The past weeks have been a rollercoaster introduction to crypto for me, in which I finally saw blockchain and cryptocurrency as a whole, as more than ‘currency’.

Key learnings so far:

• It’s hard HODLing

  I’ve tried to engage with as many protocols as possible, most of which are built on top of Ethereum. This has led me to continuously shovel money towards ETH and burning it on gas fees without making significant gains. HODLing means not engaging w/ DeFi, at least not on ETH

• NFTs

  NFTs aren’t about generative art, they’re about membership and roadmaps. I’ve minted a couple of NFTs - @chikn_nft / @apa_nft / @bushidosnft - that are very interesting from a tokenomics perspective.

APA rewards early minters by issuing mint rewards, essentially redistributing part of the mint fees back to the holders. This incentivizes minting early, as it’s now a cost-recovery strategy.

Chikn on the other hand sees their NFTs as the start of an ecosystem consisting of $egg and $feed tokens, which can be used to change metadata associated with NFTs or to generate new chikn (what came first, chikn or $egg)

Bushidos - a Samurai inspired NFT project - has been struggling with floor prices in conjunction with high ETH gas fees (the other two projects are on AVAX). They decided supply should be reduced, and are introducing a way for Bushidos to mint Katanas, or swords. Any person holding both Bushidos and Katanas can choose to commit Seppuku, thereby reducing the Bushidos supply and driving up the price. Their reward is… a new type of membership, a new and different class which might receive other perks in the future.