Stephen’s* first brush with crypto in 2016 felt like a ticket to lasting wealth. By 2021, he was all in. But when the market crashed, it took everything with it.
In this story, he talks about how his decisions wrecked his finances, strained his relationships and forced him to rebuild from nothing.
As Told To Toheeb
If you were my friend in 2016, you’d know how much I liked high-risk investments. You might even call it gambling.
And if you’d asked me about it, I probably would have said something like, “It’s not deep. You just need money to earn more money.”
This thinking drove many of my financial decisions, especially after I discovered Bitcoin.
If this had happened at any other time, I might’ve ignored this new, shiny way people made money. But I had just gotten a pharmacy degree and was open to new things. And the thing was, I didn’t want to practice unless I needed to.
So, when a friend’s brother invited me to join a trading group, I decided to take the plunge, even though I didn’t fully understand how cryptocurrency worked.
I found a quick workaround, though: I decided, very smartly, to avoid trading. Instead, I bought Bitcoin and sold it to people at a small markup. It was a functional system, but not a very profitable one. I ultimately decided to focus on my pharmacy degree and try to get a real job.
The first act was over.
Three years later, in 2019, I crossed paths with crypto again. See, I needed money and a break. I spent most of my days as a medical sales rep on the road and often thought there had to be more to look forward to.
I got my wish.
A friend told me about a coin called XIO, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to invest some of the money I was earning into it. I dipped in very cautiously, putting ₦50k in the XIO token. Shortly after, it began mooning, which is crypto parlance for coins or tokens whose value consistently goes up.
I bought the XIO token on Uniswap — a decentralised exchange — and, as a result of this activity, Uniswap gave me 400 units of its native token, UNI. Altogether, my XIO and UNI were worth ₦500k. You have to remember that I invested ₦50k in this.
I loved this outcome so much that my brain lit up. It almost felt like free money. My mind worked overtime trying to figure out how I could turn this into a consistent stream of income.
I got a break.
The people who developed the XIO announced an airdrop to reward users, and as a result, more people started buying the token, driving up its price. I earned approximately ₦1.5m from this project’s sudden rise in value.
For context, I was earning ₦100k/month from my day job. I’d made 15x my salary without doing half the work. Things like this flip something in you. The show had to go on, and I decided to go all in.
By 2020, crypto had gone from a side hustle to an obsession. YouTube became my classroom; I spent every spare hour on tutorials, charts, and strategies. I had two trading options: spot or futures. Futures promised bigger returns but required serious technical analysis. I wasn’t there yet.
Spot trading was simpler: buy low, sell high, repeat. I learned three rules fast: enter wisely, exit early, and cut your losses before they cut you.
Within months, I was hooked. I stopped bothering with my sales job. My boss thought I was out marketing; in reality, I was at home, hunched over my phone, watching charts as if my life depended on it. Eventually, it did. My day job felt like dead weight, so in April 2020, I quit.
The wins came quickly. I built a paid Telegram group where people joined to follow my trades. My track record spoke for itself, and money flowed in. Then came investors — people who wanted the gains without the grind. I promised them 10% monthly returns. It sounded bold, but in that bull market, it felt not just possible, but easy.
Meanwhile, my personal life shrank to the size of a trading screen. My girlfriend would come over, and I’d barely look up. In my head, she was permanent; trading windows were fleeting. That’s how you justify neglect when your brain is lit by adrenaline and profit charts.
By May 2021, I had around $7,000 in the market, more than I’d ever managed before. My plan was neat: grow it to $10k, pay everyone back, and keep the rest rolling. To make that happen, I reinvested everything. No safety net. No exit strategy.
And then, the market turned.
One night in May, I woke up to a flood of notifications. Bitcoin’s value was tanking. Sometimes that happens, so I wasn’t nervous. I was sure the price would steady before morning. I was wrong. By the end of the month, it was below $30k. A month before this, one Bitcoin was worth $53k.
It was a disaster. Bitcoin controls the markets, so price fluctuations trickle down to other projects. My portfolio’s value decreased from $7k to $4k. The rational part of me knew it was time to cut my losses. The gambler in me doubled down. I emptied my ₦300k savings into the market, hoping for a rebound that never came.
The market didn’t recover. I was in a crisis and couldn’t return my investors’ money. More importantly, I had no job. More importantly, my relationship with my girlfriend, having taken a series of hits, was strained.
For the first time in years, I felt stripped bare. No charts. Just fear. I hid indoors, terrified of running into someone I owed money. For a while, I numbed myself with alcohol. But even that couldn’t drown the reality: I’d built my life on a house of cards, and it had finally caved in.
First, I called all my investors and asked — begged — them to give me three months to repay them. To my shock, they all agreed.
Between June and September 2021, I liquidated the carcass of my crypto portfolio. But it wasn’t enough, and I had to borrow money from my friends and family. Ultimately, I paid around $4k. I was in debt, but the worst was over. Once the last payment cleared, all I felt was exhaustion. I didn’t want another quick win; I wanted distance from the market, from the chaos, from the version of myself that thought every high would last forever.
I returned to the basics and took up a new job in October 2021. But I knew I needed more than a paycheck; I needed a full reset. A Master’s abroad became my North Star. I’d already started the paperwork earlier that year, and with my family’s help, I fast-tracked the plan. In January 2022, I relocated to a new country.
I was now studying and working, and the bulk of my earnings went into my tuition. There was almost nothing left after all this, so I couldn’t think of putting money in crypto. It was for the best.
It’s been four years since that crash, and I no longer chase the thrill. And my girlfriend, who watched me ride that rollercoaster? She’s still here. We’re getting married next year.
I didn’t lose everything after all.
