“Old dogs, new tricks.” Our theme today.
I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now. And I realized old dogs that learn new tricks can find bones buried in places they’d never have thought to look…
Growing older is easy. Comes naturally.
Growing wiser?
That’s entirely dependent on having an open mind and being willing to accept that the age in which you and I—Boomers and Xers—live is essentially a foreign land. And they do things differently here.
We grew up inside a very different snow globe than the one we live in today…
Crypto is a great example. Crypto is fundamentally changing processes you and I know as normal.
Let’s take the Wall Street IPO as an example—the initial public offering.
I clearly remember when IPOs were the financial designer-drug everyone wanted. Back in the day, those lucky enough to snag a bag of some IPO du jour had a license to print money.
I mean, TheGlobe.com went public in the late ‘90s at $9 per share, but the first trade on the Nasdaq was nearly $90—a 10x for IPO investors.
For the general public who got in after the IPO—pretty much shit on a stick
Of course, you generally had to “be someone” to snag that bag. You had to be a deep-pocketed client of some white-shoe Wall Street brokerage firm, or you had to know someone on the investment banking team who could slip you access to 100 shares at the IPO price.
Crypto, which has matured greatly in the last three years, has its own versions of the IPO…
One is the ICO, or initial coin offering. It looks a lot like an IPO, in that early investors buy pre-market tokens at a deeply discounted price, and then cash out big when the ICO takes place. The big difference is that ICO access isn’t limited to institutional players. In crypto, plenty of opportunities arise to be an angle investor even if you’re not Daddy Warbucks.
The second version of the IPO in crypto is called the “airdrop,” which is really what I want to share with you today. It’s a huge opportunity for us older dogs willing to learn new tricks…
These events have no analog in the world of Boomers and Xers. Crypto projects are literally dropping thousands of dollars in free money. In many cases, the drops are going to people who are simply going about their normal daily tasks in the cryptosphere—investing here, swapping tokens there, using this wallet or that, bridging from one blockchain to another.
And—boom!—free money for doing what you would have done anyway.
Recently, I began pursuing another type of airdrop that costs nothing other than your time. Airdrops tied to something called a “testnet,” a crypto network that isn’t yet ready for primetime because the developers are still working out the kinks before they release it into the wild as a “mainnet.”
To battle-test their projects, crypto teams run these testnets that anyone can take part in. Doesn’t cost a dime. Or a nickel.
Or a penny, even.
All you gotta do is have a crypto wallet that works on a specific network like Ethereum or Solana. Then, just connect your wallet and progress through a bunch of pre-assigned tasks like trading fake crypto coins (called testnet tokens), or moving crypto from one blockchain to another (known as “bridging”).
You don’t even have to buy the fake tokens; all these testnets run something called a “faucet” that you tap into for free testnet tokens you can play with. Those tokens aren’t worth anything, they’re just the crypto version of Monopoly money you use for whatever tasks are necessary for some particular testnet.
Sometimes there are social tasks to complete as well, like following the project on Twitter/X or joining the project’s Discord channel. But those are minor annoyances because…
The payoff can be so huge.
When crypto teams officially launch their mainnet, they very often send a bunch of very real tokens to the people who participated in the testnet phase. Those coins are routinely worth anywhere from several hundred dollars to $2,000 or $7,000… or even $10,000 in some cases.
And the cost was literally nothing more than time invested in interacting with the testnet.
Talk about free moolah!
Which is why I’ve been spending many a night working through a dozen or so testnets for projects such as Nabla, Entangle, Berachain, and others.
The projects I’m tied into are all backed by deep-pocketed venture-capital dollars, which is a great sign because VC investors can only recoup their investment by selling off the tokens they collect in the ICO. So, they have big incentive to back the projects they see as having great tech or a great product.
Participating in a testnet means that you’re getting in at a price lower than the VC guys.
Which means when the mainnet tokens launch, you’re quite likely to see a very nice pile of dollars plop into your lap for having done nothing more than test the network.
The world you and I live in today is fat with juicy bones buried all over the place… if you’re willing to learn a few new tricks to be able to find them.
Risky and tumultuous as the crypto space can be, the wealth running through the crypto market is beyond imagination. If you know where to look.