👀 How I did a 4X overnight

GM everyone. This is 2036. We scroll for gems all day so you don’t have to.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: sometimes, weekends are calm. Other times, they’re money-making. This time, it was the latter. Here’s the quick breakdown - and how you can do it, too.

Let’s dig in.

It's Sunday afternoon.

I’ve just come home from the Christmas market with my wife. Our son is blissfully asleep. I’m having red tea. Life is good.

Like every Sunday, I sit down to prepare this Monday newsletter.

I scroll Twitter to see if I missed anything during a 24-hour self-imposed digital sabbath.

I see the market is down a little. No biggie.

But one coin is up: Injective.

At this point, it doesn’t actually matter what Injective does. What matters is that it’s up when everything is down.

Sounds too simple? Just wait; it gets better.

I start going down the rabbit hole of Injective. It’s a Layer 1 that’s… fast. And it’s up 20X in the last year.

Not bad.

I scroll through their official Twitter. I read all the founders’ tweets.

I check out their NFT marketplace and top collections.

And I look up their memecoins.

But then something dawns on me: Injective only has one memecoin.

And it launched 24 hours ago.

The logo is an AI-generated picture of a dog dressed as a Ninja. Of course, what else.

I go to the decentralized exchange on Injective.

But here’s what really catches my attention: the memecoin only has a $5M market cap.

$5 million.

$BONK, the dog memecoin on Solana, just reached a $1 BILLION market cap.

(On its way there, one trader took an early position in $BONK and turned $16,000 into $10 MILLION).

And top dog coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu have $12 and $5 BILLION market caps, respectively.

So $5M is nothing.

It’s time to pounce - and start moving out on the risk curve.

Luckily - Injective isn’t Ethereum.

Brinding to the Cosmos ecosystem where Injective lives takes 2 minutes and costs like $0.00002 in fees.

I head over to Astroport, an Injective DEX. I scroll down to find my memecoin - $NINJA- and press the buy button.

It’s a gamble, and I don’t think much more of it.

I finish the night eating Peking duck, watching Princess Diana die in The Crown (spoiler alert. Though you probably already knew how it ended anyway).

This morning, as I open my newsletter editor, a little thought pops up. What about that memecoin…?

I open my Injective wallet. Just to see.

Turns out - there’s a lot more $$ in it than yesterday. In fact, a full 4X as much.

For a second, I feel like a lottery winner.

I’ve achieved the dream of every degenerate crypto gambler: my memecoin is mooning 🐶🚀

Okay - so why am I telling you this?

It’s not just to humblebrag.

Buying $NINJA in the first place was only possible after a series of painful mistakes and failures.

Here’s how to save yourself the pain:

1/ Way too many of us dismiss memecoins as total stupidity 🤡

Instead, we look for the next “modular blockchain with cross-chain interoperability that’ll scale EVM-compatible blockchains.”

🤦

Or worse, we still believe that “XRP is going to bring the banks.”

We think people who buy memecoins are undereducated.

But they’re the ones making $$.

And every single memecoin is underestimated.

Unsurprisingly, there’s even a meme for it:

Don’t worry - I often find myself in the middle, too.

But memes are a new form of social infrastructure. They’re deeply embedded in Internet culture - and, as a result, in crypto.

A while back, I wrote about how lucrative it could be to invest in cults. I’ve learned my lesson.

2/ It pays to be early ⌛

Still now, $NINJA only has a $20M market cap (note: that doesn’t mean you should buy it)

But Injective is an up-and-coming ecosystem. And bridging onto Injective is still too complicated for the average person.

But where there is friction, there are gains to be made.

Eventually, the friction will be abstracted away, as it did with Bitcoin. Then all the gains will be gone.

Money is made by being contrarian and right.

3/ Memes bring money 💰

The Solana phone came out nine months ago.

But nobody wanted to buy it. MKBHD straight-up said it was a bad phone.

Even the Solana founder didn’t use it.

But when crypto Twitter discovered that the Solana phone came with an airdrop of $BONK - a memecoin on Solana - sales skyrocketed.

If you bought one after I sent out my email on Friday, congratulations.

It’s now sold out and fetches $5,000 on Ebay (against a $600 selling price). That’s a quick 8X for reading 2036 three days ago.

Memes bring money - not some complicated whitepaper no one was ever going to read anyway.

That’s why I’ll dig more into memes and alternative chains in 2024.

This is not an endorsement of any chain or memecoin. But don’t fade what you think is beneath you.

And if you want an excellent breakdown of why memes matter, read this.

1/ Solana SAGA phone sells for $5,000 as $BONK hype continues

2/ Bitcoin NFTs are in a frenzy

3/ Memecoins and Ordinals clog up blockchains