Is It 2021 for Crypto All Over Again?

It kinda feels like we’re going back to the future.

In November of 2021, I was busy minting non-fungible tokens amid the craze at that time for the digital-art crypto projects more commonly called NFTs.

Getting into a high-demand NFT mint was like scoring tickets to the Super Bowl on the 50-yard-line… at face-value. Damn near impossible without connections. And even if you managed to horn in on the mint event, you might not be fast enough to mint an NFT because demand was off the charts.

One mint that November sold out in 11 seconds.

I spammed the ever-living hell out of the mint site with as many buy orders as I could… and somehow, I managed to snag five NFTs, including one of the rare ones that today is worth about $32,000.

I paid about $350 for it.

Those days fell by the wayside during “crypto winter” in 2022–2023. NFTs and cryptocurrencies in general were suddenly asset-non-grata.

Even now, amid the crypto bull market that has been rampaging for the last two years or so, you don’t often find that same kind of vibe that defined 2021.

Until now…

That same NFT project I bought in November of four years ago recently announced it will launch a new token tied to the project. This has been a long time coming. Much anticipation has built up around this token event, and prior to the token launch that will happen later this month or in early September, the team put together a whitelist pre-sale for long-time NFT owners.

The pre-sale priced the tokens at just $0.09 each, which valued the project at just $90 million. Based on the revenue the company is already earning, the growth it’s seeing (quadrupling revenue year-over-year for the last three years), and given its business model, this project should easily reach a valuation of between $500 million to $1 billion dollars… maybe more, given that its older (non-crypto) competitors are worth multiple billions.

So… I wanted in.

The team put me on the whitelist.

The nanosecond the mint went live, I tried to buy $15,000 worth of the token—the max investment for anyone.

And I got zero!

Nada.

Zip.

Zilch.

Turns out that we very much are back in 2021, because just like the NFT, the pre-sale tokens sold out in just 11 seconds. And only 73 buyers around the world were able to get in. (Luckily my son was one of those 73 and let me buy $2,500 worth of tokens from him at the 9-cent valuation.)

But why do I share this? Beyond serving as an anecdote showing that animal spirits aren’t just alive, they’re a lot like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh: They’re bouncey, trouncey, ouncey, pouncey, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun (The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers song will be in your head all day now—sorry)…

I share because it speaks to the ways that crypto is maturing.

Outside of meme coins and some other similar craziness, crypto investors today are keen on buying coins and tokens that have a real purpose.

I’ve mentioned here and in my Frontier Fortunes newsletter a project I call the Fidelity or Charles Schwab of the blockchain. It’s one of the leading exchanges for buying cryptocurrencies, and a platform for a variety of decentralized finance opportunities ranging from the simple (buying crypto based on automatically dollar-cost averaging into a position) to much more complex opportunities (crypto strategies that are like stock-options strategies). It’s not like Coinbase—a so-called centralized exchange; those are big and general, and, as the name implies, centrally controlled. Decentralized exchanges like the one I’m talking about are where the “good stuff” is in crypto—the rarer tokens that could skyrocket; as well as all kinds of crypto income opportunities. They are called “decentralized exchanges” because control is spread out among users, not centrally maintained.

Some days, this decentralized exchange is doing well over a billion in volume. Analysts who track the DeFi (decentralized finance) space estimate it’s generating about $240 million a year in revenue. At that level, it would qualify for inclusion on the S&P 600 list of small-cap companies!

But this isn’t a real-world brick-and-mortar business.

This is crypto.

And so much of the mainstream press claims crypto is a scam, a scheme, a flimflam. No redeeming value beyond a bunch of gunslingers slinging guns and ripping off everyone through some Ponzi-du-jour.

I don’t know—$240 million in annual revenue seems like redeeming value.

Hyperliquid, Solana, Ethena, Raydium, PhotoFinish.live, PancakeSwap, MakerDAO, Chainlink, Pump.fun… and so many other crypto projects are all earning millions of dollars in revenue from blockchain-based business models.

And yet the mainstream press just looks right past all of that because crypto isn’t Wall Street—it isn’t respectable the way stocks like Enron and Worldcom and Washington Mutual and Pets.com are (were).

However, that respect will come soon enough as more and more mainstream investors join the party. Just recently, PNC Bank, a super-regional bank in Pittsburgh, partnered with Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, to offer retail mom-and-pop savers an easy solution for buying and owning crypto through a bank account.

That’s the mainstreaming of crypto in action.

Sectors like decentralized finance and crypto gaming are taking off. PhotoFinish.live, a digital horse-racing game I’ve previously written about, is soon to launch off-track betting in bars, sports bars, sports books, and elsewhere. Anyone can bet and win real dollars on verifiably fair and transparent digital horse races without having to outwardly deal with cryptocurrencies.

That, too, is the mainstreaming of crypto.

The project that I failed to buy into recently is already hugely profitable as a game-design engine that allows anyone to build and monetize video games, even if they have exactly zero coding knowledge. It’s all plug-n-play.

That’s the mainstreaming of crypto too, as ordinary people seek new ways to generate a non-traditional income.

Millions of dollars in revenue are flowing through all manner of crypto companies these days.

You’re still not too late to join this wealth-generating moment… but at some point in the not-too-distant future, you’re going to wish it was 2025 all over again because you’ll realize you missed this opportunity to bank a small fortune.