I have a confession to make: I’ve been obsessed with crypto over the past couple months.

I’ve always had a vague awareness of crypto, and even bought Bitcoin on a whim back when it was $150/coin (I should have bought more!). But then I sold it during the first Bitcoin spike of 2017, when the price hit $30,000/coin (a 20,000% ROI).

It was a nice windfall at the time, and I knew a few friends who made A LOT more, and were even able to buy houses with their Bitcoin investments.

I figured at the time that Bitcoin was just speculative hype or a scam, and my suspicions were confirmed a few months later when the price of Bitcoin came crashing down to earth.

I didn’t think much about Bitcoin again until 2020, when it started making the headlines again. I still hadn’t learned much about the technology or the thesis behind crypto, so I pretty much ignored it, even as prices climbed north of $50,000.

Then I had a conversation in 2021 with a friend that finally woke me from my dogmatic slumber.

A friend of mine told me he had invested in a few NFTs (non-fungible tokens) called Crypto Punks in late 2020, and the NFTs which he had bought for $500 a piece were now north of $30,000. Some were even worth a few MILLION dollars.

Those eye-popping numbers finally caught my attention and made me revisit crypto. Even if crypto was indeed all a hype and a scam, if it had the potential to 2,000X my money, I wanted to learn more about it!

Over the past few months I have been diving head first into the world of crypto and learning everything that I can about this strange and fascinating universe. It turns out there is more to crypto than just scammers, and there is actual technology there with real world use cases.

There are now thousands (if not tens of thousands) of developers rushing to build technologies atop the decentralized technology of crypto and billions of dollars of money flowing into new projects, currencies and dApps (decentalized apps).

All the buzz reminds me of the early 2000s, when the internet was starting to take off, and everyone was rushing into the new technology. There were tons of half-baked ideas (pets.com anyone?), hundreds of millions in capital lost, but also thousands of new millionaires minted and the birth of companies that have shaped our lives for the past two decades (Amazon, Google, PayPal).

I’m feeling that same energy now in crypto and the world of decentralized technologies. I expect we will see some incredible volatility and crashes like during the early .com days, but also tremendous opportunity as well.

My brain is now overflowing with all the new terms, tokens, and technologies involved in the defi world, so I am planning to start sharing my thoughts and learnings here on this blog. Feel free to follow me along on this journey– there is potential here for technologies which will shape the next stages of the Internet.