That's So Crypto: Lagos, New Money and NFTs

-Mfon

I discovered crypto in 2018 in University. There was this website where you completed tasks, and they paid you in Litecoin. But the problem was that it was hard to get your money out of the wallet.

So, I had to do a large number of tasks for an entire semester before I could make enough Litecoin to cover the withdrawal fees. Then came the part where nobody was willing to pay you in naira because this was a weird currency. How were we supposed to change it to naira?

Then, I discovered a cryptocurrency exchange that helped, and I ended up getting $200. That was baller money back then!

I became fascinated with crypto, but being in medical school didn’t give me that much time to explore it well.

So, I had to pause till 2020, when I got back into crypto. There was this Dogecoin mining farm where I was doing tasks to earn DOGE. Turned out it was all a scam. They were basically using people to mine DOGE for themselves. It was such an elaborate scam; I’ll give them props for that.

The next year, 2021, I moved to Lagos and got an offer to work with a crypto exchange. I was a Lagos JJC who had just more or less run away from home and was earning ₦50K a month. My parents weren’t sending me money or even talking to me, and I had just used my entire life savings to pay for a house. Of course, I jumped at the offer. I would be earning ₦250K a month, 5 times what I was earning!

I learned a lot from that job about how cryptocurrency and trading work. I made some substantial new money from it, about $3K. I used the money to complete the roofing of our house in the village, and that was when my father started talking to me again.

Then NFTs happened, and I made a lot of money from it, roughly about $17K.

Here’s how I did it: I found an NFT project, held it until it doubled in value, and then sold it. I wasn’t that guy who would wait until an NFT had 5x or 10x in value. And it’s not because I was level-headed or anything; I was driven by fear. Sha, I still got burned here and there with some failed NFTs, but there were some big projects that paid me up to $5K.

My biggest crypto loss was when I joined an Avalanche project.

Out of the $17K I invested in it, I lost about $10K. The project was supposed to have been launched with a community-based ICO. Everything was going fine, and we agreed to launch in about two weeks, but then the founder disappeared.

He told everyone that he worked as a consultant, but he was actually in the army!

The very week of the ICO, he was getting dispatched to somewhere in South America. He didn’t communicate this to anyone and didn’t say anything about being in active service! He goes AWOL for about a year, then comes back to apologise, claiming he has taken a 1-year break from the army to work on the project.

We decided to try to use the next 3 months to relaunch and revamp the project and get hype for the ICO. Everybody agreed, but the week after, the founder sold off 25% of his total token volume. The token itself was barely a dollar, and because of that selling, it plummeted to nearly zero.

As expected, nearly everybody started selling off their tokens, causing the price to crash further.

I was only able to sell about $900 worth of the token I invested $10k in before it was delisted. That’s less than 10%. I just took the money and blew it on partying and bad behaviour for a month.

Currently, I’m not holding any crypto. I also don't trade, and I’m staying away from crypto for now.