How I Made Thousands From NFT FOMO in 2022

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You’re reading that title and you’re groaning. You’re probably groaning so hard that you’re almost farting and maybe shidding a little. But fret not, this isn’t what you think it is. I’m not sitting on a rented yacht with a monkey image. In fact, none of that money even exists in my wallet, anymore. But I did do it. And it’s never going to be possible to do it again.

It started after I returned to my previous job. I didn’t have a good phone, and the car I got was already seeing issues (although, one could say that owning a car is just compounding issues, forever). To top it all off, I was wearing glasses that were nearly two decades old, and my PC had failing hdds.

I needed a quicker solution than saving money for probably a couple of years.

Flash back and then forward to Twitter in 2020, or was it 2022?

It was 2022.

Right before the company was bought out by Elon Musk.

I was drawing these things by hand in Photoshop using a template I created myself, and it was called “Catgirl Pixel Club.”

The first idea, was that I would just draw these things and upload them as NFTs, and maybe someone would decide that, like the monkey images, these were worth a million dollars. Laughable now, but, when you need things, like, the ability to see more clearly with your eyeballs, the limits to what you might do become smaller. And ever-smaller still, when those things you need become more dire.

So I was drawing these things, uploading them onto the Polygon network, for free, and it wasn’t until a bit later that I found out that, nobody wanted to buy any NFTs on the free Polygon network. But that was of no consequence to me, at the time.

I was making stuff! Who cares!

Now, this did come with some knee-jerk consequences. I had some friends on Twitter with whom’st I talked to daily. I think I knew them for … maybe three or four years? Once I changed my name to “cmdr_nova” and started uploading this stuff to my timeline, they turned on a heel and acted like they had no idea who I was. Screamed at me on Discord about how horrible and bad I was for doing all of this, and ghosted me on the spot. Never spoke to me again.

This wasn’t the beginning of my distrust of people online, but it sure was a piece of that stone.

But then, one day on a break at work, something crossed my Twitter timeline.

The official Twitter account wanted to feature some NFTs by creators of different communities, rather than just NFTs created by regular dudes.

I just so happened to fit that bill.

The official Twitter account DMed me.

They asked me to upload some new CPC avatars to the Ethereum network, rather than Polygon.

I obliged and dropped 400 USD out of my own pocket for the privilege to do so.

They bought one.

Then I started drawing more, and more, and more. I took custom commissions, I posted in Discords, people on Twitter were sending these things into the stratosphere, and I was receiving congratulations and death threats. I had people jumping in my DMs across multiple social networks telling me things like, “You’re a straight up hustler DAMN!” and, “FUCK YOU!”

Suffice to say, people bought in.

After … I think, three hours? I cashed out.

I siphoned it off little by little until my share in Catgirl Pixel Club was worth nothing, and gradually, the trading stopped. I think other users traded around 30,000 USD worth until they lost interest.

After the dust settled, and miraculously, nobody questioned me about what had happened, I bought all of the stuff I didn’t have, and had needed for over a decade.

Six months later NFTs as a concept began to sharply decline.

Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter.

Everyone forgot about Catgirl Pixel Club.

But I got an iPhone, a Macbook, new glasses, and a new wardrobe, and all it took was a few hours of pretending I really gave a huge shit about NFTs. And, people still send me random NFTs here and there for free on the OpenSea network. Sometimes I drop what’s left in my wallet on weird ones thinking, “This could be worth a million dollars.” But they won’t be.

That’s just the gambler inside of me that will probably never go away, as a side effect of having interacted with the NFT world.

I play gacha games now.