hacks - that’s the point of making the contracts open source, after all, so they can be pen tested by the world. We wouldn’t dare stake our ETH or USDC in defi protocols, no matter how well established - it was degen coins only, selling to ETH and BNB, or cashing out.
[Feb 16, 2021 03:37:39PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: uniswap, pancakeswap
[Feb 16, 2021 03:37:45PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: maybe 10000 users total full users
[Feb 16, 2021 03:37:59PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: 2000 semi regular users
[Feb 16, 2021 03:38:06PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: 500-1000 everyday users
[Feb 16, 2021 03:38:12PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: you see a coin with 3000 holders, thats a smashing success
[Feb 16, 2021 03:38:30PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: 500-600 pretty good success
We became aware that our BSC shitcoin game was just a small part of a vast network of scams and opportunities across the defi and crypto landscape. The degen world was a tiny unregulated part of the unregulated part of crypto. For example, there were people making money with algorithmic stablecoins, staking them for governance tokens, or arbitraging across different exchanges with price fluctuations. There were sniper bots that monitored token launches and used sophisticated algorithms to determine buy and sell points automatically. Providing liquidity for a token, like CAKE (the native token of pancakeswap), was a way to park some tokens for passive gain, along with essentially risk dampened holding of the asset, since you provide liquidity in a pair where one half is a more “stable” asset like BNB or BUSD. But it didn’t feel worth it when presales did many x’s daily, especially with the omnipresent risk of contract exploitation and rugs. There were as many types of rugs as there were ways to make money. In contrast, the game we played required no high effort finance or coding knowledge - all you needed to do essentially was to read telegram and submit manual transactions at the right time. What transactions to submit when? Well therein lies the artistry. Half the battle was knowing if a coin or contract was safe. The other half was properly gauging the level of hype.
======= A FEW TYPES OF RUGS =======
DEPOSIT - Deposit BNB. We'll do the all the hard LP Work, High APY's for 2 Days, Harvest Later Example: BSCVault
MIGRATOR FUNCTION - Stake pairing for high APYs. Site goes down, LP Tokens stolen Example: ChickenFarmFinance
TEAM PREFARMED - Twitter and Telegram opens up 5 hrs after team has preFarmed Example - Zombies SEND 0.02 BNB for Tokens - Send small 0.02 BNB for tokens Example - Saturn
MINT FUNCTION - Code on the contract has a mint function. Dev prints tons of tokens, then rugs the LP and takes all the funds out Example - Safu
HOUDINI - Everything is fine, then all of a sudden. The site and chat disappears, can't unstake b/c the site is gone. Example - Too Many
APYs INCORRECT - Site list HIGH APY, but when you actually calculate how much you're receiving.. the math is off Example - Drakeswap
HONEYPOT - Contract set up so you can only buy, can’t sell - chart looks like it’s just going up forever
[Feb 16, 2021 06:06:42PM] [JS] -> [moviecrew]: this is a full time job
[Feb 16, 2021 06:07:00PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: Ya def can be
[Feb 16, 2021 06:08:22PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: Normal farm = scan all the groups and see what u believe
[Feb 16, 2021 06:08:24PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: Monitor price and buy and sell
[Feb 16, 2021 06:08:28PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: Group raid / dungeon is the presale stuf 😆apemaster
[Feb 16, 2021 06:08:36PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: All of us in it together to beat the boss
[Feb 16, 2021 06:08:47PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: Get variable loot drops
https://github.com/reflectfinance/reflect-contracts/blob/main/contracts/REFLECT.sol
Reflect finance was launched in November 2020 and introduced the idea of “frictionless yield”. Basically, instead of having to stake your tokens or do anything, the contract would redistribute a portion of the transaction fees for each transaction with the token to all the holders of the token, decreasing sell pressure. Why sell when you can see your token amount slowly increasing without doing anything? Passive income - the dream! The catch is, of course, you need new people coming in and buying the coin for there to be transaction fees to split. And so RFI forks became the de facto standard base contract for a shitcoin - these “deflationary coins” were the foundation for the new generation of ponzis. This straightforward yet revolutionary idea probably kept the casinos open much longer than otherwise.
The way we gained an edge was to not gamble on the shitcoins outright - we took advantage of alpha on telegram and discord to be among the first to get into new coins during a pre-launch round of “investment” called a presale. Coin presales were very simple. They had 5 essential features - there was a presale contract, a hard cap, a soft cap, a min cap, and a max cap. We send BNB to the presale contract address when the presale opens and if it’s not a rug we’ll get the appropriate amount of tokens specified by the developer at the predetermined launch price. The presale fills up when it reaches the hard cap, and but it has to reach the soft cap in order to launch. The min/max specified how much each wallet could send to the contract to exchange for tokens. If your wallet successfully got into the presale, beating out the other apes, you’d usually be able to claim the tokens. Before the standardized sale platforms DXSale and Pinksale got popular, this step was where a lot of rugs happened - you would find that you couldn’t claim the tokens even though you sent in your precious BNBs to the presale contract. Realizing that you can’t claim the tokens you just “bought” was one of the worst feelings I can remember.
At first, the way we would enter the presales would be to manually send tokens from our metamask wallets. We’d tile as many windows as we could on top of each other and click submit in the narrow 3 second block window hoping our transaction would go through and frontrun everyone else trying to get into the sale. I wasn’t that good at FPS games, so I needed to write a script for sending tokens to the contract so I just had to click enter at the right time instead of clicking. The blockchain block that the presale contract would open up is predetermined, but sending transactions takes a variable amount of time based on unpredictable network effects, so we clicked as fast as we could and hoped for the best.
Counterintuitively, the script was not necessarily always better than clicking. I tried to time it to exactly 2-3 seconds before the presale launch time to account for the variable transaction times, but the script was too much commitment; it operated too methodically. I’d miss all 4 wallets sometimes (the window was very narrow so the python script could only set off max 4 transactions within the block). There was not enough random jiggling to optimize fate. So I started randomly varying the setup depending on how I felt and how important the presale felt; for example, for one presale I would have 2 windows with the script sending 3 wallets each, and manually clicked a few; for the next I would have 2 wallets set up for manual clicking and one script window open to send 2 wallets. I paid for my own node on quicknode - can you believe it was only 10 dollars a month? Basically the idea was to leave certain parts of the process up to fate - there was no guarantee of the coin not being a rug, or of selling at the right time to avoid loss given the complex psychology of fomo. These “uncommitted wallets” helped minimize regret by leaving it up to fate whether I got some of them or not.
Setting up the right gas price was essential. Gas is what determines the priority of transactions within a block. More gas means more money completely wasted on the transaction itself, but not enough gas means not getting a slot to play in the game. We would pick our favorite numbers that we thought might give us a marginal advantage over others - if we thought others would do 3000 gas, we would pick 3003 or 3103; those extra 3 or 103 gas often really did determine whether or not our wallets made the cut into the presale.
Once the hard cap fills up, the admins will announce in the telegram, and set a time for the token “launch”. Launch meant moving the liquidity from the presale contract to the new token contract to allow trading to commence. Before DXSale, people would put a lot of effort into trying to find the token contract address in order to snipe it on launch, but on DXSale it was right there for everyone to see, a “fair” playing field. Amid endless walls of “wen launch” and “wen pcs”, the liquidity pool would be finalized usually with severe delays (in practice this meant sitting around waiting for the dev to press the button for hours after the announced time).
The fluctuations would be wildly chaotic for the first few blocks due to the bots, and then stabilize into patterns of exponential rise and fall. More tech savvy players used sniping software, buying immediately at the launch block; but there’s a hierarchy of how fast your node runs which will allow you to get in first. And some algorithms dump almost immediately (sell on the first few blocks) with an inflated price, so if your sniping bot is good enough but just a bit slow, i.e. you don’t sell in time, you’re going to have massive losses. I experimented with using Trade Butler Bot (TBB) for sniping, frontrunning other people at the token launch, but most of the time I end up getting screwed - I learned to stick to presales, where the launch price is guaranteed if you get in. It reached a point where every new coin started with a massive red candle, and normie investors who didn’t use sniping bots knew to steer clear of the madness for the first few minutes and attempt to buy the launch dip (which was usually impossible unless you set the slippage to something like 50% or more).
[Feb 27, 2021 03:59:46PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: Need to make some rules for yourself and follow them like -don't buy anything that just did x's -don't buy at listing, wait for the listing dump before buying in -take initial or initial + a little profit if you think it has momentum to go longer -take most or all of it out if it's random fork #532 -don't sleep on shitcoins, way less stressful -bet sizing/risk management: --if its total rando yolo play without having done reserach to feel safe: 0.5 bnb or less --50/50 could be legit / but have some doubt: 1 bnb --known person in the space + connected people 'know' the dev and are vouching: 2 bnb --a company set this up and has all the markings of a legit company with backing from other known organizations (e.g. partnership with some well known project): 3+ bnb And then adjust these rules as you get more experience
The most fashionable chart changed over time - at first we used Chartex, buying a token to use the real time features. This was the only token I remember where buying the token felt like it had a real use value - it was like actually buying a product in normie land. But eventually, poocoin, then dextools / dexscreener replaced the rest of the chart programs - they were free and saturated with degens.
Selling was based on a combination of intuition, experience, and personal rules. The most basic selling pattern was half during the first pump, then half of what’s remaining at every subsequent suspected peak, until you have some “dust” in your wallet that you never get rid of (actually there’s usually some dust anyways because of the slippage even if you try to sell all the tokens). But in practice, we rarely followed our own guidelines. If a project felt like it was hype, we might sell one wallet at the first pump and keep the other 3, for example. Hype was an atmosphere felt through the frequency of the chat, the tone of people in the voice chat, and most importantly, the density of transactions, lines of red and green popping off underneath the chart. The harder the fall, the steeper the ascent. The steeper the ascent, the greater the chance for an even steeper ascent as people fomo in - exponential growth. A coin in decline, when the knife falls, will usually rebound to slightly above half of the amount it fell. These were empirical observations. The winner of the game was the one who clicked sell right before everyone else does. It’s impossible to time the top, but there were times when we would coincidentally sell close to the top. Much more common was selling at a local maximum, often immediately before a green god candle made our hearts sink in regret. Then there’s the common practice of keeping a moonbag - a small percentage, maybe 10%, that you resolve to keep no matter what the chart looks like - you never know when a random coin from the past will resurge, and when it does, the feeling of not keeping a moonbag is one of worst possible triggers of regret I’ve ever experienced. The whole game was basically an exercise in regret management - what sequence of actions can I decide to take that will give me the least regret and anxiety?
[Feb 16, 2021 10:34:43PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: sideways waiting for pump, it dumps, i hold, it dumps more, i capitulate and sell, it bounces, i fomo in, it dumps again, i panic sell
[Feb 17, 2021 05:57:14PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: Dude this is so predictable wtf
[Feb 17, 2021 05:58:18PM] [AL] -> [moviecrew]: Every coin runs unless its a real rug
[Feb 17, 2021 05:59:36PM] [apemaster] -> [moviecrew]: u feelin the fomo
It was the worst fomo you can imagine to not get a wallet in a presale. As we got more experienced and had more tokens, we started to gradually increase the amount of wallets we tried to get in - from 1 to 3 or 4 to 8. But sometimes our timing would be off and we would miss all of them. At such times, we would sometimes console each other in our group, by offering a wallet to someone who missed all of them, so they aren’t forced to watch on the sidelines. Going outside became dangerous - what if we missed a presale? I would always have my laptop on me if I had to go outside even just briefly. Since we were in the middle of the COVID pandemic, staying home almost 24 hours a day was acceptable, even socially encouraged.
The moment I awoke from my anaesthetic after wisdom tooth removal surgery, I checked the group chat and token prices. There’s a photo of my friend lying in a hospital bed, his arm connected to an IV, aping from his laptop.
When he had to go on vacation to a cottage for a week (his friends had planned it ages ago), the fomo was unbearable - “fack im gonna miss a whole week of airdrops and presalez T.T”. He would regularly check in from the extremely spotty signal from his cabin in the woods; even though his girlfriend forbade him from bringing his laptop, he still wanted to know how much he was missing out on, to confirm his regret.
I remember aping from benches at train stations and on buses and trains, praying for good signal tethered to my phone’s internet, on rare occasions I had to take a trip somewhere. Our personal lives all took a massive toll, assuming we had any to begin with. Something that still haunts me is the time I promised to go on a date with my girlfriend at the time. We hadn’t been anywhere outside in weeks - she would come over and we would eat together but mostly she would just lie on my bed while I stared at my monitors. But that day, she made me leave my room, and we made our way over to Golden Gate Park to visit the deYoung museum. Of course, the whole time my eyes were glued to telegram and discord on my phone. After wandering through the first two galleries of the museum, I saw a hyped presale happening in the next hour. I still cringe when I think back at what I said to her - something to the effect of “I can’t justify spending several thousand dollars to stay here”. I ran outside to catch an uber, and 20 minutes later I was back in front of my ape station. This is probably the main reason I broke up with her (well, in addition to her cheating with 3 different guys…)
“you have your rights to play, just know that the only way this can work is you have to give up crypto to spend time with me sometimes and im not okay with otherwise because i should worth more than virtual currencies to my bf 🙂 well at least most of the time i should & if not then i just cant agree with the priorities & will refuse to compete with literal coins for attention”
Often we wouldn’t have time to get lunch or dinner; the presales were filled up back to back and missing even one of them was out of the question. There was no way of knowing which one would run or not. The fomo would have killed us. At first we would follow the rule of never sleeping on a coin. But soon they ran for unpredictable lengths, and we had to sleep at least a bit, so we’d sleep a few hours and check in the morning. Sometimes it would have done a 10x overnight, and sometimes it would have become almost zero.
Sleep was the biggest challenge for me - a truly global endeavour, whitelist deadlines and presales would happen at inconvenient times. Scheduling a few hours to sleep every day was an unfortunate priority, and it was often different hours in every 24 hour period; life became one long sleep deprived weed filled fever dream; I lost all sense of time and the outside world. My work laptop was just another sub process to handle; I would give unconvincing daily status updates; my work output dropped to basically zero and I was making up things and I didn’t know how long that could last, but I didn’t have the time to slow down or have the mental capacity to do work for my “real” job. As it turns out, you can coast in a software engineering job for literally years before someone starts to question you.
“crypto is constantly wavering between fomo of why you didnt allin your stack on some random play that 5xd and utter despair that you even put anything into a coin you just hoped to 2x and get out but dumped/rugged instead”
Every few minutes I would compulsively check the telegram token tracker bot - I would type #tokens and it would list all the tokens I currently had so I could check the price. Most coins we bought were sold right away or within hours of launch, but there were a few longer term projects that we thought had potential, and so we held them for weeks or even months. Antimatter. Lightning. Eleven Finance. Feeder Finance. Dozens of others. Some of the names were memes, some of the names were stylized and sleek, some sounded like “real” financial protocols to enhance legitimacy.
On March 8th, 2021, Safemoon launched on DXSale; it was DXSale #8. One of the catchiest marketing slogans I remember from those days: Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe; born just in time to buy $SAFEMOON. Safemoon would go on to run up 55000% in the next 2 months; it would have an ATH market cap of 5.7 billion dollars, and it would make it to the mainstream crypto attention, even landing on the front page of Reddit for the normies. We didn’t actually hear about Safemoon until it had already mooned (about 2-3 days in), so we didn’t buy any. We had no idea that it would go up several thousand percent even from the mooned state. But before all of that madness came to fruition, there was the onslaught of copycats. This was it. The flood.
The first one we actually managed to get into was Safemars. This was the first copy that did well. One wallet of Safemars, if held from launch to its ATH a month later, would have been worth just under 14 million USD. I can’t even count the number of nights this particular coin haunted my dreams. I would sometimes go back and check my wallets just praying that I forgot about one; but of course it didn’t exist.
Psychologically, missed gains were much harder to stop thinking about than losses. Losses we accepted fairly quickly - asymmetrical risk worked in our favour; all we could lose was our initial investment for each coin (which we routinely did in rug pulls) - somewhere between 0.5 to 3 bnb per wallet usually. But the times when we sold early - that sinking feeling is something I’ve never felt again since then. When my 0.5 BNB in Safemars became 7 BNB, I sold. A profit of 2k should have been something to celebrate. I still had that number (of safemars tokens) in my pancakeswap window after selling, and I couldn’t help but keep watching. So many times I had the urge to buy back in, but by that point I had done this enough to know that’s never a good strategy; you never know when the big red candle is coming. I watched it become 20 bnb. Then 50bnb. And then 100. Only then did close the pancakeswap window and the chart - I couldn’t watch anymore.
After Safemars, there was:
SafeSaturn
SafeJupiter
SafeSolar
SafeSuperMoon
Fairmoon
SafeFairMoon
FairSafeMoon
FairSafe
FairMars
FairStar
… You get the point. Some were rugs. Some mooned to the stratosphere. Some dumped immediately in a bottomless hole. I remember being extra hype for SafeEarth, which had a stacked team of trusted devs, a nice and shiny UI on their website, a real environmental mission statement, and it was on Eth! It was so legit! I only got 1 eth in - it 10x’d almost immediately, but we held it too long. It kept going up and up, but then it collapsed. I held for hours before selling, and I kept a quarter of the tokens for days. In the end it dipped below 10x and I had to cut my losses. I actually remember feeling a whole lot worse that I didn’t sell at 30x levels than the fact that I had just made about 9 ETH.
Most of the new BSC token launches consolidated on the DXSale platform. It became a one stop shop of checking what new coins were launching that day - a slick, easy to navigate user interface with all relevant info at a glance. The game had reached maturity. I remember the day DXSale had its own token launch - $SALE - I was convinced it was a guaranteed win. I decided to try for 10 wallets - my friend came over and helped me click 4 of them on my second laptop. It ended up being a measly 1.5x to 2x, severely underperforming expectations; but 10 copies of that profit wasn’t bad…
By mid-march, the routine had solidified. We played the core game loop all of our waking hours, keeping one eye on the telegram / discords and new launches, the other on charts of all relevant tokens to see how well they’re doing. Sometimes we’d even browse poocoin or etherscan for coins that just launched but weren’t marketed in the telegram chats - the hype was so crazy than anything would explode, if only for a little while, but 99% of these were scam copycats of “legit” projects or at least eventual rugs. The presales themselves became something to look forward to, an event when we’d get together in voice chat to celebrate wins and cry about losses. These were coins that we knew there was hype for - we knew because there was a high ratio of people in the telegram to presale slots (Hard Cap / Max Cap). We knew because the chat was very active with real sounding people (this was before chatGPT), which meant most of the members weren’t bots. Before deciding to ape in a presale, we’d usually make sure to do our due diligence of checking the presale contract for any obvious exploits or hacks; sometimes the contract would be egregiously altered to enable to dev to easily rug. We’d check what other channels the admins were in, or try to find other coins that the presale contract creator was involved in before, whether as a creator or just as an ape. But to be honest, the real decision came down to a vibe check - it just “felt right” or not, and the more telegrams we joined, the better our rug sense became.
For the first 30 minutes to one hour of each token launch, our eyes were solidly glued to the chart and the telegram, even if we had already sold most of our tokens - the fomo regret of selling early had to be confirmed even if it brought deep pain. Even days after token launch, we’d revisit coins we’d sold to measure our fomo; and once in a blue moon, they would indeed have mooned without us - those few examples make up a disproportionate amount of memories. Sometimes we’d have to juggle 2 or 3 simultaneous launches - just like studying for exams, we’d prioritize the one we thought would do better. In real life, I began thinking in terms of BNB - oh, this only costs 0.25 BNB, this is less than 1 BNB, I’ll buy it…
Dogecoin and then Shiba had huge runs at some point, and this led to the proliferation of degen dog coins - there was Dogebsc, Snowge, Dogira, SafeShiba… As more people joined the game, we found ourselves not getting into a lot of presales. We started aping some token launches as well, pure degen gambling. We set 1%, 10%, and finally 50% slippage, anything to get a ticket to play. 50% slippage means losing literally up to half of the amount invested before the buy transaction even goes through. That’s effectively a 2.5x just to break even (there’s sell taxes and slippage on the sell side as well). But it didn’t matter - that’s how crazy the fluctuations were. A particularly memorable rug was a coin called GOMIX. It was super hyped on all the channels for many days - when they rugged immediately after token launch, the collective fury and frustration reverberated through the universe; the telegram and discord chats were flying at a hundred chats per second. The next day, there was a copycat token called SafeGOMIX.
ok I need PRICE TO GO UP. like VERY SOON. I cant take this anymore. every day I am checking price and it is staying the same. every day, check price, same price. I cant take this anymore, I have over invested, by a lot. it is what it is. but I need the price to GO UP ALREADY. can devs DO SOMETHING??
Icons and inside jokes that captured the degen zeitgeist were celebrated, and they multiplied and mutated. Memes proliferated and recurred. A “Cambrian explosion of slot machines”. No one can predict the future of markets, but for a time it felt like the strength of a meme in collective (telegram / discord) consciousness was directly correlated with the probability of its associated coin doing well or having a resurgence after a period of decline. Having a grasp on what’s relevant in the community was an important predictor of profit. It truly was an economy of memes.
In addition to the core game loop, there was a constant variety of what I would describe as mini-games. I can’t remember most of them now. For example, two coins hosted a trivia night on telegram - they’d post a question about a musician or some general knowledge, and the first X people who answered correctly would get a whitelist slot in the private sale. We googled fast and each won a wallet slot. One of those coins ended up doing a respectable 5x. On pancakeswap there was a minigame called “prediction (beta)” - essentially, every 3 minutes, you’d bet BNB into a pool for whether BNB will go up or down in those 3 minutes. Because there was a slight delay between the real time chart price of ETH or BNB on an aggregator like aggr.trade and the value that the prediction app actually used to determine the up/down verdict on pancakeswap, it was possible to have a better than 50/50 chance of predicting whether the next 3 minute block would be up or down. Of course, the amount staked on each side of the prize pool would reflect this, but somehow the odds were slightly in my favour. I did this in the downtime between presales, whenever I was bored - I was able to make 9 or 10 BNB just from this prediction market alone, but it was a lot of micro effort, staring at the chart. That time could have been better spent searching for the next presale play; in this exponential growth environment even finding an exploit that allowed you to make over $100 an hour but required your attention to do wasn’t worth doing.
For a long time, we half joked about creating our own token. Actually, I remember walking along the Canal St. Martin in Paris, 2018. Someone I just met told me to create an ICO, find some math compsci academia friends to put their name on it for clout, what was I waiting for? I thought that was ridiculously high effort, not to mention possibly illegal. But by 2021, we no longer needed to author a whitepaper, come up with a novel financial model, find experts to vouch for us. There was even a one click shitcoin launch website:
https://vittominacori.github.io/bep20-generator/create-token/
The “work” would consist of “simply” setting up a telegram group, maybe paying for bot users to seed the numbers, moderating the chat to build hype, designing believable UI graphics and visual assets, and marketing the casino launch date. At the height of the boom, it was truly a money printing endeavor, even more so than aping into other peoples’ presales - we would have controlled the launch! Guaranteed presale profits! In the end, we were lazy. Running a marketing company to sell an imaginary token still felt like work. The presale game was the level at which our dopamine feedback systems could still tolerate long term engagement - it was work with just enough elements of play to make it “fun”.
In June 2021, after a brief lull in the action, I decided to work from Spain because the airports in Europe were opening back up and there was no real reason to stay in San Francisco. I thought the shitcoining activity was winding down - there were stretches of days with no profitable presales. But the day after I arrived in Barcelona, the presales picked up again in a massive second wave. I moved from a hostel to a five star hotel - I figured that a comfortable, enclosed environment for aping mattered more than the price. What was 500 euros a night when that was the amount spent on gas fees for single presale? I remember entering the Gaudi park and gardens for literally 10 minutes before seeing a presale pop up, and rushing to find an e-bike to ride back to the hotel because a taxi would have been too late. In the end, I didn’t see anything in the city except the Sagrada Familia - I spent those 2 weeks glued to the screen in my hotel room.
That was the period of “hyperdeflationary” coins, which kicked off with Everrise - in addition to standard reflection mechanisms of token redistribution, there were high sell taxes which disincentivized selling, and also periodic buybacks coded into the contract where transaction fees themselves would be used inflate the price by buying tokens and burning them. In effect, these was just slightly more resilient dragons - the charts were almost the same, just spikier. One after another, my life was taken up by names like BNBRise, RiseMyTiki, SafeTiki, BabyDoge, Floki, MiniDoge, MiniBabyDoge, Dogeback, Daddydoge - this last one was particularly memorable because it mooned 10x after they posted a tweet of Elon getting into a limo and screaming “daddydoge” after a group of people followed him screaming “Say daddydoge! Say daddydoge!”. I think this was also one of the first coins to use the gimmick of buying ad space in Times Square - for a few days, it joined the rotation of visual static at 42nd and Broadway, and it actually brought in a lot of normie coinbase and robinhood buyers.
All of these coins did really well. In retrospect late June - early July was the last push of exponentially rocketing coins from presales. There was also Cumrocket, Lonelyfans, and Pornstar - a series of governance tokens for (hypothetical, unimplemented) onlyfans-esque NFT platforms. The “revolutionary” concept of onlyfans creators owning their own photos and videos as NFTs was taking off, and nobody knew what the true valuation of this market was; people suspected it was in the billions.
Friends and acquaintances started to hear about shitcoining in the media and asked us how to participate. The Apemaster made step by step guides complete with diagrams and arrows to help friends set up their wallets. But shitcoining was dying, and also most of the others had real lives and jobs, so they couldn’t commit to the lifestyle of 24/7 obsession required for profit. By late July the game had gotten crowded; its days were numbered. Even crypto normies who only knew about BTC and ETH were starting to catch on to the game. People talked constantly of “grinding whitelists” - because now whitelists were the only way for people to get wallets into presales - no more public sales. This meant even more privilege for the casino creators and their friends; our little send to contract trick wouldn’t pay off for much longer. Still, we had some success getting into random whitelist lotteries and some contrarians who wanted to raise more by keeping the sale public. We grinded whitelists by submitting as many wallets as we could, and for some coins with stricter requirements we created dozens of fake emails and twitter accounts for limited KYC verification. Often we had to also provide proof of shilling on social media platforms for a chance at a whitelist spot.
A lot of presales started to require you to purchase some amount of another token. This led to wild speculation on the price of the allocation token; there was unknown gain from the presales, so the game shifted to gambling on the pump of the allocation tokens before each presale it enabled. Each entry gate added to the process diminished the pool of potential apes who would be bothered or had the capital to join, and so the return was diminished for each token. A lot of new tokens had extensive rounds of private sales so that token creators could further privilege friends and insiders; public sales wouldn’t fill anymore, or else the token would dump in a massive red candle immediately on launch and never recover. One of the final nails in the coffin was that newcomers to the telegram communities started catching on to the unfairness of having presales, and so to appease the masses, token creators would directly launch a coin onto the blockchain as “fair sales”. So the only play left was to use sniping bots, which as previously mentioned, almost guaranteed losses since we didn’t have access to fast nodes that would let us frontrun the more sophisticated bots. Eventually, DXSale became a wasteland of shitcoins that didn’t even reach soft cap. Coins just weren’t doing X’s anymore. People migrated to new, more unpredictable gambling minigames, to other chains like Solana and Avalanche. The game became a victim of its own greed and had run its course.
It was around the time of Boxer Inu. Every “good” coin would do at most 2-3x to its all time high, which meant we were barely profiting anymore given an average strategy. I was back in Toronto, and my friends were going out to eat and hang out in person. It felt good to be outside again. It felt good to not worry about missing massive profits every moment of the day. Real life was creeping back in. We lost interest in being glued to the telegrams because the return wasn’t there anymore. Coins were still pumping, but without the guarantee of presales, to play the game would be no more than sheer gambling. Again, it happened slowly, then all at once. We cashed out our shitcoins and BNBs; we swapped to BTC / ETH. We hunkered down for crypto winter.
If you’ve ever played any MMORPG, like World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls Online, this immersive gambling experience felt like a succession of periodically different patches / updates that shake the meta and create new ways to play but with the same fundamental game loop, mechanics, and incentives.The end of BSC shitcoining wasn’t the end of the casino; the rules just became different. We were too entrenched in the old ways to keep up. Too many people started to know about the game and its exploits. It was impossible to get into presales, and they dumped anyways. It got more complicated to consistently turn a profit. You could still make money but it would require some ingenuity and hacking.
We missed the entire solana memecoin meta. Then there was SQUID in October 2021, one of the most dramatic rug pulls in crypto history. This was probably the last one I can remember from that era, and even that was long after we were already out of the game; I heard about it on reddit like a boomer. I was no longer browsing the alpha channels (many had long since disbanded and the people moved to other secret chats) or the meme discords. $PEPE, $BITCOIN (HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu), $WSB, $SPONGE… those were all the tip of the iceberg for their respective pumps. An ocean of derivative shitcoining activity probably followed and preceded those famous examples.
[Mar 11, 2021 03:44:16PM] [AL] -> [apemaster]: lol when u see things like
[Mar 11, 2021 03:44:22PM] [AL] -> [apemaster]: pajeet - thank you now i can feed my entier village
[Mar 11, 2021 03:44:26PM] [AL] -> [apemaster]: really makes u think
[Mar 11, 2021 03:44:31PM] [AL] -> [apemaster]: this literally could feed someones entier village
Through the bull run we had been aware of NFTs, but none of them seemed like good investments before - stuff like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks were too pumped already. The BNB derivatives of ETH NFTs never did well - binance punks, bashmasks. I really only started speculating on NFTs during the late phase - the last leg of new NFTs, January - February 2022. It was really out of boredom, sitting on all of these magic internet tokens, it had been a while since the last ape. It was going well at first - buying all the staples from Summer 2021 that were pumping again - World of Women, Pudgy Penguins, Cool Cats, etc. We were fans of @b1gqing so we bought her IreneDao NFTs - along with the corresponding $SIMP governance token.
By this point I had embarked on a long drive across America, from Miami back to San Francisco. I remember aping Azuki at mint in the parking lot of a Florida shopping complex. It was so hyped that all 10k Azukis were minted out in a few minutes. I felt fomo and decided to buy two in the presale dump, but 2 ETH was the lowest point I could buy it at (mint price was 1 ETH). I sold at about 3x thinking I had made a good profit. But a few days later, when I checked again, Azuki had shot up to 16 ETH. A month later it was approaching 30 ETH. I remember long night drives thinking about those missed gains. It was basically downhill from there - for several hyped projects, I kept catching a falling knife, buying more of the same failing NFT on the way down. The market died so abruptly that none of us could react fast enough. I gave up following the NFT market even though a few of them did quite well into April and May 2022. As we all know, NFTs are now officially dead, a fad of the times. Overall, I lost maybe a quarter of what I had made shitcoining investing in NFTs. But do I have a right to feel like I pissed away hard-earned cash? Wasn’t I just feeding it all back into the machine from which it came, everything in its proper place?
At the San Francisco Game Developers’ Conference, it seemed like every other booth was related to crypto. NFT game integration was the Next Big Thing, and I was seeing so many familiar names from shitcoining and beyond, some of which actually moved past pure marketing hype and actually started putting together an actual team of actual people to work on an actual project that actual games might try to integrate. This was shocking to me… the degen world imprinting onto “reality”. Of course, established NFT gaming players like Decentraland ($MANA) and the Korean NFT company Wemade were there too (as a key sponsor). Axie Infinity was popping off like never before, with billion dollar valuations, and Sky Mavis had a huge presence. NFTs were heralded as the next evolution of gaming; as part of my “real” work in gaming, we even held talks with representatives from both Immutable X and FTX to investigate NFT integration (my company as leaning towards FTX, lol). Crypto firms which were almost completely unrelated to gaming were in attendance. Through friends, I had the opportunity to meet the core team including the founder and CTO(s) of Harmony One, a novel L1 blockchain. Sitting down in their midst felt like some kind of grand council initiation - the founders exuded so much self confidence that it was intimidating to be in their presence. I felt like I was being sussed out and judged to see if I made the cut to become a member of their boys’ club. All I could do was talk about what I knew - degen aping - and it turns out that they had almost no clue what I was talking about - the extent of shitcoining familiar to them was Safemoon. It was bizarre to be around people whose “real” careers were in crypto - they were physics, computer science, and economics majors who had gotten together and written an actual whitepaper based on an actual blockchain innovation based on actual novel cryptography research. They were serious about the future of decentralized finance and DAO governance and truly believed they were changing the world.
In July 2022, I decided to spend some time working from New York City; my friend L was there, and she offered to let me sleep on her couch. I was totally unprepared for the whirlwind month that would follow; all the absurdities unleashed by weed became the frenzy that was NFT NYC as it descended upon the city. On the day I landed, I had just dropped my bags off at L’s when she said they were heading to an event being run by Golden Dao, an Asian American crypto collective. They had heard there would be a lot of celebrities there, but they weren’t sure how to get in. I looked at the invite, and saw that all I needed to do was mint the Golden Dao NFT for 0.88 ETH to get us in. It even came with a real physical gold plated ring!
We took the metro over to High Bar New York (346 W 40th); at the entrance, we saw Andrew Yang (democratic presidential nominee in 2020 - not right, not left, forward!) about to leave so I got a picture with him, told him I bought the NFT and he fist bumped me. Up the elevator, on the rooftop was an open bar for holders. We were surrounded by Asian hypebeasts and ABGs. We walked over to the NFT selfie machine and met a bunch of super nice Asian crypto bros who worked in finance; they took us to meet Teddy, Andrew Yang’s younger brother. I went to pick up my Golden Dao ring after they sized my finger, and wore it right away so I had a matching accessory with everyone else. On the way back to the bar we ran into Kevjumba and I told him it was an honour to meet him and got a selfie; later on, L got a bunch of photos with the youtuber Michelle Phan. We were told that there were a lot of super famous League of Legends and Starcraft players there, but I’m not familiar with that world so I can’t remember their names. With some of the crypto bros, we took an uber over to Marquee nightclub, and we were told that Snoog Dogg had just left. Teddy was a VIP, so we got in right away, and we sat at the booth with gray goose and table service. Steve Aoki was DJing.
The entire week consisted of one all you can eat and drink party after another. All the club venues in the city had been booked out months in advance by people in the crypto space. The whole city was overrun with degen NFT energy; the free alcohol and merch flowed in an endless stream. Dogs and anime NFTs lit up all the billboards in the city. Eminem and LCD Soundsystem performed a concert for Yuga Labs NFT holders (which we unfortunately didn’t have access to). But except for that concert, we managed to make our way into almost every other party without invites (having the girls in the group talk to all the bouncers probably made the most difference though to be fair, not owning NFTs). This is what the second day’s schedule looked like:
[Jun 21, 2022 03:48:43AM] [HJ] -> [ljsa]: CLOSE TO OFFSITE 11-2: launch house brunch @163 W 23rd St (Near Empire State Building) 11-8pm Cooltopia Center415 (Near Empire State Building) JUNE 21-23 CLOSE TO EACH OTHER 6-8 Vybo cocktail hour @the butterfly Soho 11am-7pm Invisible Friends 100 Avenue of Americas (https://twitter.com/InvsbleFriends/status/1534303293081636864) 6-10 mixing your reality (SECRET LOCATION) in soho 9-12am Gaming event at OS NYC (Soho) CLOSE TO EACH OTHER 7-10 Wanderers at Daylight studio Hudson Yards 8:30-1am Investor Networking Party by Doodle Labs at NOIR NYC (Chelsea) CLOSE TO EACH OTHER 7-2am Cipriani (Musica) 7pm-2am Hollywood 3.0 at Nebula (SUPER COOL VENUE!) https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hollywood-30-party-presented-by-rad-and-ara-nftnyc-awards-afterparty-tickets-355599336187 (NEAR TIMES SQUARE) 10-3am IRL After Party @Missionhttps://twitter.com/InvsbleFriends/status/1534303293081636864
At another rooftop party, we met the founders of OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace at the time. Also there was the founders of the L2 chain Polygon ($MATIC), as well as the guy who had just sold his ZK rollup startup to Polygon. We met the core engineers of Uniswap. Random people kept showing up in the most unexpected places. We went to an 888Dao asian founders event in a penthouse overlooking Central Park; I ran into my friend’s entrepreneur boyfriend. There was someone I met in the Philippines at the only crypto event I attended there the previous year. We met 14 year old Eric Zhu, the founder who became famous on twitter for working on his startup and taking calls from the bathroom of his school. Eventually, his school principal had to issue a statement banning him from using the bathroom, and then he was banned from LinkedIn for being under 16, which further entrenched his minor celebrity status. His companies had million dollar valuations and Series B funding, and he admitted that he still doesn’t know how to do laundry. Actually almost everyone there was a teenager except for us - an 18 year old founder was the self proclaimed “dad” of the group. Someone mentioned that they go to school with Damien and Kai Musk, two of Elon’s triplets. The next day, we went to a dimsum event with those people, and I met Jason Chen and Lucia Li, millennial musician youtubers from the early days of the platform. Lucia told me that she had just frozen her eggs in SF, and they’re not sure when they’re getting married (everyone on the internet keeps asking them this). As we were leaving dimsum in Chinatown, I saw that the Azuki NFT experience was right across the street, taunting me. Holders were entitled to free merch, and there was a group of them doing some sort of scavenger hunt activity across Manhattan for extra prizes.
We headed to the Cool Cats event called Cooltopia, where they had a surprisingly high effort carnival assembled, with arcade games, artfully decorated garden spaces, cool cats themed sculptures, lots of places to take selfies, and tons of extremely cute merch. As a cool cat holder, I was entitled to pick one free item from the merch store. Basically, I paid 10k for a black sweater. One night there was a party for the $GALAXY coin, and they invited a bunch of people in sports. I knew nothing about basketball players, but apparently a bunch of them were there. I took a picture with a guy that everyone wanted photos with - it turned out his name was Spencer Dinwiddie and he’s an up and coming player for the Dallas Mavericks. A few days later there was a sunset boat cruise with the who’s who of Asians in crypto - founders from Stanford and Berkeley, twitter influencers/personalities, engineers at Uniswap and Opensea; young professionals living the high life.
We met a friend of a friend at a cafe; while waiting for someone else, he pulled out his laptop and started working on his crypto startup. We found out he was actually working with Do Kwon himself - they had met over zoom calls and became collaborators - he literally just talked to him on Telegram a few hours ago. In case you’re unfamiliar, Do Kwon was the founder of Terra (LUNA), which had scandalously collapsed in May - Luna rugged basically, and Terra went from 45 billion dollars to zero overnight. Kwon was wanted for fraud and illegal fundraising. At this time, he was avoiding authorities, living in Singapore. Here, right next to Washington Square Park in New York, was a telegram chat between him and a collaborator; I could have sent him a DM. (Do Kwon was finally arrested trying to board a flight to Dubai in March 2023). At another crypto party, I met Martin Shkreli, of pharmaceutical securities fraud fame. I’m not just caricaturing when I say his face had a sinister, skeletal aspect - he was skinny af, having just been released from prison. Surprise, surprise, now he hangs out in the crypto circles and is hustling to spin off new projects in this space. Every time I think back to New York, I can still see the crowds of smartly dressed young professionals laughing over free flowing champagne, the lights of Times Square awash in cartoon dogs and other crypto mascots, poppy stylized lettering advertising an infinite proliferation of $COINs, a fever dream of green and red arrows.
The famous collapse of FTX and demise of SBF in November 2022 marked the official end of the last bull run. Now that crypto is on the rise again, I wonder if degen activity will pick up as well. Crypto detractors often criticize its ponzi-like nature as a chain of selling to “greater fools”. This might be true of people who buy and hold crypto tokens with purported “intrinsic value” i.e. tokens that claim to exist for some longer term purpose. But nobody playing our crypto themed presale game was a fool in this sense. We all knew what was at stake - the delicate balancing act of keeping the ball rolling as long as we can collectively keep collective attention. It was our own fault if we didn’t sell in time and became bagholders. I’m not going to try to offer some game theoretic analysis of shitcoining; all I know is we all intuitively knew the rules of the game, and contractual agreement with these rules was a prerequisite to participation. The risk/reward ratio was heavily skewed in our favour - this was possibly a once-in-a-lifetime glitch in the simulation. These thinly veiled casinos are still running; new shitcoins are still launching and mooning every day. But the rules change too fast to keep up with the meta; what would work one day would be outdated the next. We were lucky enough to play during a prolonged stable equilibrium of greed and growth. Honestly, I hope I never have to get sucked into the mental void of this world again. At the same time this relatively brief period of psychological torment has afforded me a lifestyle of pursuing my passions and interests instead of scrambling for sustenance. After coming back from the degen world, I had room to breathe.
