Collie Pixel's Web3-Blockchain Origin Story

Cosmin Joint NFT - Collie Budz owns one

The Cosmic Joints were my first collection of digital art I minted on the blockchain. It was a simple project just "for the art". No utility or community included. Back then, no one cared about those words. It was a digital art, flea market, all on a handful of blockchains. Mostly on Ethereum but also on others like Tezos and Polygon. Folks were buying jpgs, pngs, and gifs just cuz they thought were cool, looked cool or had some form of cultural relevance to the time, ie. Rare Pepes, Jack Dorsey's first tweet, etc...

I had an abundance of time an energy at the beginning of 2020. At the end of the year in 2019, I was working as an animator for a well known firearms accessory brand, producing content for social media, animating commercials and product call-outs for Amazon. I was their only video content producer. The contract was going to be renewed in March with a nice 3 month break for me. Then a series of nearly catastrophic health issues hit me followed by Covid. It was a great time diversify my skill set. I did so by diving into crypto, NFTs, smart contracts and coding.

My skills as an animator along with my bit of web building/coding experience suited this world nicely. I caught on quick and felt at home in the culture. I learned Solidity, or should say, I will forever be learning Solidity. Not because it is hard, but because my journey into such things is a constant learning pursuit. This is how my over active brain keeps its hooks in deep.

My focus shifted from creating art to coding smart contracts to building Web3 capable web pages with ReactJS to building NFT products and leading+building projects.

My skillset, diversified. I was now in full time in Web3 by 2021.

Having the technical knowledge click, and getting better at it all rapidly, I saw that so much more is capable with this new tech. Day trading and selling digital art was awesome but it was only the outer peel of huge onion. Seeing the virtues of self-sovereign finance up-close and personal plus the equity Web3 has the potential to give peoples in all corners of the globe, I was most definitely all-in.

Being a creator, working independently and a freelancer, I love that Web3 is a framework for the Creators Economy and so much more. Learning the inner workings of De-Fi, Decentralized Finance, taught me much about managing my own finances. I am the kind of person who likes the idea of knowing where my "money" is. For instance, you have know idea where your funds are being used once deposited into your fractional reserve banking system. I also geek out about most everything I have a modicum of interest in. Investing and using my income to generate more income, have always been a pursuit of interest for me, but the traditional finance system has left lots of financial instruments and markets out of my middle class income bracket hands.

I will explain the workings of De-Fi and how I leveraged the system to be used as a high interest savings account. For a bit I was farming yield quite a bit, on platforms like Pancakeswap. This is basically manually compounding your interest in real time, as it is paid out daily and sometimes more often.

Mention anything like De-Fi right now and folks that don't know how it works typically jump to the latest headline seen on mainstream media. Folks like Sam Bankman-Fried & Bernie Madoff have generated many side eyed glares. Most people don't understand that SBF was not a crypto guy. Concepts and platforms like decentralized crypto exchanges, de-fi and crypto lending flash-loans are all based on code and smart contracts designed to retain liquidity on a transparent block-chain. The human element removed from the agreements made, run on smart contracts.

Besides my NFT pursuits, and De-Fi investing, I have spent the last 3 years learning technical analysis. I have used this knowledge plus my interest in crypto currency fundamentals and news to start building small accounts into bigger ones. I am not wildly profitable right now but am doing OK staying afloat in this crypto ice age.

The crypto ice age is why I've ventured into day trading Forex, or the foreign currency exchange. This has nothing to do with Web3 but a market is a market and the foreign currency market is the most liquid in the world. You can buy and sell currency pairs such as the Euro-USDollar pair. The value of the world's currencies fluctuates with quite a bit of volatility. Trading it has been fun and I seem to be doing OK so far. I am currently participating in a prop-firm assessment where if I am successful trading a demo account (not real money), in their time frame, under their parameters, they will fund an account for you to trade. The firm gets to keep a percentage of your profits and you pay for the assessment. This is how folks like FTMO make money. Most folks fail their assessments & those that don't make money for the firm, using the firm's capital.

I don't do one thing, full time right now. I am excited to see what serendipitous projects come with my hustle and learning in 2023.

Collie.Pixels

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