How I Turned $2,200 Into $64,000

Today, a life lesson…

It comes to us by way of a Netflix series I binged over the weekend, One Day, a 14-episode British drama. I won’t reveal the plot because it’s rather pointless to today’s dispatch. I will only say that (mild spoiler alert!) the final two episodes are truly sad.

And it’s from those final episodes that this dispatch sprang.

Oddly, today’s topic is crypto—just from a perspective that is different than my recent musings on the crypto market.

See, there’s a crypto project I’ve been writing about here in Field Notes since at least the summer of 2022. If you’re a very long-time reader, you might remember the name Portals. It began in late 2021 as an NFT project focused on building out a very cool and futuristic metaverse.

I participated in the original Portals mint—the first time the NFTs were issued to the public. I minted five at about $300 apiece. Somewhere along the way, I ended up buying a sixth Portals for about $770.

Today, those six Portals NFTs, and a second, less-valuable collection Portals distributed to owners for free, are worth a combined $64,000. I’m gonna say that’s a nice return in less than three years. Roughly $2,200 became $64,000. Who can complain?

But the value of Portals today really isn’t the point, actually.

The point is that through the years, through a bull market that turned to bear that turned to bull, as uncountable numbers of projects rose up, lived, and failed, the team behind Portals continued to quietly build.

Portals is no longer about a metaverse, per se. It has morphed into a plug-n-play gaming engine, in which anyone at any level of coding ability—super-nerd to “what’s coding?”—can use Portals to build a game that they can then monetize through the Portals website. And lots of people are.

The project has more than 100,000 users in the Web2 world, even though it’s a Web3 business through and through. (Web2 is the internet most of us currently know—Amazon and Google. Web3 is the crypto web.) Professional gaming developers are building games right now on Portals for Apple Vision Pro, the augmented reality glasses.

In short, Portals has become a Web3 game engine, no different really than Epic Games, the North Carolina gaming studio behind titles such as the global blockbuster Fortnite.

More important, Portals is set to soon launch a crypto token that will have utility within the Portals universe. Those tokens will largely go to folks like me who own Portals NFTs and have had them staked (deposited) at the Portals site for some months now.

Which brings me to my real point: Living through the ebbs and flows of crypto.

It’s fairly easy to calculate a potential value for Portals tokens. The quantity of tokens is known. So, one can apply an overall market cap to the project (the value of all the tokens combined) and then back into what each token would be worth at various market cap levels.

Several Portals owners on Twitter/X have begun doing that in anticipation of the so-called “token generating event,” which you can think of as an initial public offering, or the first time the Portals tokens are tradable.

Because of all the Portals I own, I have accumulated about 4 million points so far, a number that will likely be closer to 5 million when the token launches (potentially next month).

If Portals’ market cap reaches a relatively small $100 million (barely in the top 600 crypto coins), 5 million points would equate to tokens worth about $50,000. At a $1 billion market cap, quite plausible for a project of this caliber, my tokens would be valued in the half-a-million-dollar range. And at $5 billion (a top 40 crypto coin; again, plausible after some time), I’d be sitting on about $2.5 million.

Which is why this dispatch is about living through those crypto ebbs and flows.

At its core, that Netflix show One Day is about surviving life’s high and lows. Persevering. Pushing through when all you really want to do is capitulate.

I’ve been there, done that, and I want nothing to do with the T-shirt to remind me.

Life can take you to the top of the mountain and the world looks incredible. And just as quickly, life can plunge you into an abyss and all you see around you is impenetrable darkness.

It’s the same in crypto.

The exuberance of 2021 collapsed into a ball of self-loathing for so many NFT and crypto owners who were still holding their bags when Crypto Winter blew through starting in late 2022. Many who were new to the sector capitulated. They sold out for whatever price they could get, turned paper losses into realized losses, licked their wounds, and moved on with life, vowing to never again wade into the swirling vicissitudes of crypto lunacy.

Others of us never flinched.

We knew crypto was defined by wild and unnerving swings.

The paper losses certainly sucked. At one point, the combined value of all my Portals was about $2,500—barely above my original cost.

Today, they’re back above $64,000 and I’m sitting on all those points that could be worth tens, hundreds, potentially even millions of dollars more.

All because I sat on my hands.

I moved with ebbs and flows.

Persevered through the darkest days, convinced a brighter tomorrow was coming for crypto. And it did.

I share all of this because I know many Field Notes readers are also crypto owners, while others are just now beginning to build a portfolio as this current crypto bull market continues to roar.

As I’ve noted in numerous past dispatches, 2025 could be an explosive year for crypto because of numerous tailwinds that are blowing, particularly thanks to the incoming pro-crypto Trump administration.

But it’s also potentially a volatile year because of some of Trump’s other policies… (For example: Crypto, like the rest of the market, could react badly if renewed inflation—brought about by tariffs—leads the Fed to raise rates again.)

Thus, crypto prices could very well soar, then plunge and reset for another soar.

You have to accept that. You have to know it’s likely.

And like the main character in One Day, you have to persevere through the pain if that moment comes to pass. You can’t capitulate because you’re scared of losing more money. (Also, never invest more than you can afford to lose. Ever!)

I say it all the time, but crypto and the blockchain really are the future. That’s pretty much written in stone at this point. But the future is never smooth sailing.

It’s gut-wrenching at times.

But you ride the waves, survive the dives, and hold on for the brighter tomorrow. Because in crypto, every down day is just a reminder that a brighter day is just around the bend.