Bear markets separate the crap from the corn. Now that the free money of 2020 is all spent up, and the best investors took profits and ran, what you're left with is a bitter dose of reality. The reality is:
1. No one, i.e., NO ONE has created a sustainable play to earn system that allows for scholars to extract value while maintaining the system. Unless you are the first investor in one of these games (which you won't be unless you are a megaguild or an insider), you will lose money. All of the nonsense garbage tokenomics, the locking and the staking and the breeding, are just ways to divert your attention away from the slow rug. Even Gala Games is nothing but a bigger ponzi. They were smart enough to expand into music, which extended the ponzi. But those shitty songs Snoop Dogg and BT are coming out with won't save shit for long. Bottom line — someone's going to have to come out with a great game.
2. There is no such thing as Node as a Service. It's a buzzword; nothing else. That crap is all ponzinomics as well. The only half-legit actor in the space, Strongblock, was recently outed as an unsustainable ponzi. They're trying some bullshit to try and pull in new investors to keep it going. Even if it works, it will only work because of the new money, not because of a breakthrough in stable financial modeling. All of these other "nodes" are just yield farms with different marketing that do nothing but reduce your cash. That includes $THOR and all the rest of them. If you didn't get in early, expect to lose. And these nodes are worse than yield farms because you can't even remove your capital.
3. Play to earn is a joke (unless you started out homeless). If you've been reading my articles, you'll know that I have been buying up P2E assets so that I could play my way through any bear market with the games that would come out. FAIL! Token prices dive too fast. The only way to make decent money is to be first and flip assets to the next upcoming game. If you're a player, the law of reallyreally fast diminishing returns precedes every other metric. Also, "development" on all of the games everyone is excited about gets pushed back time and again, which I should have known from the regular gaming industry. Even the most hyped games like Embersword, which I expect to be a complete disappointment, are just stalling and bullshitting! I'll be waiting for the next pump and getting out of that fucking garbage ASAP. Lucky for me nftfi.com created a legitimate P2P loan site where I can get liquidity by putting my assets up as collateral. But the lenders, man...they're shit, too. Better than nothing, I guess. But everyone's a piece of shit.
The entire narrative of WAGMI and non-competitive elevation of humanity through blockchain is a falsehood. I can't really put my finger on why, but the entire space is falling back into the same inflationary ponzinomics that crypto was created to avoid. I can put my finger on it. The new business class in the crypto space are a bunch of sellouts who got caught up in the hypergrowth narratives of VCs instead of just building good new tech. That's why you get these hurried, half-baked philosophies of "we have to compromise with regulators" and "we need mass adoption now/mass adoption is the number one goal." Like, no you don't, and no, it isn't. This generation of crypto devs accepted tons of money from VCs and are now VC slaves. The mandate is just to get something up rather than truly move forward monetary experimentation and financial sustainability.
How do I protect myself?
A. No more investment in clone games. One of my biggest mistakes was Pegaxy. The founder may have had all the best intentions, but the fact was his game is a copy of Zed Run. If you follow Zed Run, then you see exactly how Pegaxy was going to go. The first investors got rich, pulled out, and everyone else lost money slowly as the breeding mechanism fooled enough people back in thinking they would ROI. No more investing in bullshit 3-on-3 card game Axie clones, horse racing bullshit, simpleshit RPGs, or adventure games that look EXACTLY like Dark Souls. Which leaves nothing really to invest in. Keep your money in your pocket and wait for the next generation, I say.
B. No investment in anything I can't verify. I don't mean the people. I mean the tech. People KYCing and then dropping some bullshit is the biggest graft in the space. Watch out for the ones who lead with all of their web2 experience and nothing else. There are so many roadmaps that talk about "community involvement." Bullshit. This generation of community is as diluted as the investors and the devs. No one will add value, and everyone is looking to profit from the work of others. If there isn't a sick team with a definitive roadmap, you'll get a flip out of me at best. I'm not staying around to jerk dicks with the bagholders who get left with your worthless NFTs while you wank off with your new millions traveling to conventions seeking out "partnerships." By the way, the entire purpose of a partnership in the NFT space is just to be able to say you got permission from someone else to call you a partner. Those partnerships don't actually do anything.
C. No trading unless the trade is in my favor 100%. There is no room for "compromise" in this market. It's a 0 sum game. If the trade doesn't benefit me from all possible perspectives, then the best move is not to take the trade. WAGMI is BS. Only a few will. I'm going to be one of those few.
That's what the fuck is up in the market, and that's why the fuck you've been losing money for the past few months. Regroup. Reread this article a few times. Best advice for most people, honestly? Stay the fuck out of crypto right now until the VCs decide to pour more money into it.
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