I have been hearing about crypto in one way or another for more than ten years. Back in 2009, eating pizza at a corner shop somewhere in downtown Singapore, a friend mentioned this new digital money called Bitcoin. He said he had bought a few although at the time it was very difficult for a layperson to do so (Mt Gox, anyone?). Some time later I remember BTC going to about US$200 and thinking it was crazy to think that this funny internet money could be worth that much… surely this obscure mode of payment that almost nobody had heard about was not going to go anywhere. Surely the banks, Visa, SWIFT, anyone in the traditional financial system would either copy it, make a better version, or more likely find a way to suppress this. And besides, US$200 just seemed to me like a lot of money at the time for something intangible. I’d rather order a couple of bottles at the club with that kind of money, at least the next day hangover would certainly not be intangible.

Years later I came across crypto again. BTC was around US$1k but it was still incredibly difficult to buy. The lack of an easy way to buy made me think this asset had less liquidity than, say, real estate, and so I focused on that instead.

About 3-4 years ago, blockchain use cases across a broad spectrum of industries started to crop up. There was finance, carbon credits, NGOs, industrial, all kind of use cases. I thought things looked bright, but a lot of these use cases also depended either on other technologies (e.g. IoT, RFID), or on adoption by large corporates or government bodies.

It was not until late 2020, completely burned out by a management consulting job, that I decided to take a long break from work and dive deep into crypto, and specifically DeFi. I had heard some really weird terms. Staking? Airdrop? Yield Farming? Liquidity Mining? DAO? It was like a completely different language that only few understood.

It’s been about 10 months on my journey into crypto. I still feel very new to the space, like there’s so much that has happened in the last few years that I need to get up to speed on, not to mention all the innovation and new stuff cropping up daily that all of us try to keep up with.

Like someone on CT said: Crypto is the one place in which those who are supposed to keep up with everything feel constantly behind.

More to come…