On Thursday, our friends at NasAcademy hosted a crypto dinner in BGC. It was my first time at a meetup of any kind in over 2 years, and I had honestly forgotten how efficient these things can be. In my mind, the ideal meetup accomplishes three things: (1) you can catch up with old contacts, (2) you can pull off agenda-driven micro-meetings with partners, and (3) you can hear about interesting projects from the newcomers. Because people are expected to be mobile during the meetup, each of these activities happens in bite-sized 10-minute chunks, and if you’re doing it right you’ve talked to everyone in 2 hours tops.

It may come as a surprise to some readers to know that I’m not really comfortable in social gatherings. I still have to motivate myself just to show up sometimes. On the other hand, nearly every major career milestone I’ve had can be traced back to one of these meetups, so I really should stop complaining. An obvious example: it was my regular attendance at Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco in 2017 that eventually led to me becoming one of the world’s first NFT artists with the CurioCards collection. More broadly: nearly every cofounder and investor I’ve ever worked with was first introduced to me at a meetup of some kind. The moral of the story: just show up. If you’re consistent and focused, you can use meetups to accelerate your agenda in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible online.

There’s a saying we like repeating in the crypto world: timing the market is less important than time in the market. What does that mean? Well, we spend a lot of energy arguing over when the correct time to get into crypto is. Is now a good week to buy in? Should I wait for another dip? Am I too late to ride the wave? Although these questions are good, they’re often far less important than simply buying, holding, and participating in the community. Even with everything that’s happened in DeFi, NFTs, P2E, etc., the dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin, and the dominant smart contract platform is still Ethereum. Why? Because time is the one resource that is truly scarce, and even with tons of leverage and every trick in the staking-rewards handbook, young projects still have a hard time overcoming a decade of positioning. (In other words: HODL > BTFD.)

Does this mean that newbies don’t have a chance in this market? Heck no! With so many new ideas out there, there’s always an opportunity to ride a new project to life-changing multiples. Just this week, for example, we saw $GMT2 break the $1B mark in daily trade volume, making it one of the top 5 most traded cryptos in the spot market. It’s not the first time either — it’s been doing that regularly since it launched on March 1st on Binance Launchpad. $GMT2 (Green Metaverse Token) is the governance token of Stepn, a move-to-earn project on Solana that turns your walking and running activities into crypto rewards. The token has gained by about 3000% over the last 60 days. Even the fitness buffs are finding alpha!

I haven’t been plugging this enough, but my cryptocurrency beginner course at Nas Academy (https://nasacademy.ph/luisygg) is online now and accepting signups! I got to see the finished course materials recently and am pretty proud of the output. We’re giving away scholarships for the course in partnership with PDAX, so if you sign up at https://nasacademy.com/PDAX_Scholarship_Form, you can access the course for free, without paying the regular 1,250 pesos fee!

Sorry for the shorter newsletter today folks, but I’ll make up for it with something nice and meaty soon. Or maybe I’ll even catch you all at the next meetup ;)