Take A Step Back

A different approach

Taking anything too seriously can be bad for stress and your day-to-day activities. I noticed I would check the markets while I was with friends or at the gym. Waking up and immediately checking my phone to see if there was any new news I missed while sleeping. Crypto is a 24/7 market, and for some that is a stressful and time consuming thing. Taking a step back and looking at everything going on, I realized there was nothing to do but laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. There is a way to be involved in crypto and actually enjoy it. There’s nothing wrong with watching the market for trades or investment opportunities. Sometimes though, the best course of action is to sit back and laugh at everything.

The last year has been full of surprises

CryptoPunks NFTs, which have been around since 2017, began skyrocketing in price in early 2021. As of January 26, the value of all sales is $1.96 billion. Since there is a finite amount, only 10,000 in existence, there is a certain amount of status that is attributed to owning one. All that being said, sometimes its okay to sit back and laugh about how some goofy pixelated headshots are making people millionaires. In March 2021, Beeple’s work, “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” sold for a whopping $69 million as an NFT. This blew the door wide open for the market, showing individuals could make serious money off NFTs.

My personal favorite of the NFT projects is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). Whether it be on Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media platform, you’ve surely stumbled across someone with a strange, humanoid looking animal as their profile picture. The BAYC was the start of this NFT market trend. There are 10,000 BAYC NFTs in existence, and more can never be minted. Each one depicts a different ape with different features. Thousands of inspired NFT projects have been made since BAYC with lions, elephants, tigers, and more as the base animal for the project. The floor price for a BAYC right now is 92.5 ETH, which at an Ethereum price of $2500 a coin is well over $250,000.

Recently on The Tonight Show, Paris Hilton showed off her newest NFT purchase, Bored Ape #1294. She shows Jimmy Fallon a framed picture of the ape, which he then shows off to the audience. Imagine watching this with no prior knowledge of NFTs, you’d think you got transported into some strange alternate reality. It really is impressive and amazing how some people have managed to build an entire life around simply owning one of these NFTs, but at the same time it seems like a weird Black Mirror episode.

There is so much to laugh at in the crypto space: Elon Musk’s constant Twitter storm, dog tokens making people unholy amounts of money, Facebook changing its name to Meta, and Mark Zuckerberg making this video. Not to mention RadioShack completely rebranding as a crypto company. These are all unexpected, or just plain weird, phenomena that occur because of cryptocurrency. So many people do take these things extremely seriously, so if you’re able to look at it with humor and clarity in your perspective, it should give you a distinct advantage.