When I grew up, I never knew anything about investing for the future. It would be a lie, if  I say I even heard about investments before university level. We lived modestly at the schools in which my father taught, and then from my rural home when my father worked at a nearby school. In the community I grew up in, and due to my fathers’ background, investment was something else. Because my father grew up under unfavourable conditions, he did his best to make sure that we did not lack what he did not have. This included having a rural home, some chicken, cows and a piece of land. I really think the conditions available when he was growing up made him think like this. To him buying cows and a piece of land in the village was the investment and nothing else.

I do not blame him though, I understand that in his version of investments, he succeeded. He now has what he was looking for, but there was a blunder. There are 6 of us in the family and his land will not be enough as an inheritance even for one of us. This was the first thing that manifested in my mind as soon as I started thinking like an adult after my advanced education. And this made me realise that while my father’s version of investment and success was good for him to fit in in the village, it was not enough for me. I did not have to fit in, I had to think outside the community that I grew up in to see my success. That is how I later came across cryptocurrencies.

The journey begins

My journey into financial exploration and crypto did not start as easily. For years I wandered around different types of investments learning and practising until I fell into the well of cryptocurrencies. My first view of investing was rather wrong, I thought starting a small tuckshop would get me set up. I had this dream that if I had this small tuckshop, then my life of withdrawal and luxury would start. It was not until I went to live with my uncle who was into tuckshops that I realised that running a tuckshop was a business not an investment. The moment you get sick, no one will save your business, it may wake up only when you are well again.

My journey did not start with me having a grand ambition to derail and overthrow the centralised financial system. It started humbly, dreaming of owning a tuckshop. Back then I only heard  whispers about Bitcoin and faucets were forking out current fortunes for solving a capture puzzle. I was too young to understand its potential use, and too detached from the modern world to think about reading Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper from 2008. I would be crazy and a liar if I said I saw vision in what Nakamoto was proposing, back then I was more worried about getting my school fees paid, passing school and getting a nice job! This was my dream until I understood that the education system had lied to me.

I only started noticing crypto and its beauty around 2017 when I was doing an unpaid internship after months of failing to get a placement. The hunger that came with working for nothing forced me to scour the internet to search for a way to survive.

First encounter with trading 

Unfortunately, my internet search during attachment was not enough to get me anything. It was not until I went back to school that I started seeing crypto and binary options trading from iq options as well as olymptrade. The way the adverts were made, I thought I would make so much money with binary options trading that I would buy my parents a car and keep some change. I will just say, I got the shock of my life. My first 5-10 dollar deposits on olymptrade disappeared so fast I thought I was scammed. I had no knowledge in binary options, just placing buy and sell and hope I hit profit. I gave up after several losses and deposits but no withdrawal.

I tried the same, with the IQ option and pockets option, with the same results. The funny thing is I actually thought trading binary options was forex trading.

Introduction to cryptocurrencies

It was later on after being scammed in 2021 that I thought of learning about cryptocurrencies. This was new  to me and no one at school in my program or at home knew anything about cryptocurrencies. Everyone thought it was some gambling scam and you would lose all your money. Some thought it was so good that you could earn millions in minutes from just 10 dollars.

Back then I did not know about self custody wallets, just some exchanges like Kucoin. My first contact with cryptocurrencies was Kucoin and I still love the platform even now. I fully trusted Kucoin and thought, if I buy coins and put them in this exchange, I would watch my earnings grow and earn so much money. And for the first year in crypto, I kept some USDT in Kucoin and felt like a crypto guru.

My first encounter with Trust Wallet

One day while at work, I was introduced to Trust Wallet by a colleague. There was a binance smart chain investment option on one of the DEXes that I don't remember, the APR was nice and everyone was running there. So, I quickly downloaded my Trust Wallet, created a wallet and I don't even remember what I did with the seed phrase  back then. I didn't know about blockchain networks then, so I had no idea that I could only stake USDT BEP20. Guess what, I quickly transferred USDT on trc20 to Trust Wallet ready to conquer the world.

Now, imagine the shock I received when I couldn’t stake my money in Trust Wallet. I didn't know why I couldn't but I had USDT as requested. Well, today I always scream when I think about it, “It was freaking trc20 instead of BEP20 dummy!”

Now, after I tried to stake and failed I wanted to withdraw my money back to Kucoin. I failed to withdraw because of no gas, but I didn’t know. I thought the trust wallet wanted to steal my money. It was after a few weeks later that I tried to send TRX first then used it as gas to withdraw my money.

Looking back to those days now, I always find it funny!

TON airdrops made me love cryptocurrencies

After my embarrassment with Trust Wallet, I had a stint away from cryptocurrencies until I found one of my workmates tapping away at their phone. That was the infant of the scam that became Tapswap. So, being curious, I joined and started tapping away. I would just tap my phone and earn from nothing anyway. I joined tapswap, hamster combat, rabbit, cati and dogs airdrop  campaigns among others. Pixelverse was the worst of the airdrops and scammed me for my time.

However, I got very nice airdrops from hamster kombat, Cati and Dogs. These are the airdrops that made me dig deeper into cryptocurrencies. After these airdrops I started digging deeper to find out how cryptocurrencies work. I started understanding the differences between CEXs, DEXs and non custodial wallets. So, to me, in terms of crypto and all my knowledge, the TON ecosystem made me.

Final thoughts and conclusion

I know my story is over summarised and does not include my most recent exploits, but I think you can agree that it was a rollercoaster journey. My apologies if you did not like it, but today, I felt like I needed to tell a raw story on how I became involved in crypto. If I want to write everything, we may end up with a biography!