I lost $30,000 in NFTs: Thanks Mom

Looking for entertainment? Dive into the rollercoaster ride of my NFT career.

The story begins at the height of the pandemic when I spent my days buying and selling sports cards. Each night, I would tune into Clubhouse chat rooms. Remember that app? Well, one topic that often came up was NBA Top Shots, a next-generation concept for the collectibles market. For those unfamiliar, it's a marketplace where you buy, sell, and trade video clips in the form of an NFT.

Not knowing what an NFT was sent me down a rabbit hole. I did my "due diligence" and fully-heartedly believed I would be a participant in pioneering the next great disruption of capital markets. Like many, I fell victim to the delusional optimism and the new way of life these "assets" promised. I commonly heard phrases like, "Everything is going to be an NFT, bro," and "Picasso drew the Mona Lisa, but Dapper Labs created the CryptoKitty. Don't be a sheep. Escape the game THEY want you to play."

Signs to exit were coming from all angles, and I ignored them all. Friends who had never invested a dime in their life were buying sh*tcoins as if their lives depended on it. I would throw $500 worth of ETH into a project I saw on Reddit and, one week later, sell it for $2,500. I thought I was in the fast lane to riches, having cracked the code and broken free from the rat race. You name it—I owned every conceivable digital animal under the sun, participating in Discord groups that operated like cults, at the forefront of the inevitable financial revolution.

Oh, the vanity I deeply chased.

Rationale, logic, analysis? No, no, no. You mean utility? I became the epitome of that "crypto douche" everyone with sense despised. And rightly so, I deserved to lose it all. And lose it all, I did.

As I finally moved out of my parents' house, I left behind my sacred 15-word passkey—the one you can't retrieve and the one only you have access to. When my mom went through my desk, she considered it junk and tossed it out.

Decentralized assets sound good until you can’t access them. Buried in a landfill lies the password to a diversified portfolio of aliens, cracked-out animals, a Nelk Boys meta card, and even a piece of land in the metaverse!