About a year ago, I lost almost $100K overnight.
Like most beginners during the 2021 crypto craze, I made many mistakes. But this one was my most expensive one, by far.
Here's the wild story of how my greed led to my greatest loss.
In April 2021, I landed in San Francisco for the first time in my life.
With a re-entry permit for the U.S. that was set to expire in a couple of weeks, I had made a choice to quit my job in France, break up with my girlfriend, and say goodbye to my friends to come to live in the heart of tech, where all my dreams would (eventually) become a reality.
I booked my flight, hopped on a plane, and landed in SFO a Friday afternoon on April 2nd, with a loosely held plan, direction, a room I had barely seen through a pixelized FaceTime 3 weeks prior, and the firm intention to make the most out of this experience.
I was 23 years old and had in my bank account the result of summers working in jobs that seemed to compete to be the one who'd pay the least their employees and some extra dollars that I had miraculously saved from my $500/month internship salary, for a grand total of $9,300.
This slim amount was just enough to give me a shot at my dream of living in the U.S. and keeping my green card. The clockwork started, and I had three months to survive to find a job.
Around August 2021, immersing myself in crypto and talking with builders in the space seven days a week, I managed to get a decent amount of tokens that were steadily increasing in value.
Through all my investments, I had made a couple of hundred dollars. Just enough for me to keep investing the few dollars I had into new coins and, soon, into NFTs.
By the end of August, I dipped my toes in by purchasing my first NFT: a pixelized Astrocryptid. It wasn't that I specifically liked the art, but they were cheap enough for me to experiment with the whole process of buying them.
Sure enough, their price dropped quickly after I bought them.
A few weeks after this first experience, though, I started seeing friends of mine talking on Twitter about a new NFT collection that had just dropped: Loot (for Adventurers).
These NFTs, created by the founder of Vine, were a collection of text-based NFTs representing white words on a black background. Most of all, the art was free; you just had to pay for the gas fees. I decided to purchase one.
Total of the operation: $300 spent in fees and a JPEG of some text in my wallet.
~whAt a DeaL~
And that was that. To be honest, I don’t know what I was really expecting from this, except maybe being able to say I was an NFT collector to the creators I was talking to and getting the right to join a soon-to-exist community. I continued my day and didn’t pay much attention to this for the next two days.
Until I started seeing my Twitter feed full of people talking about the project.
Suddenly, and only three days after my initial purchase, it seemed like the collection was on its way to becoming THE next big thing in the NFT space. In days, journalists started to cover the rise of the collection, and new projects started to pop up here and there to fuel the growing universe of the Loot ecosystem.
Someone had even created a social token (Adventure Gold or $AGLD for short) associated with the NFT, sending it directly to the wallet of everyone owning a Loot. Not sure of what I would find there, I checked my wallet and found I had indeed received a transaction.
Almost overnight, I had made $4,000 just by buying a JPEG online. Trust me*;* it was eu-phor-ic. From $300 to $4,000 in 3 days, that was it - I was a real crypto investor.
I started, slowly but surely, checking a bit more often my crypto wallet and Opensea to see the price at which people were now buying the NFT in the secondary market, slowly becoming addicted to the dopamine of seeing my net worth increasing every day.
From there, things really started to go crazy.
A short week and a half after purchasing my Loot (for Adventurers) for $300, and only a few days after it hit $4,000, the bundle was now worth over $100K. Everyone, including mainstream media, talked about Loot (for Adventurers).
The average sale price for a Loot NFT had soared to over 21 ETH, or about $84,000 at the time, and the original 10,000 AGLD I had received had skyrocketed to $28,000.
Suddenly, the stakes were much higher. From checking my wallet a couple of times a day, I then kept refreshing my account every minute like an adrenaline junky to see if I had become even richer than the seconds before or if it all had just crashed…
Because here’s the thing:
Technically, I HAD those $28K and the NFT in my wallet. But until I had withdrawn the AGLD tokens and sold the NFT, the price could still drop to zero. It was a battle that started in my mind, between selling right away when the value was increasing minute after minute and missing the opportunity to make bank, or waiting, taking the risk of losing it all.
It was my second NFT ever. I had no experience in investing. I decided to keep playing.
On Tuesday night, as I refreshed the amount in my wallet one last time before trying to go to sleep, my brain kept running, and I started to envision all the things I could do with the money if I could sell it at the right time.
As best I could, I turned off my phone and closed my eyes. The night was (obviously) short, and at 5:30 AM, I was fully awake. I quickly grabbed the phone on my nightstand, turned it on, opened my crypto wallet, and checked the amount displayed at the top of my screen:
The 10,000 AGLD I had were now worth over $70,000.
As you can imagine, my head was spinning.
"OMFGGG!!! I did it, I didn't sell too early, and I'm now fuc*ing rich. Let's goooo!” But here I was again. Is NOW the right time to sell?
See, getting those $70,000 and an NFT worth at least as much was way above my wildest expectation, and the wise part of myself screamed at me I should sell everything, take the money, and go enjoy life. But as I checked the price of the past hours and saw it constantly increasing, I couldn't help but think: Why on earth would it stop here?
And this is how barely awake, I decided to play the money game a little longer.
And for the first few hours of the day, everything went well. I started my day as every other day, first checking my emails and Twitter, then going from call to call, eventually checking the price of the tokens between each call and seeing the price slowly fluctuating.
Around 9:30 AM, a client asked me to work on a project in a short timeline, and I got completely absorbed by my work. When I finally got my head above water, it was already 1:00 PM. I checked my wallet again.
The AGLD tokens had completely plummeted, now getting back to $40,000.
In less than 6 hours, I had just lost $30,000. Damn... that hurts.
Now, I know what you might think. Reading this, you're quietly thinking you would have done differently, that you would have sold at $70K when it was still time, and that only a stupid motherfu**er would even think about holding for a little longer.
Deep down, I’m sure many of you would have done the exact same thing.
Because when there's that much money at stake, you don't make rational decisions anymore.
You're seeing the numbers go up and truly think you can always "win a little bit more." You're seeing the hype getting stronger than ever, and you're one of the few who have the chance to be part of a movement that the world is watching with envy. So why on earth would you sell while it's going up?
In retrospect, the answer is easy: because, inevitably, it'll go down.
Sick to my stomach, I decided to grab my bike and go for a ride. The thoughts in my head were running as fast as I went down the hills of San Francisco under the adrenaline of someone who just lost $30,000.
I tried to imagine all the scenarios in my head: Is it going to pump again? If I'm being honest with myself, is there a reason for this spike in the first place? Can I really risk it all in my situation?
I stopped in front of the ocean near the Palace of Fine Art, and after a 30-minute ride weighing the pros and cons, I decided it was time for me to stop playing the game. It was more that I could handle.
I was done with it all. I sold all the AGLD Tokens at a discount — never mind the $70,000.
Over the next 48 hours, seeing the trend slowly fading, I also decided to put the NFT on sale, hoping to get an email announcing that a transaction had occurred and that the money would soon be transferred to my account.
One day, two days.. one month.. 3 months… After months of waiting for a notification, I had to face the reality: no one would buy it. And just like this, I accepted my faith. Of the over $100,000 I was hoping to win between the NFT and AGLD tokens, most of it was lost due to my greed.
A $100,000 Life-Lesson
Looking back at it, I now clearly see the impact these few months of investing in crypto (specifically, my experience with the Loot NFTs) had on my life.
Coming with less than $10,000 in the U.S. and earning money in crypto after only a few months, I was already living the American dream. I could have withdrawn everything as soon as I won $20,000 or $30,000 and enjoyed life for a while. But I wasn’t satisfied. I always wanted “a little bit more” and decided to continue playing the money game.
The thing is, the game never really stops. Each time you reach a new milestone, it becomes your new standard, and you start dreaming of new heights. As soon as you get the adrenaline of finally getting what you’ve desired for so long, this satisfaction vanishes.
Trying to win the money game is a never-ending quest. And as the stakes grow, you increasingly sacrifice more and more aspects of your life in the pursuit of a single goal… one that might not be as worthy as you think.
For a long time, I optimized my life to win the money game. All my life choices were optimized to be rich ASAP. Staying in France or coming to San Francisco? Easy choice. Embracing the comfort of a big company or risking it all for the potentially unlimited upsides of a small startup? Even easier. Going out with friends or staying home to work on a project? You get it.
My life goal was always to be free, and I thought money was the way to get there.
Hint: it’s not.
It made me realize that what I really want is to keep writing. Go on bike rides whenever I want. Travel with my girlfriend. And do all these things that don’t require a million dollars - far from it - to be happy.
And so, while I technically lost money on the table, I still feel like I came out of this situation a winner. At only 23, I learned a lesson many spent years learning and avoided wasting years playing the wrong game.
So before continuing your journey, I guess it’s worth asking yourself:
Is the money game the one you really want to play?