Why My Impatience Cost Me $3,502.34

What’s the cost of impatience? I know that answer: $3,502.34. 

That, or thereabouts, is what my impatience cost me. 

To be fair, I really had no idea that another $3,500 was in the offing. Still, that’s no consolation… 

But before we address that, let me recap a fact that I know you already know: Crypto had a year in 2022 that ranged between horrible and atrocious.  

As the Federal Reserve aggressively raised interest rates, crypto prices aggressively raced lower. Bitcoin at its weakest point last year was down nearly 70%. Ethereum, bitcoin’s younger sibling and the world’s #2 crypto, was down about the same.  

Solana, one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies on the planet, was off even more. A staggering decline that created an environment that felt like a frigid winter numbness to those of us engaged in the ecosystem every day. 

That’s the crypto at the center of today’s dispatch—Solana.  

What’s been happening in the last few weeks in the Solana space tells me a spring thaw is underway in the cryptosphere write large…a thaw could very well echo across other financial markets, including stocks, bonds, and gold. 

This story begins in early January, when I logged into my crypto wallet one morning and saw a bizarre new token staring back at me: Bonk. 

“Clearly a scam,” I thought.  

I regularly find funky tokens have landed in my wallet because someone is trying to run some kind of shady scheme designed at gaining control of my wallet or tricking me into clicking on a bogus link that aims to drain my NFTs out of my wallet. So, I generally remove these mystery tokens from my wallet through a process called “burning.”  

But Bonk was different. 

I hopped on Twitter and saw a huge amount of buzz about it. Seemed like everyone was talking about Bonk. It turns out various blue-chip and secondary NFT projects had actually partnered with Bonk to airdrop the tokens for free into the wallets of people who held NFTs from certain collections. 

In my wallet, I had 906 million Bonk tokens.  

Better yet, instead of a blank line to the right of the currency name, denoting zero value, my Bonk showed it was worth more than $500. 

Now, I have been around the crypto block many, many times. I know how quickly hype can fade, taking with it the value of some cryptocurrency or NFT. So, being prudent instead of patient, I quickly dumped my Bonk. Based on the rapid price fluctuations that were happening at that moment, I locked in $475. 

Not bad at all…a free $475 on a random Monday. 

I texted my son back in the U.S. He’d found 1.2 billion Bonk in his wallet much earlier than me (while I was asleep in Prague) and had sold all of it for just $50. I was gloating internally at having pocketed almost 10x his haul. 

And then impatience knocked… 

Had I waited 72 measly hours, that $475 would have been worth $3,977.34 at Bonk’s peak (my son missed out on more than $5,200 in additional gains).  

True, there’s a slim chance that either of us would have caught the peak price. But that’s neither here nor there, really.  

The point is that Bonk even happened at all…that crypto/NFT investors all over the world woke up to hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of dollars in absolute free money from the Bonk airdrop. 

Bonk, a goofily named token that to this point has no real purpose (though it’s working on one), has helped revive—or at the very least highlighted—the animal spirits that seem to be bubbling up again in the Solana ecosystem. People are excited again. The frozen tundra of crypto appears to be warming.  

I don’t say any of that as a way of urging you to go buy Solana…or Bonk. I say it because it is indicative of what I sense is a shifting landscape after a challenging year—a changing vibe in the crypto corner of Twitter and among the crypto project teams I talk to regularly. 

While crypto has struggled under the weight of Federal Reserve policy and the FTX crypto-exchange fraud that exploded onto the scene in November, it’s now moving into a market where tailwinds are beginning to swirl.  

The FTX scandal is old news and people have moved on. More importantly, the currency markets are saying that the Fed is basically done—that the U.S. economy cannot absorb much higher interest rates and that the Fed is very soon to stop with its rate hikes. 

When the Fed officially announces that day has come, the bell will have rung on a new bull market in bonds and risk-on assets including stocks and crypto. 

Bonk might just be a sign of that. And so might BONKz…but that’s a story for tomorrow.