Crypto Printed Me $1,800 on a Sunday Morning

The Magical Internet Money Machine goes brrrrrr once more.

That’s crypto chatter for a money-printing machine running at full speed.

And that machine has, indeed, been running fast recently.

I sent you a dispatch a few days back about a digital horse-racing game that has generated more than $6,000 for me since October, and now I present to you yet another story of the crazy wealth that’s printing again in this early stage of a new bull market in crypto.

And to back up a step or three… I share these stories because I want to regularly expose you to what’s happening in crypto. It’s a space that has a ton of negativity swirling around it because of mainstream media stories written by writers who do not understand of what they write… and because, yes, high-profile scams and frauds do proliferate in this weird world of new-era finance.

Nevertheless, opportunities abound here. Like pulling the handle on a slot machine, knowing that you’re going to hit jackpot after jackpot to such an unreal and unexpected degree that you’re convinced the machine is broken.

Alas, the machine is working just fine.

It’s just that in the world of crypto, financial life is very different than we Boomers and Xers are accustomed to. It’s more about equality and equity, and it can all seem surreal. Therefore, it must be fake or scam.

Only, it’s not fake.

Although now that I write that, I have to say that “fake” is entirely the point of today’s dispatch.

We begin with a story I shared with you earlier this month, about something called “airdrops.” Basically, these are akin to an initial public offering, or IPO, on Wall Street. Just that, instead of the shares going to the fat-cats running mutual funds, or the well-connected and deep-pocketed clients of major brokerage firms, the companies dropping their tokens onto the market are dropping them into the wallets of the people who actually use their service.

How novel.

The people who helped you build your business are the ones who benefit when you go public. I see it as a more egalitarian way of launching a company… but neither here nor there.

In that original dispatch on airdrops, I mentioned an airdrop I will be a part of later this month—a crypto exchange on the Solana network called Jupiter. Right now, pre-drop Jupiter tokens are trading at about $0.80 apiece. I’m in line to hoover up 8,700 so-called JUP tokens, meaning my drop is worth roughly $7,000.

However, there’s also talk that because of what Jupiter is building—and because of the excitement around this airdrop—the token could see a price of potentially $3 fairly quickly. If so, then my 8,700 JUP tokens would be worth more than $26,100 (by the way, this is the first of four airdrops Jupiter will have; qualifying for the other three is still very much viable and, in fact, I’m currently “farming” those future airdrops through my continued interaction with Jupiter in multiple crypto wallets).

As part of the first airdrop later this month, Jupiter recently ran a test to make sure all the mechanisms are working that will allow people like me to claim their JUP tokens. That test included the creation of two fake tokens: mockJUP and mockUSDC. (The real USDC is a stablecoin that reflects a 1:1 price with the U.S. dollar).

And here’s where our story gets interesting, and where the Magical Internet Money Machine goes brrrr…

Those tokens were worth nothing.

Those of us eligible for the real JUP tokens were given a website to visit to collect mockJUP, and to collect mockUSDC, that we could then use to buy and sell mockJUP on a trading site affiliated with Jupiter.

Well, the thing about the crypto community is that they fall in love with everything—even if only for a moment.

But what a moment to exploit that love.

Through various trading early on, and the free mockJUP I collected, I built up a stack of mockJUP amounting to nearly 25,000 tokens. I did so on a hunch—a suspicion that just maybe these mockJUP tokens would mean something in terms of the three upcoming airdrops of real Jupiter. That’s the way it works in crypto… you complete a task you think is innocuous and it turns out that task actually factors into qualifying for an airdrop.

I woke up Sunday morning very happy to have accumulated my stash of mockJUP. The crypto community had fallen in love with this token. They liked the cute, little JUP character attached to the mockJUP tokens, and they liked that fact that of 955,000 wallets eligible for the real Jupiter drop, just 55,000 had interacted with the mockJUP site. The rest of the mockJUP that would have gone out to those other wallets was instead burned, meaning it was permanently destroyed.

The mockJUP that I and the others had claimed is the only mockJUP that will ever exist.

And what was designed to literally be worth nothing was, on Sunday morning, more than $3,500 in my crypto wallet.

So… I sold about half of it, collecting 19 Solana tokens, the cryptocurrency I primarily operate in. Those 19 Solana tokens were worth $1,800. Not a bad way to start a Sunday.

I’ve kept the other half. I’m really curious where it goes from here. Real JUP will outnumber mockJUP by about 10 to 1, when it was supposed to be 1:1. Will mockJUP soar alongside real JUP, when it’s released?

Honestly, I don’t know. But I don’t really care. I collected $1,800 in totally free money from an asset that was supposed to be worth $0. I can’t complain if the rest of my mockJUP collapses to nothing.

I spent much of Sunday afternoon taking that $1,800 and spreading it across various crypto websites where other airdrops are exceedingly likely, meaning that my free $1,800 is going to very likely lead to free tens of thousands of dollars across 2024.

But that’s another story of the Magical Internet Money Machine going brrrr.

P.S. For those who might be interested, I also just finished an airdrop masterclass where I explain how all of this works. Hopefully that will be released soon…