I mean, just as the title says.

I had no need to leave the money in the IRA, and I noticed that the crypto market is currently quite low, so I thought it was a great time to make some moves. This is super risky, but I'm confident it'll pay off at some point in the future.

It all started with me getting hired as a contractor at Coinbase. I hadn't really looked at the crypto market since it's been in a downturn, but since I had a lot of downtime, I decided to hop onto TradingView and take a peek around. Naturally, I looked at some of the old projects I held, and most of them are pretty low. No one is really talking about crypto nowadays, but that's perfect.

During the previous bull run, my big three were DeFi, DAOs, and NFTs. The only category that actually stuck around was DeFi. Looking ahead to the next one, my big three are DeFi, Tokenization, and Smart Contract Platforms.

DeFi was the Wild West during the last bull run but has since matured from its degenerate days. Now there's the realization that you can lose it all when you blindly invest in a platform, there's the risk that the platform can get exploited, and everyone's funds are stolen. Lastly, there shouldn't be an expectation of 1000% daily returns due to complex Ponzi schemes that no one understands. Nonetheless, DeFi is here to stay.

New to the scene is Tokenization. In a nutshell, Tokenization is the process of creating a digital representation of a physical asset on the blockchain. Think of a Basquiat being represented on a dapp platform where people can own pieces of it or fractionalize a house. This too is in its infancy, meaning the proper processes and procedures haven't been developed yet to make it a viable application of blockchains. I really do think that Tokenization is the key that enables Traditional Finance (TradFi) institutions to utilize blockchains in their business processes.

Lastly, Smart Contract platforms. These are blockchains like Ethereum, Optimism, Base, Stacks, Tezos, Algo, etc. Naturally, blockchain projects had to evolve to meet user and customer needs. As NFTs and DeFi exploded onto the Ethereum scene, the need for Layer-2 solutions, which provided cheaper and faster transactions, raced to meet the demand. At the same time, alternative blockchains to the Ethereum standard worked to capitalize on the DeFi and NFT trends and launched their own projects on their respective chains. To stay relevant, OG blockchains need to keep up with what people are using web3 for. We can see this with XLM building a smart contract platform called Soroban and Stacks pushing for smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Taking the above into account and considering an Instagram poll, I decided to sell my 401K, pay the taxes, and start dollar-cost averaging (DCA) into the crypto market. In a sense, you can say this is thematic investing. Going forward, I know this isn't a strategy to maximize gains. I'm looking at what's trending and what people are going to use in real life (IRL). We'll see where we're at post BTC-Halving ;)

P.S: I should definitely post more on my personal website. Catch ya on the next one!

You only live once - Drake