“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow—that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Today—a story of $42,435. And growing.
It’s the story of patience, from a Tolstoy perspective.
Not the lazy patience. Rather, the persevering patience—when you want to call it quits, toss in what remains of your chips, and just… walk away.
Thing is, I never felt the desire to walk away.
I wanted to hang tight, through the worst of it, because I knew brighter days lay ahead. The worst of it didn’t even faze me. I sort of mentally slept through it and went about my life…
Our topic here is crypto. But more pertinently, crypto relative to sitting on your hands when the rest of the world is fidgety and fleeing.
The crypto in question is a project on the Solana blockchain called Graphite Protocol. And note, this is not a recommendation to go buy Graphite—that ship sailed.
Instead, this is one of those “lessons learned” stories because I regularly field questions from people asking me how I steel myself to ill winds and why I’m such an investment packrat. And I am… I am an investment packrat, meaning that I buy the stocks and cryptocurrencies of companies and projects for which I see a vibrant future.
And then I hold.
And I hold some more.
And then I forget I’m holding because, by design, I don’t pay attention to my portfolio every day. Or every week. Or even every month.
Which gets to the “steel yourself against ill winds.”
Those winds don’t especially bother me. I’ve lived through every crisis on Wall Street since 1987’s Black Monday. Over the decades, I’ve learned that:
- Not all stocks (and not all crypto projects) will survive, so I am prepared mentally for that, but the good ones will bounce back and keep climbing. And…
- Projects, particularly crypto, that are in the doldrums today can suddenly come upon a gale force wind that propels them higher at breakneck speed.
Which is I why I like being an investment packrat.
I feel comfortable owning certain investments for the long haul and, so, I buy them and then go about my life and hold them for the long haul.
And that brings us to $42,435.
Back in the spring of 2022, I snapped up a project I’d wanted to own in the non-fungible token space. NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital artworks) were hot at the time, but a project known as Taiyo Robotics had come down in price a bit, and Solana, the token in which Taiyo was priced was down as well.
So I bought a Taiyo and staked it—that is, I “deposited” it at a particular online site, where I would collect what is effectively an interest payment. But instead of getting paid in cash or even Solana coins, I earned tokens called Graphite Protocol, which were going to be used as a payment method for various services on the Graphite platform.
But to be honest, what I really cared about was putting my money to work in a project controlled by a blockchain developer known as “Solport Tom.” He had stepped in and saved the original iteration of Taiyo when the original founders “rugged” the project, meaning they abandoned the project and absconded with the money they’d raised.
Tom stepped in with a plan to turn Taiyo into a real project with real revenue streams. He had the background to accomplish that, so I had faith that holding a Taiyo would ultimately pay off. I’d just need to be patient.
This past spring, Tom and Graphite partnered with one of the hottest meme coins in crypto—a project known as Bonk. I won’t wade too deeply into the weeds, but I will say that they partnered with Bonk on a project called letsBONK.fun, a launchpad for other meme coins (a hugely popular corner of the cryptosphere). Graphite, which owns 40% of letsBONK.fun, provides the technical infrastructure for the platform.
As such, Graphite earns some of the fees that letsBONK generates and then uses those fees to buy back Graphite tokens on the open market and burn them, basically permanently erasing them from existence.
The numbers are large and growing.
In the last week of June, Graphite bought 316 Solana worth of tokens… or about $47,400.
By the middle of July, the buyback had reached more than 3,183 Solana, or about $515,000.
Graphite’s team calculates that because of the ramp in demand for services on letsBONK.fun, the project could be burning upwards of $650,000 worth of Graphite every week.
Granted, that’s entirely dependent on activity at letsBONK.fun, and who knows how that plays out going forward. Though I will say that the platform has already generated $10.6 million in revenue since launching in late April, and as of mid-July was doing more than $1 million a day in fee volume. And it has captured more than 55% of the launchpad market for meme coins, doubling the next closest competitor, Pump.fun, which has been massively popular over the last year or so.
The point here is that Graphite Protocol tokens were trading in the $0.03 range in April.
On the day that I am writing this, they’ve touched a high of $3.96… a 12,200% return in less than three months.
Which is where my patience paid off.
All those Graphite Tokens I’ve collected over the last three years were worth about $345 in April.
Today, they’re worth $42,435.
I’ve not sold. And I don’t plan on selling until Graphite climbs to between $7 and $10 per token, which would imply a value of between $80,000 and $115,000.
Will the token reach those levels?
I can’t say.
But I can be patient a little longer.
We’re in the midst of a very bullish moment in crypto.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and others are flying.
Meme coins are hot hot hot, with people launching new ones multiple times per day. They’re primarily using letsBONK.fun to do so, which means ongoing fees for Graphite and an ongoing burn mechanism that will keep taking big slugs of Graphite out of the market permanently. That just serves to drive Graphite’s price increasingly higher.
And as a side note, letsBONK is, as I pointed out, tied to the meme coin Bonk, one of the most important meme coins in crypto. Its price has been surging too, up about 400%, because of the growing popularity of the letsBONK platform.
Thing is, I have about 750 million Bonk, all awarded to me for free over the last few years through airdrops and staking… meaning that along with my suddenly large load of Graphite, I have $30,000 worth of Bonk that cost me nothing.
God, I love crypto… and patience.
