It's been less than a year since I took my first tentative steps into the world of the blockchain. And it was quite by accident. To be fair, I had heard about cryptocurrencies. After all, I couldn't avoid news of the strange new digital coin called Bitcoin that had been selling for only pennies a piece a few years earlier before reaching the astonishing price of $19,783.06 per coin in December 2017. Since then, Bitcoin has become a household name and trades for $38,973 per coin at the time of this writing.
In 2018, I started experimenting with buying and selling the much more affordable Dogecoins through the Robinhood app (They were hovering between $0.002 and $0.003 per coin back then). I was trading these for entertainment more than anything else. I'd buy a thousand Dogecoins for $2, then wait for the price to go from $0.002 to $0.0028 per coin, sell them for a 40% profit, then wait for the price to fall again, and buy some more. I happily sold off most of my Dogecoins (6,000 coins) for $30 when the price hit $0.005 in 2020. If I had held on to them, they would have been worth over $4,000 at the peak of the crazy surge in May 2021.
I really couldn’t have cared less about the blockchain technology that made digital currencies possible. I didn’t even mind missing out on the big money. Really, I wanted something to satisfy my compulsive urge to buy and sell stocks. I knew I would average better returns on my small investments in the traditional stock market if I left them alone instead of constantly trading them. Of course, some people are very successful at doing just that. But only if they do their research and make wise investments, and that wasn’t something I wanted to do. So for me, buying and holding was a smarter strategy. But it’s so boring! So Dogecoins gave me an outlet so that I could buy and sell something every day without jeopardizing my small investments in “real” money. What it really boiled down to was that I was more interested in “playing” the market than I was in investing.
In 2020, I began hearing about some sort of digital assets called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that were built on the same technology that brought us Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other digital currencies. I didn’t fully understand what NFTs were, but the name was so strange, it was just fun to hear people talk about them. In reality, though, I dismissed them as a passing curiosity and paid them no more mind.
Last June, I received a few hundred dollars unexpectedly, and looked around for something interesting to invest in. I was looking at a couple of crowd-funding sites and I came across a proposal for a company developing games on the blockchain. I was curious, but honestly, I had some trouble understanding the concept. Fortunately, the founder had some videos on YouTube that did a better job of explaining the concept. I still had to watch at least a dozen videos over several weeks before I understood enough to follow along. The original pitch was for a game system called Blockchain Kingdoms (Later re-branded as Metasource Games). The primary pitch video that caught my interest doesn’t seem to be available anymore, but you can find an overview of the original concept here (38 minutes). Please note that Metasource Games just released its first game, Castles, which does not look at all like the gaming system outlined in the video. This is the first of their games to be available to the public. Whether the company will ever achieve the original vision remains to be seen.
The Blockchain Kingdoms video intrigued me, so I followed the development of the project, and even spent what felt like a lot of money on one of the NFTs associated with the game long before there even was a game. Even the NFT wasn’t really an NFT yet. It was several months later before they minted it on the blockchain.
From an investment perspective, I wanted the traditional path: I loan my money to a business, that business does whatever they do, and eventually they give me more money back than I first invested. I didn’t want to be involved. But the whole reason I invested in this company (by purchasing the NFT), was because I wanted something more fun than regular investing. So I was sort of swept along, half eager and half scared. In order to access my new NFT, I needed to open a wallet on the WAX blockchain. Suddenly, I was in way over my head. Part of me was excited to see where this was going, but another part wasn’t ready to enter this world. It was too new. Too strange. And it was happening too fast!
I had a small financial investment in the game, so I grudgingly agreed to jump through the hoops and sign up for my wallet. Once I had it, I decided to buy another NFT. To do that, I had to sign up for two more multi-currency custodial wallet accounts and jump through several hoops to convert my money into the right currency to buy it. By the time I figured that out, I had become one of the cool kids with not one, but three digital wallets. But what was I supposed to do with them? The Castles game was still in development, and it was going to be a few more months before there was anything to do there. So I started exploring on my own. Slowly at first, and gradually picking up speed as I became more and more fascinated with this strange new world that I had stumbled into.
Over the next few months, I became interested in the concept of Play-2-Earn crypto games. I explored Alien Worlds, R-Planet, Blockchain Brawlers, Farmers World, Wrath of Tezca, Splinterlands, Castles, Myradun, and Upland. Some of these games were fun, some had good earning potential, some were too expensive, some were uninteresting, and some were too early in development. I will write about my experiences with these games and with any upcoming exploits in the blockchain world. I hope I can provide some useful insight, suggestions to other new explorers, or entertainment to you, kind reader. Together, we can explore this brave new world.
"Lives come and go. If we succeed, our names will live on forever."
-Captain Robert Walton
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)
