It feels like forever since I last posted to Hive and it's about time I made an update to give some context as to what's been going on and where things are going.
The past year has been a whirlwind and life's ups and down never cease to amaze me. The crypto market is in absolute shambles right now, with few exceptions. Personally, I have experienced some major successes along with multiple cataclysmic failures so let's just dive right in.
First let me address the IceBreak-R debacle. In 2021 when we first launched ICEBRK on Binance Smart Chain everything seemed like a dream. There was tons of trading activity, NFTs were new and exciting for most people and then came the 2022 market crash. This pushed our project into migrating to Fantom blockchain, which at first seemed like a great pivot. After many struggles working to find our product market fit, along with our attempt at creating a new application and dapps for social media we ultimately failed to accomplish our goals.
Partly to blame was the market conditions where liquidity and interest dried up across the board, but also to blame were the people involved with the project. I partnered up with someone who was not really pulling their weight and ended up being a major sandbag, both financially and physically, holding back the project from any major progress whatsoever. After exhausting all of our funds, time and mental energy I decided it was time to just pull the plug and walk away after several years of ruminating on the sunk cost fallacy. ICEBRK.io was a failure as a result and the entire tribe and front end imploded due to lack of support both internally and externally. I guess it was just time to move on and focus on other things instead of just trying to beat a dead horse.
Meanwhile, I was spreading myself too thin across multiple projects that I was juggling - like the WePulse/WePulseX/WePulseConnect/WhaleWater & TenEggsDAO (NEGGS), VIP token ecosystems I was creating, along with the Mouse/MouseTrap, CATNIP and SOYL side projects I had helped others create. It takes a tremendous amount of time, effort and funds to support any single project and I was simply doing too much. Juggling too many balls which ultimately dropped one after another. Maybe I was naive to think I could just keep creating, maybe I was just crazy. Either way it takes dedication and consistency to maintain anything in life, otherwise it will just fade away.
The August 2024 market crash, triggered by the Japanese Yen carry trade unwind, was the final nail in my coffin in terms of crypto trading where I lost the majority of my assets due to leveraging collateralized lending and had to withdraw most of what I had left just to survive. I found myself in extreme amounts of debt, up to my eyeballs with stress and anxiety. The last straw was when I experienced a major health scare myself soon after learning of the deaths of two of my close colleagues and friends. Life suddenly became much more serious as reality struck a chord. I needed a total reset and to start with a blank slate again.
Since that moment I decided I needed to drastically change my life. This pushed me to move back in with my family, across the country. Entirely uproot my life as I knew it and to simply restart from ground zero. I had to be totally honest with myself - I was financially broke and mentally broken from my experiences over the last decade.
So the first step was to get everything back in order, I had to get my car repaired, registered and licensed in a new state which took much longer than expected after repeated back and forth trips to the repair shop. Change all of my documentation, update all of my accounts and after around two months I was able to confidently get back to work. Eventually I found myself working two part time jobs at the same time - 7 days a week. Drowning myself in my career it helped me to numb out the pain of my losses and failures but still did not feel fulfilling emotionally. Sure, this allowed me to repay 100% of my student loans, and all of my credit card debt but I soon found myself back in some debt which I took out to buy the dip on crypto after the October 10th market crash.
So where does this leave me now? I'm still working every day and have plans to get back into stocks and options trading this next year. Perhaps I will begin posting more on social media and try to create a larger online presence to grow my following. The only crypto project I have been actively managing is now WeBase on Base blockchain - where I migrated all WePulse community members via an airdrop. Currently my main crypto position is in Sonic ($S), which I built up over the last two months post-October 10th crash, but that has been performing terribly.
I've had thoughts of returning part time to the Hive blockchain in order to rebuild what is left of the VIP project but even Hive seems to be a shell of its former self. It has become increasingly difficult for me to obtain HIVE tokens since no major US exchange supports it and I would have to on-ramp using an exchange such as ChangeNow, which only supports certain assets to swap with. The other option would be to use TribalDex (HiveEngine) which doesn't have the best rates either. It just seems so trivial at this point when it feels like there are better things to be focusing on, like my mental health and financial stability.
Perhaps I will return to posting the Zero-To-Hero challenge blog series or create a new and more exciting idea. But for now I have been in survival mode and taking it one day at a time to maintain my sanity.
