Top 10 Craziest Moments from the Bull Market 🤪
Bidding on the U.S. Constitution, Elon Musk, denying $10M bids for a jpeg, and the best advice for buying a castle.
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Dear Bankless Nation,
A DAO placed a $40M bid to buy the U.S. Constitution.
Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey trolled the Ethereum Community.
Su Zhu was giving advice on how to buy a castle.
The whole Elon Musk thing…
Some crazy stuff happened in the last bull run.
You can’t make it up.
So we decided to bring in our resident meme lord, Michael Wong, for his newsletter debut to recap the craziest moments from the recent bull market.
It doesn’t disappoint.
- Bankless team
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WRITER WEDNESDAY
Bankless Writer: Michael Wong, Bankless Memelord
Top 10 Craziest Moments From The Bull Market 🤪
As the adage goes, everything is obvious in hindsight.
Looking back now, this past bull market almost seems like a fever dream 🤯
I pooled together some of the wildest things that happened this past 18 months.
Will we learn anything from it? Probably not.
Will it make us feel better? Also probably not.
Regardless, some crazy sh*t happened.
So, let’s recount the rollercoaster together.
#1. Raising $40M to buy the U.S. Constitution
Man, just how bored were we?
Usually, when a significant portion of the market doesn’t know what to do with all the money they’ve made, you should probably head for the exits.
Instead, I, and many of you, threw precious ETH at a ridiculous premise: thousands of internet strangers were going to buy a copy of the US Constitution.
It was close, and ultimately Citadel Ken rugged the kids.
But the real hero of the night even got her own fan cam.
#2. Tai Lopez Buys Radioshack to Shill DeFi Scam
In what sounds like a game of bull market madlibs, Great Value Martin Shkreli aka Tai Lopez made his entry into the crypto foray by forking Uniswap.
As the new owner of RadioShack (via bankruptcy), Lopez parasitically adopted the RadioShack brand to peddle forked DeFi products.
I realize none of those words are in the Bible, but to make things even more strange, Lopez’s team has recently attempted to “How do you do, fellow kids?” the RadioShack Twitter account into Crypto Twitter’s favor via painfully mid and unarguably crude sh*tposting.
3. Richerd Denies a $10M (2500 ETH) Bid for JPEG
Now, I’m too poor to even begin criticizing what a rich dude does with his money.
What I will point out is that when people are writing op-eds about shot-blocking $10M offers for a JPEG, and worse—there are people in the comments agreeing—it’s probably a decent time to at least consider kicking off the exit plan.
#4. Elon Enters the Chat
Bitcoin on the books, accepting BTC for Teslas, SNL, and pumping dog coins.
At this point, I don’t even know if it was all real.
In what would become a preview of his new drama with Twitter, Elon’s entry into crypto was sudden, exciting, and ultimately disappointing.
A pump fake for the bull market ages, Elon speedran through connecting red-hot Tesla with red-hot bitcoin, took that back, and of course satisfied himself by wielding his influence to pump Dogecoin.
Here’s the moment we should’ve sold it all:
#5. Su Zhu Shares Castle Buying Advice
There’s a lot to say about this man, and much of it has already been memed and analyzed to death on Twitter.
The one moment I want to point out that was the most hilarious in retrospect was when Su Zhu blessed the TL with advice to castle purchasers via a joke from Robert Leshner.
And though he admits he’s no castle expert, the man did have a good idea or two about domiciles in the long term 😂
It’s too bad he’ll never be able to live comfortably in either 🏡 nor 🛳 for a while.
#6. Loot, The .Txt Mania
Wow.
When dom released Loot one fateful summer night, the entire NFT game reached a fever pitch.
A list of in-game attributes and items. Free to mint. That’s it. That’s Loot.
So how the hell did we end up with 500 free-to-mint Loot derivative projects in a week?
It shows the power behind the idea that dom incepted with Loot, and likewise represents the foolhardy opportunism and hype that fuels so many runs and falls in crypto markets.
A spin-off token for the Loot economy called Adventure Gold even popped up, which at one point had over a $300M market cap.
#7. ETH Flag on Twitter
Jack never thinks of Ethereum, no, never. Not once.
The former Twitter CEO had popularized emoji hashtags (e.g. #bitcoin followed by a little orange coin). When TRON got its own hashtag, it was rumored that the privilege could be purchased. Then one morning, in a hilarious admission of brattiness by Jack, the #ETH community did get its own hashtag.
Except it wasn’t for Ethereans, it was for Ethiopians.
The Ethereum community responded in large by rallying around the circumstance and cheering on Ethiopia in the Olympic games that were taking place at the time.
#8. Unmasking Sifu / DaniGate
Ah, yes, DeFi 2.0. I haven’t heard that name in ages.
First, Dani and his amphibious 🐸 gang hit the timelines with a ferocious fury, ready to spread the “gospel” of their new religion Wonderland, a borrowing/lending/stable coin mechanism meant to take down Maker.
Dani clouted himself up by speaking like a visionary (spoiler: all vapor) and working with former crypto poster child, Andre Cronje.
Well, before long, the dominos started to fall and the facades started to fail.
Integral to the swift downfall of Wonderland was the bombastic uncovering of cofounder / partner Sifu, a known mega-scammer with connections to recently-famous-again Quadriga (in other words, was scamming right alongside Gerald Cotten).
More below.
I’ll hand it to them—Wonderland and MIM have not died nor rugged their users in significant ways (although I suppose it depends who you ask.)
#9. Do Kwon’s Attempt to Kill Dai
But Do Kwon can’t say the same.
Narrator: His attempts would prove to be a catastrophic failure of Madoff proportions.
I’ll be honest, part of what makes this so delicious is that Do Kwon specifically took on Bankless team members in his hubris-fueled crusade to kill $DAI.
In the end, Luna, $UST, and Terra would all death spiral and take many prominent players, let alone tens and thousands of innocent retail investors, to the drain.
A major punctuation mark to one of the craziest bull markets.
10. Bukele Buys Bitcoin for El Salvador on Twitter Spaces
At the height of the “laser eyes” movement sits this core memory of mine. I was traveling home on an airplane and reading crazed tweets that the president of El Salvador was about to make bitcoin legal tender in his nation.
Then, he joined a Twitter Spaces with Nic Carter while on the Congress floor to talk about it live 😱
One of the coolest, wildest, and most memorable experiences in crypto also is indicative of the hype of the bull market and its infectious energy.
If you can see your profile picture in the recording below, you won.
Conclusion
What did we learn….?
Probably nothing 😅
At the very least, this walk down bull market memory lane could serve to remind us that we should be more mindful during market runs.
Some things are only obvious in hindsight, but let’s hope we can all do our best to avoid next bull market’s Pixelmons.
Til next time, stay solvent lads.
Action steps
🤪 Reflect on some of the crazy things that happened—they could be top signals
🤓 Review how degen-proof your portfolio is
Author Bio
Michael Wong is the Cultural Correspondent at Bankless. Memes, fashion, NFTs, and jobs. Down bad but fresh as hell. Follow @wongisrite on Twitter.
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Ah Hahaha! #7 took me for awhile to get that. Eth with Ethiopia flag together, didn't know short form for Eth was Ethiopia. Hilarious!