⚓️ tis the season
gm.
before I get into it today, I urge you to vote Cool Cats for the Macy’s Day Parade.
it’s been a long year for us Cool Cats, so it would be nice if you would throw us a bone here in the spirit of the holidays.
the winner will get a float in the Macy’s famous Thanksgiving Day Parade.
…and the competition has been stiff with Sup Ducks leading most of the way. at one point, Gmoney was leading (and I’m still wondering WTF that balloon would even look like).
regardless, I think that the Blue Cat would make the *perfect* float for the parade. vote and you could even win a Cool Cat. do it.
it’s the season of giving. so let us not be stingy in this time of need. there are lots of people this holiday season that could use your help.
yes…the NFT community needs your exit liquidity.
me? I have been exit liquidity more than I would like to admit, but for each influencer that you funnel more money to, there is *someone* worthy…someone who just needs to catch a break.
and you can be that exit liquidity. please consider donating your ETH to a degen in need…
I harken back to my first big sale: an AlphaBetty for 5.2 ETH.
don’t remember AlphaBettys? respectfully, no one does.
it was a project that minted in August of 2021 when the euphoria for NFTs was high (to say the least). it was the days that if Gary Vee merely sniffed around your project, people started sweeping floors with prejudice.
which is exactly what happened here.
there was a message behind AlphaBettys, in their defense, that made it seem different and got people like Gary Vee’s attention. the project proclaimed they were going to donate some earnings to helping children learn to read.
I had just had a daughter and decided that it wouldn’t be a complete waste of ETH to mint a few. of the 3 I minted, 1 happened to be special.
for those blissfully unaware (or unlucky), in standard generative NFT collections, there are often a few 1/1s that are completely unique; they don’t share traits with *anything* else in the collection.
with AlphaBetty each of the 24 1/1s represented a letter in the alphabet. I pulled the L (which turned out to be a big W).
0xfunction was the buyer. he initially made me an offer of 6 ETH, but I was too slow to accept it. I messaged him asking if he was still interested and boom. we had a deal.
to this day, it remains the third-highest AlphaBetty sale ever.
(right behind my sale is a purchase by Gary Vee himself for 5 ETH)
currently, the state of AlphaBetty is grim. they sit just above a 0 price floor. you can say I sold the top because I did. of their almost 1500 ETH in sales, almost 75% of that came within the first month.
I was unbelievably lucky with how all of it played out. so this is a happy ending, no? it surely would had I stuck to my guns. unfortunately, I did not.
early on, I wanted to save it and stake it on Lido. I was hoping it would maybe become a college fund for my daughter. however, my impatience grew as I watched those around me do a lot with far less than 5 ETH.
I pulled my profits out and threw them back into the market at exactly the wrong time too. currently, that 5 ETH probably looks more like 2 ETH (to be generous).
all things considered, that’s not the worst loss in the world. I’ve also seen those around me do *a lot* worse.
but so it goes. that 5 ETH was essentially *reinvested* back into the NFT ecosystem. see? you too could be lucky and *still* be exit liquidity at the same time.
is there a moral to this? of course not. I rarely have *good* advice in this newsletter.
but if there’s a silver lining it’s that this sale got the hooks in *deep*. it showed me that rolling the dice could pay off and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since.
at the time, that money was life-changing…not just because it was like winning a lottery scratcher, but because it radically shifted the way I looked at NFTs, investments, greed, and my life.
it was sad that I thought $20K could change everything for me. it was sad that I felt the greed and tried to turn into something bigger and ended up losing it all. it was sad that 0xfunction was my exit liquidity.
but it ultimately drove me toward a passion I didn’t know I had.
have I ever minted another 1/1? of course not again. the odds of that are crazy and even if I did, it would probably be from a collection that didn’t find any traction.
but I’ll be damned if I stop trying at this point (I realize this may read like a deranged person talking about addiction).
in order to find success…you need a little bit of luck, but you also need to learn from past failures. I got a *big* ol’ lesson with my AlphaBetty mint.
so next time that you are exit liquidity…just think of all that tough life advice you’re instilling into you and the person you gave that ETH.
happy holidays.