While she does have a full-time job in Finance, Jade considers crypto a full-time gig. It was 2017 when she was bit by the blockchain bug. Everyone was talking about bitcoin. “No matter where I went in the office, at happy hour, on the news, it was always Bitcoin, Bitcoin,” Jade said. Money savvy, Jade had a brokerage account in her early 20s. When her friends were saving to buy shoes and handbags, she was paying off debt and student loans. Her first Bitcoin purchase was the max allowed of $750 on Coinbase. She bought a piece of the top and then promptly forgot about bitcoin as it went down 90%. Right before the halving of 2020, articles started popping up. With a bit more free time Jade started researching and investing. After some successful moves, she started looking more into DeFi and realized she wanted to get involved.
Jade devoted time to researching, yield farming, scanning discords, telegram, twitter, alpha chats, the whole world just took over. “I feel like an accidental content creator because I lost a lot of money in Luna,” Jade said. “It absolutely killed me to see all of these people suffering.” She always loved to write and journaling helped her process. She wrote an article called The Five Stages of Grief According to a Lunatic. It was a way for her to rationalize some of her losses. She did not expect the community to respond so positively to the article. Her DMs were flooded with thank yous and all-around positive feedback.
This helped her find a new path forward, writing and becoming involved in new communities, not just for investing, but backing up and learning more.
“Crypto is the only industry where you can go up to someone and say hi, my name is so and so can you tell me about your project?” And that is exactly what Jade did. She first went to Consensus to meet founders and ask questions. Jade heard so many interesting stories, it led her to the concept for her show, Behind the PFP. The crypto community is so hidden in their computers, she wanted to know who the people actually were. “I just wanted to tell those stories that were getting lost in the noise,” Jade said.
Not everyone is well known or a big name, but we can learn something from all of them and Jade wanted to tell those stories and “connect to that human element.”
She believes things happen for a reason, and when she chose to share her losses in crypto, Jade felt like she was sent on a new trajectory. The space is lacking in connection and compassion, and Jade might be the one to fill the void.
Crypto isn’t always up only, and that is part of the reason crypto communities have gained so much traction. People need a place to share their losses. “Not everyone has an outlet,” Jade said. “You have to have a safe space to talk about it and be willing to share it again.” Jade hopes that by doing so, she can add that feminine touch to crypto that is so very lacking. “I just want to find a way to share with the community and help them find the peace that it’s taken me a long time to find. But I’ve been able to find peace and I want to help share that with others.”
As for NFT communities, Jade is fond of BadKids and Kitaro. NFT communities are “definitely an experience that is very unique to Web3, which is weird. You would think you’d be able to do this everywhere, but I’ve been in networking groups before with different industries and it’s very stuffy. It’s very boring, it’s very dull. But these NFT groups, it’s just totally different.”
In the future, Jade continues to plan on growing Behind The PFP. She wants to share more of her journey, the good and the bad, and just be really authentic. “Like, this is me and this is really what an experience looks like. So that’s hopefully what I’m able to do,” Jade said.
You will also be able to see her as a guest star on The Next Crypto Gem, which airs this June.
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