It’s 3 am here in New York City. I get an e-mail from an old acquaintance. One I certainly wasn’t expecting. The e-mail came from Jeremy Ryan aka NFT Demon aka Jack Hoff, a mystifying, yet surprisingly also transparent figure who had grown to prominence in blockchain virtually overnight. But before we get into the numbers let’s just go over how I came to know this eccentric character.
It was 2022. I thought I knew all of the key players in the NFT market. I had been deeply invested in BAYC, Azuki, Doodles, Pudgy Penguins, among others all within days of mint and long before they took off. I had bought a Beeple piece long before his massive sale at Sothebys, the only thing that would cement him as the top NFT artist in the world. I knew hundreds of small artists.
Then out of nowhere everyone started talking about NFT Demon. A figure I hadn’t heard of. And the journalist, as well as investor in me wanted to know why. So I did a little research and found out he had literally come from nowhere. This was his second week in NFTs and I had already heard of him from a dozen or so people. His meteoric rise to become one of the most well known NFT artists in the world and also the most followed by celebrities was quicker than anything I had ever seen. And within weeks it was confirmed multiple celebrities including Eminem chose no other artist when choosing NFTs on BSC. Before anyone knew who he was he had somehow dominated one of the largest chains at the time for NFTs and become a household name within the community.
But even more bizarre was the email. He told me he had started a memecoin with another individual who had rugged it. He assured me that the other individual was out of talking, the LP was burned, and the contract renounced, facts I would later verify as true. He stated that the community was too unique for him to cut his losses. That he had already gotten Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Gabriel Iglesias, Lady Gaga, and even Burger King to follow the Twitter page (something I would later verify was true but wasn’t surprising given his celebrity clientele). He said he could use a little spark and asked me to write an article on it.
To be fair it was already long past when I would normally go to sleep but when someone of his stature makes a request it’s at least worth looking into. So I went to the website and joined the Telegram. What immediately struck out at me was how engaged the community was. People were optimistic and putting in work in a multitude of ways. People believed in NFT Demon and his leadership. But they also believed in the token. So I thought maybe there’s something here. That was, of course, until I checked the chart. It had already been over a week and it sat at just $40,000 market cap after a 100% pump which is generally a sign of impeding dump. I sent him a message and said I can’t write an article about such a poorly performing token particularly not at the top and then I went to bed.
Later that morning I woke up with a response. He told me he understood my concern but there was something special there. He said he couldn’t necessarily explain it but he knew this wasn’t the top. I responded back to keep me in the loop but won’t lie I thought he was full of it. He fell off, I thought, and his email was a pathetic attempt to use media contacts he knew had respect for him to pump the token so he could dump it. After all most memecoins are pump and dumps and he had reached out over a token that had gone nowhere. NFT Demon had lost his touch, I thought, what a shame from one of the most well known NFT artists in the world, but a testament to how far the NFT market had fallen. I was wrong.
That email was over a month ago. I thought nothing of it and assumed Belieber and NFT Demon had fallen off. That is until I got another email from him a few days ago. “I hope you bought in”, it said, “if not you should have known better to fade me”. And suddenly I was back on the website. It’s worth noting the website had been redesigned and looked a hundred times better than the previous one. According to NFT Demon the website was created, free of charge, by a community member. Who also happened to speak no English and used Google translate not only for the website but to communicate virtually all day.
Then I looked at the chart. And I was amazed what I saw. Week by week Belieber just went higher and higher. As all of the large memecoins, as well as Bitcoin and all altcoins, had lost significant numbers over the previous several weeks, Belieber, on the larger picture, had gone nothing but up. At the time it had sat at $400,000 market cap. Ten times higher than a month prior. Not extraordinary gains, I thought, but when compared with everything else including Bitcoin, all altcoins, and every major memecoin I could think of, it was smoking everything.
How is it, I thought, this token could not only remain stable for over a month which is equivalent to multiple years in this market where less than one percent of tokens make it past their first couple of days, but also go up. Consistently. To call me intrigued would be an understatement. I was downright flabbergasted. The journalist in me had to know more. So I took a deep dive into the holders, sales, and community and I suddenly realized we had a sleeping giant on our hands.
Let’s start with the holders and sales. In this I did a deep analysis. Who bought in the beginning? Who held the largest wallets and what were their patterns. And this became equally as surprising as the fact the token didn’t die. In fact I had never seen such a thing before. Every single wallet holding over 2% of the supply had bought in at much lower market caps. They were all five to ten times their initial purchase some as much as fifty to one hundred times their initial investment. They had all bought in the beginning. This wasn’t surprising at all. What was unprecedented was that not a single one had sold a single token. No way was that possible but I was looking at it in front of my own eyes.
And then I turned to the community and things became even more shocking. Over a month later and the community was still just as, if not more active as they were the first day I checked. All day every day raiding on Telegram. Constantly recruiting new people. And they all truly believed in the token. The day one holders all swore they weren’t selling until they were millions in profit and they were certainly willing to work for it. Statements backed up by what I saw with my own eyes. And I realized something. NFT Demon was right on day one. Something was very different about this community. In terms of engagement they were smoking tokens with ten times their Telegram members and even more than that in market cap.
And while it’s clear they all consider NFT Demon a leader, what’s equally as surprising is that in recent days he has not been as active as he prepares for a massive surgery. I promised him I would have something written before his surgery and this article will probably drop quite shortly before. But despite his understandable lack of participation, the community still respects and believes in both him and, more importantly, the token. So they’re leading themselves even without him there all of the time to guide him. Posting hundreds of shill messages a day on Twitter. Targeting dozens of influencers in the space.
And it’s paying off. Just yesterday most tokens fell fifty to seventy percent. And while Belieber wasn’t immune, it only fell twenty percent. And they large holders all held. Meanwhile, over the weekend, a mysterious whale donated 5% of the supply to the “community wallet” worth over $22,000 at the time. Just a day in the Telegram and you start to see why the biggest question isn’t even how they’ve remained so stable and even consistently gone up for so long? The biggest question is how they haven’t made it even further yet? And while the answer to that isn’t necessarily clear one thing is. Belieber is a sleeping giant. And this community is destined to make sure it wakes up. A recipe that virtually no tokens can still say with actions not just words over a month later. But one that also always ends in massive success. Like the community likes to say. It’s not a matter of if but when!
