$36,000 Landed in My Wallet Last Week

The Power of Crypto.

There was a meme running around for a while—probably still out there somewhere—in which a poorly drawn cartoon wizard on a Reddit post refers to bitcoin as “magic internet money.”

This guy:

Well, the Magic Internet Money Wizard has cast another spell.

For several years now, I’ve been writing about Portals, a non-fungible token, or NFT, that minted back in late-2021. When it first launched, a Portals NFT awarded access to a digital apartment that the owner could design in any style using plug-n-play technology.

From that beginning, Portals has morphed over the years into a game-design engine in which anyone with zero skills in game design can design a game with even better plug-n-play technology, and then monetize that game through the Portals website.

I minted Portals back in the day. I minted five, including one of the rarest in the collection, for a grand total of 7.5 Solana, or about $1,500 at the time.

Today, those NFTs combined are worth about 90 Solana, or roughly $21,000 at current prices.

But the real story is Tuesday, September 16…

After years of building out the project (and partnering with some of the biggest names in the real world, including Apple and Greylock Partners, the venture capital firm behind Uber, Airbnb, Coinbase, Facebook, and so many others) Portals finally launched its long-awaited token—its own cryptocurrency.

The tokens will be used inside the Portals universe for various objectives, and those who owned the NFTs where the big winners in this token launch.

Like I said, I’ve owned my Portals NFTs since the day they were minted. Never sold a one. Staked them all (meaning I basically put them on deposit at the Portals website). And I went about my life, never really concerned about what was to come. I’ve talked to the Portals teams many times over the years for stories and a podcast, and I knew they were building something special.

The token would take care of itself when the time came.

And the time came…

My haul amounted to more than 146,200 Portals tokens.

This is what they were worth when I opened my wallet on the morning of Tuesday the 16th:

$36,200… out of the air.

I didn’t do anything for this money other than own the NFTs for the last several years.

As part of that airdrop of tokens, I have another 119,000 tokens coming to me over the next year in 12 equal installments. So in reality, the Portals token drop was the equivalent of more than $72,000.

Again I will point out that this is free money.

Magic Internet Money.

I share all of this because this is how the crypto world works, and a lot of us boomers and Gen Xers don’t really understand how any of this is possible.

How the hell does a digital art token that looks like this…

…drop boatloads of free money into digital wallets?

Because as I regularly point out, crypto projects are real businesses.

Portals is a great example.

Maybe you’ve heard of Roblox. Maybe you have a child or grandchild who has a Roblox account online. It’s basically a Web2 game-design engine with millions of builders building games, and millions of gamers gaming.

Well, Roblox is a publicly traded company with a market cap of nearly $100 billion.

Portals is the Roblox of Web3—the Roblox of the blockchain. So advanced is its technology that Roblox builders are migrating to Portals in order to build on the blockchain because they know that’s where the future of gaming is going.

Apple, meanwhile, has asked to white-label the Portals product so that Apple game designers can build natively on the blockchain for upcoming Apple games, including Apple VR games.

So owning Portals NFTs—and now the tokens—is the modern equivalent of owning shares on Wall Street.

In some ways it’s different. You have to own a digital wallet, you have to pay attention to rules like staking, or you have to participate in the ecosystem somehow, and NFTs and tokens do not represent ownership in a company like shares of stock do. But own the crypto and the NFTs and you participate in the business in various ways.

And those various ways can represent far greater wealth-creation opportunities than buying a stock.

I spent $1,500-ish four years ago, and that has created wealth that is approaching $100,000.

In four years.

Hard to find 67x gains like that in such a short timeframe with any asset other than crypto.

So, here at the end I’ll underscore the real point of today’s dispatch: Learn crypto!

If you don’t, you’re missing out on these huge wealth-creation opportunities. And you will be playing catch-up when everything in our daily world ends up on the blockchain.

The Magic Internet Money Wizard is waiting for you…