Life on The Ledger: A 7 Year Journey out of the Trenches
It’s been nearly 7 years to this day since I first got into crypto and began my journey towards becoming an expert of this emerging digital asset space. I bought my first XRP in December of 2017, moved it over to a Ledger wallet and it still remains there today.
It’s crazy to think that it's been over 2500 days. 🤯🤯 2500 days of researching, learning, trying out new things, grinding in discords, grinding in the crypto twitter trenches, making mistakes and doing even more research and diving deeper and deeper into crypto and more specifically the XRPL. I have been active on a number of different blockchains over the last several years, but have always kept XRP as my largest holding as I believe the XRPL will be a leader in global finance for decades to come.
My life as a long-term XRP holder has more or less been seven years of nothing, combined with a bullshit multi-year lawsuit thrown in the mix that caused XRP holders to lose 65% of their value in a single day. Long story short, it’s been very difficult and has required patience and conviction that most people simply don’t have. There is definitely an opportunity cost to holding such a terribly performing asset for so many years. I have had lots of friends and family questioning my decisions. There were plenty of days where I even questioned what I was doing. Surely there was something here though. No one could convince me otherwise. I continued to learn. I continued to build my portfolio over the years through the ups and downs of life. I was going to become financially free through crypto investing. It was already decided. Now I just needed to survive until it happened.
I did okay living off of fast food and frozen pizzas for a few years. In 2020 though, things actually did get hard. The SEC sued Ripple, XRP tanked and never recovered, rent prices nearly doubled over the course of a year, real estate became much more difficult for me to sell, the price of everything was going up. As bumpy as the road got at times, you weren’t catching me selling these bags I worked so hard to build up. If it was winter time and my pipeline was looking weak, I was mixing cocktails so I could take full advantage of the free crypto they were giving out during the bear market. By God's grace, I always had enough money and didn't have to dip into my portfolio to live. There’s no fucking way I was going to let this opportunity slip through my fingers. Nothing was going to separate me from my destiny.
When I tell people about my experience with Drop coin on First Ledger, it all sounds really easy and in a way it was. However, there was also a major sacrifice made as well as massive amounts of knowledge gained before I ultimately reached that moment. The sacrifice for a better life was only supposed to be for a few years, but it turned into a long 7 and it was definitely starting to wear me down.
I didn’t follow the path of most of my friends. I worked on commission and didn’t have a guaranteed salary. I didn’t buy investment properties for stability and passive income. I didn’t get a jetski or a motorcycle. I didn’t go on many trips or vacations. I was treading water in real life, putting off debt and putting all of my capital and energy I had into crypto. First, it was the major utility assets and building a long-term portfolio. Then it was NFTs and Defi on Cardano. Then Solana memes became really popular. I lost a good amount of money on Solana over the course of 2024, but I believe it prepared me for what was to come.
By the time First Ledger launched on the XRPL in mid October, I knew exactly how to participate and manage my risk in the meme space. I also had years of knowledge about XRP as a whole. I remember being one of the first users on First Ledger, and it was just as fun as it is now. Within a few days, it was easy to notice patterns and which coins were gaining traction. For the most part, it was coins that were fitting within the XRPL narrative that were resonating with the community and seeing the most growth. I made a few quick 10-20x plays and was having fun, but everything changed on October 16th.
First Ledger had been out for 4 or 5 days at this point. I was up late checking out the new tokens list, and had X pulled up on my other monitor. I saw a tweet from a popular XRP influencer named Alex Cobb. In the tweet, he stated how he had just launched a coin called “Drop” on the platform. Just seeing the ticker alone piqued my interest, as I know the base unit of 1 XRP is 1 Drop. From what I remember, the market cap was around $3,400 the first time I pulled up the chart. I watched it for a few minutes. Maybe it was only a minute, i'm not even sure.
It’s important to know that these new coins often have very low liquidity, so any big buys or sells can influence the price significantly in either direction. That is exactly what happened here. There was a big sell order and I watched the Drop market cap fall from $3,400 briefly to $550. I already had my 40 xrp and 30% slippage ready to go. I was able to get 3 buys off for a total of 120 XRP ($60 at the time). This was enough in my opinion.
What I didn’t realize is I just went full on Giga Chad and ended up sniping 13% of the total Drop supply. Over the course of the next two weeks my life was about to change. Drop very quickly rose to the top of the First Ledger charts to a peak of a $25 million market cap. My eyes never left my screen as I watched my modest XRP meme portfolio go completely diabolical and turn into over 800,000 XRP in realized profits. I knew I was going to ball out with crypto eventually, but touching damn near a million XRP wasn’t on my bingo card. It was very life changing for me, but at the same time very overwhelming. It took a toll on my health, I didn’t get any sleep and wasn’t really eating or working out anymore. Oh, and then I almost forgot to mention the part where XRP went on for a 550% move of its own in the weeks to follow. I was literally a multimillionaire at this point off of that Drop trade and the XRP I had secured so far.
My story is still being written, as I believe Drop represents only the beginning of what is yet to come. My goal has always been to build a crypto community that empowers and educates people so they too can use this technology to create a better life for themselves and their families. We will use Fren and it's surrounding ecosystem to accomplish just that. We are truly pioneers of a new and groundbreaking technology and we are only going up from here. This I firmly believe.
