january3–16, 2022 | newyork 13little. I was doing really boring stuff, just
buying coins and holding them. Then,
this past August, Visa bought a Crypto-
Punk, which is a very blue-chip NFT, and
I thought, Shit, maybe I should look at
NFTs. I got lucky—I ended up minting
the rarest type of one NFT, which was
worth more than $200,000 at its peak.
I was feeling good and decided to put all
the money I had in crypto into NFTs,
which by then was about $75,000. Half
of it was mine—it was basically all
my savings after I maxed out my 401(k).
The other half was from my dad, and the
plan was to split the profits with him.
But two weeks later, halfway through
October, NFT prices dropped. And NFTs
just kind of died.
That’s when I decided to try meme coins.
A meme coin is a cryptocurrency that has
almost no value and doesn’t do anything
interesting. It’s just a coin, like shiba inu
or dogecoin. Meme coins are basically
just culture coins, and people trade them
because they like memes. For example,
there was a congressional hearing about
cryptocurrency in December, and Repres-
entative Brad Sherman said something
like, “Will mongoose coin kill crypto
coin?” Mongoose coin is not real—he
made it up. But people thought it was
funny. And like two hours later, a coin
called mongoose was launched. Because
they have no value, meme coins only
pump (meaning the price goes up) as long
as people are willing to buy them. Plenty
of people in crypto hate meme coins out
of principle: They think, This thing is
stupid; why’s it worth $500 million? But
I’m not that idealistic. I have no loyalty to
crypto. If you want quick money, you go
to meme coins, and I’m in the market to
make money.
When I was doing NFTs, I would
spend 12 to 16 hours a day camping out
on Discord to make sure I wasn’t miss-
ing anything. I wasn’t getting much sleep.
But when I started doing meme coins, it
was more chill. I followed a few meme-
coin influencers on Twitter and turned
on notifications for them. And recently,
all these influencers ended up making
their own groups on Telegram, which is
another messaging app. In the Telegram
groups, the influencer will post, “Buy this
thing,” or “Look, this other thing pumped
10x.” Telegram is easier than Twitter
because you don’t have to filter out the
random stuff. I also found some of these
influencers’ wallets, and I have alerts set
up so when they make a purchase, it noti-
fies me and I can look at it.
I have no idea who these influencers
are. That’s standard: In crypto, you
almost never want to reveal who you are.
A lot of the coin developers won’t even
reveal their Twitter handles. But these
influencers have been in meme coins
for a long time—I think all of them got
into shiba inu before it got big. They’re
really cocky, and they don’t know much
when it comes to mainstream crypto,
but it doesn’t matter: They’re good
at meme coins, and that’s why I keep
them around.
I slowly began moving most of the
money I have in crypto into meme coins.
I’d probably buy three to five coins a day,
and I’d be in and out pretty fast. Once,
I bought a coin, and two hours later the
price went up fivefold. I sold some of my
tokens and then it dropped a lot. But
the $2,000 I put in still became $5,000,
which wasn’t terrible.
At first, the meme-coin thing was a bit
of a grind. I was making some money,
but my stuff was not doing so hot. Then
in early November, some developers
launched GM coin. In crypto, there
is this thing called GM, which stands
for “good morning,” and crypto people
always say that as a greeting to one
another on Twitter. So someone took that
and made it into a coin. I bought some
GM when it was at a super-low market
cap, around $300,000. Early on, I saw
some signs that GM coin could do well:
I went to the coin’s Telegram group and
noticed pretty big influencers in it—not
just people I follow but other influencers
I recognized from the space. Then an
hour later, it soared to a $4 million
market cap; in another hour, it dipped to a
$2 million market cap, and I doubled
down and bought more. I put about
$7,500 in total into GM. When there
were only a few thousand holders of GM,
I was in the top 30, so I guess that made
me a GM whale. At one point, I owned
more GM coins than any exchange,
which is crazy.
When my GM coins hit $1 million two
days later, I was pretty euphoric. The first
thing I did was send some of my friends
money. They had wallets, so I sent them
about $1,000. One of them was a friend
I’d met on Discord—I don’t know him,
but I know his wallet address. I also
helped one of my friends pay off a loan.
She was young and didn’t know how
credit cards worked, so she had about
$10,000 in credit-card debt that was
charging 25 percent interest. So I said,
“We can do a payment plan, and you can
pay me instead of the credit-card com-
pany.” I didn’t really buy anything else.
Once, I did think, I made some money,
so I’m gonna treat myself to a smoothie.But the smoothie was $8 and not worth
it. I texted my parents and said, “Hey,
I’m actually a millionaire on paper now.”
And my mom was like, “Oh, very good,
son.” They were pretty chill about it.
One day later, my GM coins were worth
$2.5 million.
The next morning, I woke up and
saw that a big crypto influencer—a guy
known for calling out scammers—had
tweeted that the developers behind GM
coin had been shady in the past. It can
be hard to figure out if posts like that
are legit, but the tweet caused the price
to drop more than 50 percent in three
hours—people were just selling because
they were afraid. I was panicking as well.
So I sold a lot of my coins, then I sold a
little more, but I definitely missed out
on selling at the tippy-top. I didn’t play
it very well, but I learned my lesson: A
meme coin that looks unstoppable could
dump tomorrow, so you have to get in
and get out. My investment in GM coin
went from $2.5 million to $1 million, and
I ended up taking out about $500,000,
which is now in Coinbase or invested in
other cryptocurrencies. (And because
I owned so much GM, the price dropped
10 percent when I sold mine.)
At this point, I definitely play the game
differently than people who don’t have
much in crypto. I mostly spray and pray:
If I see an influencer saying, “You should
buy this coin,” and it doesn’t look like a
scam, I’ll just buy $1,000 worth. If you
buy ten meme coins and eight drop 50
percent, one goes up tenfold, and one
goes up fivefold, you’re already up a lot.
Recently, I made $2,000 in an hour on
one small coin, and two days ago I made
$30,000 in 24 hours. I think this is all
stupid and absurd. But at the same time,
I’m not going to complain—I don’t want
my life to change too much. But if I do
make it out with a lot of money, it would
be easier to justify taking a job that is not
as competitive, as opposed to feeling the
need to go for the most high-pressure,
high-paying job. I don’t really want to
work that hard.
This whole thing is definitely iso-
lating. I spent September doing nothing
for school, and October was rough too,
though I’m doing okay with grades now.
I’ll see friends sometimes, but I’m not
always looking to hang out because I did
that once and missed out on something
huge. But I’m not planning on doing this
for that much longer. I want to slowly
get out of the market before everything
crashes again. I’d like to get back to nor-
mal life. But give me a second—I’m gonna
go ape into something right now. ■