You (A crypto parody)

You. You’re a new trader. You’re romantic, hopeful and daring, in other words, you’re inexperienced. You learnt more about investment from films than from real life. You believe in the one… the coin of your life. You think it will solve all your problems, make you everything you wanted to be.

Then one day, when you’re hanging around at Stakingrewards, you spot her across the index, almost invisible amongst her friends. Almost. But you, you see her. The potential. What your life together can look like.

You have a routine by now, don’t you? You get her contract address and start stalking her. You go through her past, follow her on all the platforms, from Etherscan to Coingecko. Her code, splendid. Her reputation, triple audited. Her blood type, ERC20. Almost too good to be true.

You start going out. On your first date, you take her out for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, see how she handles micropayments. Then to an NFT museum. On your third date, you go to bed and exchange liquidity. You walk home thinking that one day she might carry your lead investment, be the mother of your wealth.

The honey moon phase goes in a blaze. You can’t keep your eyes or hands off your portfolio. You stay up until 4 am staring at the screen. Against all the Investopedia articles you read and the not-a-financial-advice YouTubers you followed, you can’t help but falling in leverage with her.

Every day, your leverage grows deeper and deeper. But you notice her passion starts to fade. She’s down most of the time. She looks pale, losing her appetite and most of her capital. Like a nail dancing around its axis, you’re getting screwed.

You’re not ready to see things for what they are. You tell yourself that with a big romantic gesture you will save this investment. That your faith in her can overcome any fear, uncertainty, or doubt.

You bet the last of your savings on this investment, on its promising futures. You go home, get down on one asset, and pop up the big question: Will you make me the wealthiest man in the world?

She doesn’t have the heart to say it to your face, she knows how invested you are. She runs out the apartment and you chase her to the staircase. You watch her descending rapidly, one Fibonacci level after the other, and when she walks out of the building, you know it’s over, it’s all gone, and you will never see your capital again.

What was an idealistic investment to you, to her was another pump and dump. She leaves you heartbroken and broke. It will take you years to recover from this.

During the rebound phase, you’re Barney Fucking Stinson. It’s all about diversification to you now, isn’t it? To hell with Leverage at First Sight, all you care about is short term day trades, drooling over bouncy assets, locking every price that moves, and hitting all the right spot markets.

You are past idealization. In fact, you now objectify tokens. You came up with a rating system for them. You’re known for your shameless saying: Only go for 8’s or higher. You no longer have standards or preferences. Longs, shorts, memecoins, shitcoins, fuck it. All what matters to you is your long, green candle.

Years later though, this lifestyle can no longer sustain you. You won’t be in your twenties forever, and your body is demanding a diet of more than cocaine and single malts. Swiping right and left on Binance and Coinbase Pro leaves you feeling cheap and shallow. You need your sleep, your peace of mind. You no longer feel angry or betrayed by long term investments, you just don’t truly believe in leveraging anymore.

This time around, it’s about the fundamentals. You’re old enough to learn that investments are about playing the long game, to go through the bear and the bull of it, with a token that you can trust and lean on.

You’re ready to give it another shot. You’re not looking for the young and flashy this time, you appreciate maturity. You’re looking for a token who’s past the years of looking for angel investors to save her, a token that would rather be with a reliable investor to help her long-term growth.

You meet a DAO.

You go through your routine, stalk her online and dig up her past. You’re intimidated by the size of total value locked in her before you even showed up. But something keeps you interested.

While the daily growth is dreadfully slow, the DAO introduces you to worlds new to you. You feel safe to open up again, and share your proposals publicly and proudly. Sure, sex is great … but have you tried yield farming?

Your relationship is half-open, it allows you to see layer 2 solutions on the side. Still, mono-wagmi is just not your thing. You can’t stop your eyes from glancing over the fence, spying on the young neighbor who just moved in next door. Every time you steal a look, she shows you her double digit overnight gains. Is she flirting with you?

You know better than to fall back to your old patterns. You remind yourself she’s just another trendy memecoin, she has no substance, her appeal won’t last. Yet, night after night, she keeps showing you this very logic-deifying double-digit growth. She’s the talk of the entire neighborhood, and you know too well what killed the cat.

You look over your shoulder and see your tired DAO, nursing three scaling proposals at once. Within a few years, she will reach an age when her monthly drops will dry out. Her token distribution cycle will come to its natural end.

The fifth shot of whiskey dissolves what remained of your fundamentals. You pay that neighbor a sneaky hot-blooded visit. You leave her with 20% of your capital and tell yourself it’s just about that one-night gains.

The next morning, the memecoin indeed goes up, FIFTY-SEVEN PER CENT UP, lifting your portfolio 12% singlehandedly, as if she walked out of a Greek saga.

Meanwhile, your DAO is spending more and more time with her stablecoin friends, she’s starting to look like one. This is not the DAO you fell for. Instead of taking out your overnight profits, you go ahead and put in another 20%.

After chaotic, mind-blowing two weeks, you believe in leverage again.

The only thing that doesn’t interest you anymore is the good old DAO. The tired dear sunk so deep in endless improvement proposals, scaling solutions and voting mechanisms that she hasn’t noticed your repeated acts of infidelity.

All of your capital is on this memecoin now. Back on track, back on crack. You’re feeling young again, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Just when you thought it would never happen to you, here she is, the coin of your dreams, giving you the world without you even asking. Your heart has never throbbed with such joy. All if it wasn’t for that knot in your stomach.

But that knot grew into a storm. You remember that morning. You woke up after a degenerate night of stalking your ex-DAO online. You found out that all that work she’s been putting in was to push forward a radical proposal. The proposal passed a few days ago, and the DAO transitioned to a DeFi 2.0 protocol, keeping her incentives system forever young. She’s seeing new investors now, and boy, they’re whales.

The radical proposal triggered a frenzy of investments, followed by a second then third waves of FOMOers. You tried to play it cool, you were “ooh, good for herrr!” all over the place. Then, in the midst of it all, your memecoin collapsed.

You must have some real Oedipus complex, because you fell for the mother of them all; of all the pumps and dumps. You got liquidated so fast you can’t even recognize your own Metamask anymore.

You are standing on the top of a building, looking over the edge. You’re having your ‘goodbye cruel world moment’. Your financial life flashes before your eyes. You’re first NFT flip, the embarrassing handle of your secret crypto reddit account, the time you called Elon Musk’s mother a bad word and vouched to do bad things to her lady parts. The good, the sad, the FUDly. You finally let go, of the paper with your seed phrase that is, and you fall to your inevitable dept.