Until yesterday, I have sat passively observing what’s going on in the world of crypto. I’ve seen people all over, especially on my Twitter feed, going crazy about the prospects of potential investment growth in crypto currencies. I’ve watched the NFT craze boom as people buy up all sorts of “jpegs”, some cheap and others mind-bogglingly expensive.

It feels like we are experiencing a modern gold rush, and the speculative energy and unstructured figure-it-out-as-you-go attitude feels like a recurrence of the Wild West.

Part of the reason for my lack of action was that because I’ve put all my eggs into my startup basket, I don’t have extra money to invest in crypto, or so I’ve told myself! Blockchain technology is for real and as I’ve been sitting and observing, it seems that things are beginning to settle and concrete opportunities are taking shape.

So there I was looking at what I needed to do to create my first NFT. I needed a wallet, but then I needed some crypto to pay “gas fees” (the cost of operating a transaction on a blockchain), and so I found myself having to actually take action.

My very first transaction was $20 worth of ADA, the crypto for the Cardano blockchain. Then I put in $20 into SOL, the crypto for Solana. Oh, and Coinbase gave me $5 of Bitcoin (BTC) for starting an account. So there it is, my first $40 investment of crypto.

(On a side note, another bold move I made as an aspiring entrepreneur is that I liquidated all of my investments in the stock market. ALL. OF. IT. I now own more crypto than actual stocks!)

I saw this Tweet today, and it reminded me that I took the right step yesterday to do what I should to be doing, to figure out this whole web3 thing.

Li Jin @ljin18

4. Use crypto products: learn by doing. Buy some ETH or SOL on an exchange, transfer it to a crypto wallet like @phantom or @MetaMask, and start using dapps: - Buy an NFT on @opensea or @MagicEden_NFT - Support crowdfunds on @viamirror - Swap tokens on @Uniswap or @SushiSwap

January 6th 2022

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Done. Done. And…now to find a “dapp” to dabble in (or build one myself)… 🤔

I personally am not as concerned about having crypto for the sake of investment growth, but to have some “capital” to spend on using blockchain technology. I’m working on a couple of web3 ideas that I hope to be able to write about here in the coming future. Stay tuned!

Finally, some thoughts:

• Getting started is still quite complicated. It’s probably still a bit early for mass adoption of all things blockchain.

• Things are very segmented, especially with a handful of large competing blockchain options out there. It feels like you need separate crypto and a crypto wallet for each one you interact with. It’s a lot to do in order to participate.

• Coinbase has definitely made it extremely easy to buy crypto. While I’m at it, here’s a link for $10 of Bitcoin if you set up your own Coinbase account, because why not? 😁

• This is exciting. It’s going to be fun!