🥛 I just bought the most expensive shoes of my life

GM, this is the Milk Road. We tell you things about crypto that you tell your friends about crypto and they think you’re a genius.

Today’s estimated read time: 4 minutes and 32 seconds

Let’s get a quick update on the Fear & Greed Index. After 3 straight days of greed and price movement stagnating, we’re back in the Neutral zone.

Let’s get into the good stuff:

🤑 Lessons learned from a Crypto degen
🎮 A crypto game growing like a weed
😎 The coolest DAOs in town

LESSONS LEARNED FROM A CRYPTO DEGEN WHO MADE MILLIONS IN DEFI (IN 12 MONTHS)

My buddy Jason has a crazy crypto story.

Jason and I worked together at our last startup, Bebo. We had like 12 engineers + Jason (he was the only non-engineer who we could send out into the real world to talk to humans).

Jason’s life took a crazy turn when his friend asked him a question: “What are you doing with your ETH?”

Jason didn’t understand the question. He had invested in some Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) but was just holding it. Doing nothing.

His friend explained there’s a part of crypto called DeFi (decentralized finance, aka crypto’s version of borrowing & lending) and you could earn interest on your ETH.

That triggered a 1.5 year journey deep into DeFi. During that time, Jason 10X’d his net worth. Hell yea Jason! Sushi’s on you for life, buddy!

Now Jason works at a hedge fund doing DeFi for institutional investors.

Here are some of Jason’s core DeFi frameworks:

1/ Create your war room

Your war room is a group chat of ~5-6 peers that are equally obsessed with crypto as you.

It’s like copying your friends homework, but you don’t get in trouble.

Everyday, you trade ideas, debate strategies, and help each other on the emotional rollercoaster of crypto investing.

Get a war room.

2/ Figure out a goal

He had two goals. First, replace his salary ($115K/year). That’s milestone 1.

Milestone 2 was a comfy retirement ($10M).

Once you know what you want, you can figure out what strategy you need to get there.

3/ Keep Your Mind Right

There’s a ton going at all times. By sleeping, you miss things. And that’s okay.

This is a game and you gotta know how to not let the game get you.

Don’t get emotional, don’t get lost in charts, and don’t chase things you don’t understand.

4/ Take Advantage of Airdrops

The coolest part about crypto is that just by using products, you have the potential to make money through “airdrops.”

Basically, they pay you for trying their product.

But the key is…they don’t tell you there’s gonna be an airdrop. So Jason uses tools (like DeFi Llama) to keep tabs on upcoming airdrops. In one year, he made $600k just from airdrops alone (3X the highest salary he had ever made at a job)

Tokens are marketing. This is how crypto projects pay for you to use them!

5/ Be Weary of Hype

Crypto projects have very fast hype cycles. But crypto is like eating dinner at a gas station: Fast pumps lead to fast dumps.

Look at projects like Wonderland or LooksRare, they had quick hype, but quick decays.

6/ If you’re going to invest in tokens, measure yourself in “alpha above eth”

If you are investing in crypto, you can just buy blue chips (Bitcoin, ETH) and chill.

If you’re going to buy other tokens, you need to measure your performance against BTC or ETH instead of dollars. That shows you if all your active investing is providing any incremental gains compared to just holding blue chips and chilling.

That’s all for now. If you like Jason’s stuff, you can watch the whole talk here (it’s very entertaining, he’s a funny dude).

A NEW GAME WE'RE TRACKING

We just noticed a new game growing like a weed - 50,000 people are playing it daily…so let’s dive in.

It’s called Stepn.

CURRENT HYPE: HIGH

LONGEVITY: BELOW AVG

The idea: A game that pays you to walk

HOW IT WORKS:

You buy an NFT pair of “sneakers” for ~10 SOL ($1,000)
You walk around, the app tracks your steps
Everyday, you have a 100 minute window to earn points for walking/running (“Move-to-Earn”)

Rule #33 of the Milk Road: “watching is for wussies, go play”.

So, let’s play.

I downloaded the app, and bought an NFT of sneakers. Yep, these babies are the most expensive shoes I’ve ever bought for myself:

High in luck & efficiency. Just like me.

From what I can tell, the payback period for the game is pretty quick right now (~2-3 weeks), but we’ll see if that holds true as more players join the game. Typically, we've seen "X to Earn" games payback period lengthen with more players and adoption, which is why we think the longevity could be below average here.

I’m already itching to go for a run to earn my points. This is better than any gym membership I’ve ever bought 🤣

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