My ex-girlfriend once told me, "You've either lost your mind, or you're a genius, and I honestly have no idea which it is."
It all started in 2021.
My career was in the gutter, and I was trying to find my feet after a significant personal business failure.
I'll never forget the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I had to return to the job market with my tail between my legs.
The office was smack bang in the middle of a council estate—what you'd call "the projects" in the States.
That anxiety-inducing hell hole where dreams went to die had burglar bars on the windows that resembled a prison cell and a one-way system around the building (COVID rules) to make it feel like I belonged on a conveyor belt.
I used to sit at that office desk, breaking down time in increments and getting to the next break while thinking how screwed I'd be if this were all I had to look forward to for the rest of my life.
Then, one day, everything changed.
Scratching your curiosity itch is a gift.
There's something pretty profound about being in the shite, not having anything to lose, and just trying out whatever comes to mind.
When I was at my lowest, I scratched my curiosity itch faster than a hacker in a server room.
One day, I remember social media star and marketing expert Gary Vee talking about NFTs. At that point, the Instagram algorithm fed me his content like I was on an IV drip.
In one video, he said:
"There's not a world in the next 100 years where NFTs don't exist. Consider this is your headstart."
I know he gets a bad rap online, but that lit a spark in me to explore the space. I went deep down the rabbit hole of NFTs, which stands for non-fungible tokens, a digital asset that can't be copied or replicated.
NFTs are actually contracts. Think of it like a QR code, but you have a layer of art instead of a squiggly barcode.
So, NFTs aren't just some funky-looking cartoon art—they have real-world value because the issuer can add things to the contract's metadata. Things like access, tuition, events or even a promise of royalties can give the NFT substantial value.
Most projects launched in 2021 were blatant cash grabs with anonymous founders. People were intoxicated by easy 30 x profits, like 1999 internet stock.
Let there be no confusion. I also got caught with my pants down when the tide went out.
95% of the 23 million NFT investors between 2021 and 2023 never made a profit, and 669,795 projects out of 73,257 during the same period went to zero.
The odds get even crazier for the remaining projects that survived because of the few thousand with registered market activity, only 7% of which are worth over $6,000.
Bonkers.
My biggest lesson.
I deployed around 20 ETH into various NFT projects.
These were mostly historical NFTs, so the first iterations of art on the blockchain and one sizeable position in Veefriends, a project Gary launched.
VeeFriends skyrocketed from a floor price of 0.5 ETH to 23 ETH faster than one of Uncle Elon's rockets.
I remember sitting at my office desk, where dreams went to die, constantly checking my phone under the table and sweating profusely.
Email after email came through from Opensea:
"Congratulations, someone just made a 60ETH offer for your NFT".
For one NFT, some random person was ready to offer me $200,000, equivalent to four years' salary.
So I did what most lunatics do: I quietly slid my phone back into my pocket and got on with my day job. Lol.
Maybe my ex was right.
Then it all sunk in.
I added up all the offers I received from people wanting to purchase these NFTs, and with some back-of-the-takeaway math, that number came to $1.4 million.
It doesn't even feel real writing that.
I'd show up at NFT meetups, and people would look at me like I was some investing genius. *confidently pops collar, lights a cigarette*
I obviously don't smoke, but you get the gist—it felt pretty good, and it was a damn sight better than how my boss looked at me each time I stepped foot into that corporate soul-sucking graveyard.
Before you could even say Vitalik Buterin, I penned my resignation and walked out of that job with a smirk on my face.
I'd made it, whatever the hell that even meant.
NFTs became all I thought about, studied, and considered putting money into, even well ahead-of-life expenses.
I annoyed people so much talking about NFTs that I decided to channel it through writing for strangers on the internet instead.
But! Somewhere between my grandiose vision of myself and the massive opportunity in infront of me, complacency set it.
Maybe even greed.
Before I could declare victory over everyone and their cat, the market began to unwind like a demolition crew taking down a skyscraper. Luna collapsed, FTX had a bank run of customers wanting their money back, and Sam Bankrupt-Fried hid in his billion-dollar mansion.
I systemically watched my NFTs drop from a floor price of 23 ETH ($75,000) back down to 0.5ETH ($1,650), equal to their original purchase price, a 98% drop.
Then I watched Ethereum, which I used to purchase the NFTs, drop by 70%, so on a nominal basis, I was below my original investment and had technically lost it all.
I say technically because I never sold a substantial amount. But as time went on, the penny started to drop.
I royally botched the whole thing.
If you ever wanted a textbook example of how to fumble generational wealth, this was it.
Or was it?
Call me mad.
I read a comment on X recently that came with a dose of truth, "NFTs don't have a bottom."
What they meant is there’s no support level for these buggers.
They can capitulate to near-zero prices like tulip bulbs and then get resurrected like some pharaoh's tomb.
People make the mistake of believing they're dead, a passing fad just for kids, but for many reasons, they aren't.
For the last three years, when media headlines have branded non-fungible tokens "irrelevant," I've focused on buying up as many historical NFT projects launched on Ethereum as I can get my grubby paws on.
My thesis is straightforward.
The entire global financial system will be built on a blockchain. Vaneck’s current marketing team calls Ethereum "the open-source app store of the Internet.”
Every single application you can think of, from social media to Uber and Air BnB, every collectable and every contract will be built on a blockchain, and Ethereum is set to dominate a huge market share.
As we become more digital, we'll inherently look for more expressive assets that people will use to signal online. Using digital pictures of monkeys or cartoons as our profile image is just the start.
I'm more interested in the provenance that owning these assets brings, considering some are the first digital assets in existence.
They've already sold at Christie's for millions and will be seen as the fossils that carry the rest of civilisation for the next 1,000 years.
It's heady, I know.
We're going through a digital renaissance period in which we can prove that we own something digitally rather than just as a JPEG. These original digital assets will have substantial cultural significance as we enter a more digitally immersive world.
I repeat: every contract, collectable, security, application, and deed to a property will be built on top of a blockchain. These "firsts" or historical NFTs will be culturally significant.
There's an ironclad supply, and there will never be more. The constant increase in demand and built-in supply friction means these NFTs could increase in price forever.
That's my bet anyway.
One NFT historian says:
"There is no limit to the supply of tokenised assets that will emerge in the future, but there is an ironclad hard cap on the scarcity of those in the past."
Final thoughts.
When I speak to people about this, they look at me like I'm off my rocker.
People eventually won't be able to tell the difference between physical and digital asset ownership.
I know because we already value digital asset ownership.
Take the famous gaming company EA Gaming. The FIFA video game drives 29% of the company's revenue, and it’s not from game sales ($1.6 billion in 2021).
It’s from in-game purchases.
People buy players with real cash in a game to build a football team. These are digital assets, NFTs, the only difference being that the gaming company holds the assets. So, if the game goes away, you lose the asset.
With NFTs, you own the assets and can take them with you. My point is that there is already a huge market for them.
As the economy improves and risk-on assets become more appealing, people generally start moving further along the risk curve. They shift from safer investments like savings and bonds to mutual funds, then to single tech stocks, Bitcoin, smaller-cap altcoins, and eventually to more speculative assets like NFTs.
NFTs are the last to gain liquidity and the first to lose it.
But over time, they'll continue to become more culturally relevant, particularly historical NFTs that need nothing but to exist.
Losing as much as I did, technically only on paper, can ruin a man, but as the saying goes, looking back only messes with your head.
So I'm buying more.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and also a curse. I think the important thing is that the market moves in cycles and so opportunity will hit again, it's just whether you learn the lessons of the past or not. I would like to say I learnt the lessons of the past, but having been through a few cycles now, I still did not sell my crypto at the top of the last cycle as everyone believed the market was going higher. It is difficult to sit and watch your assets plummet but as long as you hold on then things will come back up when people head further down the risk curve again. I hope your NFTs head back up and you get the rewards you deserve :) (just remember to cash out 1 or 2 in future)