Eric Hackney, 38, was out of work and was annoyed by watching others get rich, and when a few drinks started to take effect, he thought, who cares?

Then I spent $500 on something called an "ASS coin"

“Screw it, look what happens,” Hackney thought.

ASS, officially known as Australian Safe Shepherd, is a little-known virtual currency. YOLO (you only live once) and FOMO (fear of missing out, both internet buzzwords) have transformed cryptocurrencies from jokes to soaring assets and now plummeting, typical of these strange financial times.

Here's the thing.

Flipping through his high school yearbook at midnight in his Florida kitchen, musing on the “what ifs,” Hackney was not just another dreamer looking to get rich quick.

Buyers, Creators and Promoters

He is also a character in a drama about money that is either laugh or die. The arena where these characters strut is decentralized finance, or DeFi, where even the most ignorant person can create a new digital token — a “shitcoin,” in popular parlance — with some ready-made code in perhaps 10 minutes, without the need for supercomputers or complex math.

And just like that, Eric Hackney, a husband, father of two and former bartender from Brittany, became the owner of 20 billion ASS coins with his $500 investment.

The rich are getting richer, with stakes in high-tech companies, private equity, blank-check companies (SPACs), high-priced art, Canadian lumber, Palm Beach waterfront, Greenwich hedge funds, and more.

Eric Hackney, who could only watch from outside the circle, also wanted to get some benefits.

So Hackney became a buyer in exotic financial markets, a thrill-seeking amateur financer, one of millions surfing the markets, fueled by social media, on the Robinhood trading app and on various meme-like products.

In the past few days, greed for wealth has met reality, and all kinds of dazzling markets have begun to collapse. Cryptocurrencies, SPACs, technology stocks, Wood Sister’s ARK Innovation Fund, the prices of various assets have fallen, and some of the declines are very dramatic.

The question on people’s minds from Wall Street to Reddit chat rooms is whether this is just a minor bump in the road or the beginning of something much worse?

Hackney witnessed GameStop’s run-up in February when Reddit users humiliated hedge fund professionals with a short squeeze. For a moment he thought he had gotten lucky, only to have his fortunes blown away the next moment.

He later made a fortune through Dogecoin, which was created as a joke in 2013 and then really skyrocketed.

Yet that won’t stop Harnik from playing, and he continues to try and keep playing along with countless others who have been brought into this strange financial world by various forces, including but not limited to the coronavirus, iPhones, the pandemic economy, boredom, the Federal Reserve, YOLO, “stimulus,” FOMO, TikTok, free trading, Musk, greed, Twitter, and more.

It takes more than just buyers; you also need creators, like a guy in Thailand who just created another digital will-o'-the-wisp, "SuperDoge."

We’ll call him Fab, and like many in this game, starting with Bitcoin’s creator, everyone prefers to remain anonymous.

Fab, a Canadian from Vancouver, lived in Trang An Beach, Thailand, south of Bangkok, where he dreamed of turning SuperDoge — featuring a cartoon version of the Shiba Inu as a superhero mascot — into a global brand akin to Marvel Comics.

Finally, a third persona enters the picture: the promoter. For example, a former investment bank trader who goes by the pseudonym Pablo Herman. In his selfie-style animated videos, Herman explains how to turn $1,000 into $1 million in cryptocurrency trading in a year.

The people who make coins, the “creators,” pay people like Herman $5,000 to $10,000 to insert ads for their cryptocurrencies. The brazen promotions are a hallmark of the “shitcoin” hype cycle: mint, promote, get in, get out, preferably before those who have already fled.

At times, it seemed like a good old-fashioned penny stock pump and dump, a maneuver known in cryptocurrency trading as a “rug pull.”

These participants, buyers, creators, and promoters are all rolling in the dream of wealth in cryptocurrency. Some are still waiting for the next opportunity, another Doge Shiba Inu, who only needs another mysterious tweet from Musk to inspire people's animal spirits, and maybe they can make a fortune?

Come, let’s laugh together.

Even accounting for wild swings in cryptocurrency prices led by Bitcoin on Wednesday, one DeFi token, Meme, has surged more than 3,000% since August; PooCoin, has doubled in a month; and SafeMoon, which recently received support from internet celebrity David Scott Portnoy, is up more than 56,000% since its launch in early March.

Nick Carter, co-founder of research firm Coin Metrics and general partner at Castle Island Ventures, said of the proliferation of new cryptocurrencies, “This is more radical capitalism than we’ve ever seen.”

According to data from Dune Analytics, at last count, nearly 10,000 new games were released this year alone.

"This is global, nonstop gaming. And it's completely unregulated," Carter said.

Epiphany

Eric Hackney recalls his epiphany after epiphany in his pursuit of wealth, starting from the bar to GameStop to ASS Coin. It was a long and painful journey, but it was indeed full of heart-warming moments.

It was sometime in late January, and Hackney was at home in Tampa, weighing a bottle of wine between his fingers as a television show drew to a close.

He and his wife lost their jobs last year when bars and restaurants closed. Wanted ads? Seriously, $9 an hour?

Lately, he's been trying his luck with the Robin Hood program.

That evening, Hackney was looking for hot new things on Robinhood. That’s when he noticed Dogecoin, which had gone up in price and was still climbing.

He texted his friend John, why did this happen?

John replied, I don't know what it is!

Hackney didn’t know. But he bought some Dogecoins at 4 cents, and then the price suddenly rose to 8 cents, doubling his investment.

Oh my god, he thought. He texted John again, Come on, fuck it!

More than three months later, Hackney glanced at Robinhood again. He had sold Dogecoin a long time ago because he hated the wild price fluctuations, but he noticed that it had soared to 70 cents in early May.

How sad it was, he felt he had missed another chance to make a fortune. He began to listen to music and immersed himself in darkness. He vowed never to play again.

His wife tried to convince him, how could you not understand.

Understand what? Hackney replied.

People nowadays like stupid things. They don't care what it is, they just follow the crowd.

“I had an epiphany,” Hackney recalls. “I realized the money was in the shitcoins that popped up late at night.”

He’s talking about cryptocurrencies like Shiba Papa, OMG, SafeMoon, Baby Shiba, SpaceCorgi, taccat, shitcoins that make Bitcoin and even Dogecoin look like old-fashioned dollars.

“This is crazy,” Hackney kept thinking, “but this is reality.”

This is SUPERDOGE

Below the homepage stood SuperDoge, the self-proclaimed crypto superhero, wearing a red cape in the blue of Superman, with the chiseled body of people's favorite Kryptonian, and a wolf-like head with slanted eyes. On the chest, framed in yellow, was a large red "d".

This is the cartoon world of creator Fab, who created the SUPERDOGE token. He was once a shareholder in 29 bars and restaurants in Phuket, Thailand, a number that has dropped to 23 since the pandemic lockdown.

He insists that cryptocurrency trading has brought him back to his old ways, but also brought about some changes.

“I had a couple of 10xs, and lo and behold, boom, I was back in the game,” Fab said.

After trading other people's coins, Fab thought he should create his own shitcoin. It was so simple, this week someone created a new cryptocurrency in under an hour.

SuperDoge only offers a limited number of coins in pre-sale, mainly to give early buyers a chance to get in on the game before everyone else. Whoever clicks the buy button faster gets it.

Fab and his team make money by getting 5% of the total token supply in 6 months. Another way to make money is to invest your own money early. So far, he has invested more than $150,000 in his coins.

Many of these new coins have been shuttling back and forth on unregulated, automated interfaces like UniSwap or PancakeSwap, which match buyers and sellers without centralized custody.

On these platforms, users can effortlessly create a market and generate coins.

“People are doing this because it’s an opportunity to make a lot of money quickly,” said Carter of blockchain venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures. “It’s a fantastic, thousand-fold return possible. Of course, which of these coins will still be around in three years?”

"Absolutely not."

If Fab has his way, SuperDoge will be an exception, save for this week's debacle. He says his idea is big -- as big as a global brand. A comic book, a webtoon, an action figure, or a movie.

This man has big dreams.

“We want to be the wonder of the cryptocurrency world,” Fab said.

It doesn’t cost a lot to produce these new coins, especially by Wall Street standards. But there is one key factor: the savvy creators will be good at generating hype.

Fab said he spent $150,000 on community influencers, marketing and advertising in the 20 days after SuperDoge was created. The cost of listing the coin on exchanges was about $25,000.

The goal is to create a wonderful, painful, fear of missing out and to hype it up as much as possible. It's a way to make quick profits and losses, and to do things that everyone agrees are probably unethical.

Fab said SuperDoge is legal and that 2% of every transaction is donated to partner charities. It has its own website and several accounts on social media. Even before its launch, the coin was promoted through ads on Facebook and 4chan, and efforts to reach out to investor groups on Telegram.

Fab has also hired TikTok and YouTube influencers, paid for promoted tweets, and partnered with news media.

After launching in late April, SuperDoge had been on a tear, but has now fallen back to earth.

Internet Celebrities

Herman, 38, has more than 370,000 followers on TikTok.

Promoter Herman, howling in a video, told fans, "What happened to the dogs, the Akitas and the Shiba Inus?"

Cut to a scene where he jokingly wipes tears as he explains what Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's donation of more than 50 trillion Shiba Inu coins means to the crypto world.

Herman charges anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 to promote content on his account.

How much they’re willing to pay promoters like Herman could tell you which coins are more real than others, if “real” can be tied to shitcoin.

In the unregulated world of DeFi, money can buy influence, and these influencers drive attention, helping to spark interest and drive up prices and trading volumes.

“If someone is paying a lot of money to have 10 influencers on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter to do this, that means there’s a lot of support behind this coin,” Herman said. “That’s like the tip of the iceberg. What you don’t see is the bottom 90%.”

Until recently, Herman held a traditional portfolio of stocks and real estate. He started TikTok in January this year, and the desire to analyze cryptocurrencies prompted him to join the game.

He began gambling, as he puts it, a few hundred dollars at a time, mostly on obscure coins. He said his portfolio is up 1,063% since February and about 70% in the past 30 days alone, at least until the crash.

“Basically, I thought, why not spend $100 or $50, it might go up,” Herman said. “You repeatedly tell your audience this is pure gambling. They come back and say, I made 500 times, or I turned $3,000 into $100,000, and that’s a common story.”

Decentralization

In DeFi, all the old barriers to entry no longer exist. A decade ago, creating a viable token meant convincing a centralized exchange like Coinbase or Binance to list your coin. But as the word literally implies, DeFi is decentralized.

Do you also think that no one can control Bitcoin?

All of this raises the possibility that scammers can get away with it.

The classic strategy is to “pull the rug.” Launch a coin, pay people to promote it, and once the crowds pile in and the price goes up, you get out as soon as possible. Fabr and others say that coins with no “lock” in liquidity are a red flag, and that the lock makes it impossible for the creator to cut off liquidity and flee.

SuperDoge is locked.

Not too long ago, if you told professionals that regular people would soon be betting real money on influencer stocks touted in online forums, YouTube SPACs, Tiktok-obsessed shitcoins, and other stuff, professionals would have laughed at you.

What now.

Has everything changed?

That said, what has happened over the past year has turned small retail investors, often viewed by professionals as “dumb money,” into a powerful force. For better or worse, Robinhood, DeFi, and everything else may have changed things forever.

"We are tired of the traditional financial system," said Rami Bekhit, a 27-year-old engineer who used to watch TV and play video games after get off work. Now he works from 7 a.m. to about 3 p.m., then starts a second shift from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Since 2017, he has built a portfolio of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple, which has worked well enough to buy a house in Ewing, New Jersey — with five bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, two living rooms, a sun room and a basement.

Bekhiet, who also invests in Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Elongate, said market volatility like Wednesday’s is an opportunity to buy more cryptocurrencies at low prices.

On his dining room table, two open laptops and a 32-inch monitor glow, along with a ring light that allows him to shoot videos for his TikTok account.

In the corner opposite the kitchen, behind thick curtains, there was an ironing board.

Welcome to the trading floor of the 21st century.

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