This article is part of Had I Known, Zikoko’s theme for September 2025, where we explore Nigerian stories of regret and the lessons learnt. Read more Had I Known stories here.
Harry* (25) isn’t who you’d call a crypto enthusiast. Before 2025, he’d only had one stint trading crypto. But after a friend claimed to have inside info on meme coins and encouraged him to invest his money, he went all in.
In this story, he talks about starting his trading journey with £1k, building his portfolio to $5k in three months, and then losing it all overnight.
As Told To Boluwatife
It started like a typical day. That morning in March 2025 when I realised I’d lost $5000 in one fell swoop.
Nothing pointed to that morning being any different from the usual. The day was bright; birds might have even been cheering in the background. I picked up my phone the moment I opened my eyes and launched Telegram.
I’d been in a few crypto group chats on Telegram since my friend, Don*, introduced me to meme coin trading in January, and every morning, I’d check the groups before I did anything else. It was my morning routine.
The groups were usually a flurry of activities, people sharing screenshots and chatting excitedly about how a coin they traded had done five or ten times the initial amount. However, the groups were awfully quiet that morning.
I went on Twitter and scrolled through the timeline. Trump had done one crazy shit again. I think he said something about electric vehicles. He was always in the news for some reason, and I didn’t really pay attention to whatever was happening.
After some minutes of lazy scrolling, I left the app to check my meme coin wallet. What I saw there made me doubt whether my eyes were working: WOLF token had tanked and lost over 80% of its value. My units worth $5000 had dropped to about $200 overnight. What was going on?
I texted Don, and he called me two minutes later.
Don: “Bro”
Me: “Bro!”
Don: “Brooooo”
Me: “Fuck!”
We didn’t need to say anything more. It was obvious: the money was gone.
The funny thing is, we might have had a chance to withdraw our money a few weeks before this event. A mutual friend had shared a YouTube video of a pastor prophesying about the crypto world taking a huge loss, but we didn’t give the video a second thought.
We’d been trading meme coins since January, and there was no indication of trouble. We just had to hold out until April, make big money and dump the project. No one expected things to play out the way they did.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been a great loss if we had started taking out our profit right from the start. I probably wouldn’t have even tried meme coin trading if Don hadn’t convinced me to.
Back in December 2024, my aunt, who lives abroad, gifted me the equivalent of £1000 in USDT. I complained that she didn’t give me anything for Christmas, so she sent me the money. I didn’t expect that much, so I didn’t know what to do. I left the money in my wallet for a few weeks. Then, in January, I told Don about my windfall, and he introduced me to the meme coins.
I knew little about crypto, but I wasn’t a newbie. In 2023, I had a trading stint when my blockchain writer cousin introduced me to Harmony Coin, and I flipped $50 into $200. The coin later crashed, and many people lost their money.
I concluded that crypto was a zero-sum game. One person wins at the cost of another. When people take out all their money, the coin’s value is reduced, and others lose. You won’t always win, and that’s just how it works.
After that incident, I took my mind off crypto until Don brought up meme coins. Trump and Elon had their bromance going on, and it looked like crypto would be on an upward bullish run for a long time. Don was the crypto head, and he showed me how I could grow my money by trading instead of just leaving it in my wallet. He said he had insider info on meme coins that would scale.
So, I agreed.
We created two crypto wallets for the transactions — we didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. So, even if we incurred losses on one wallet, the other would be fine. Don mostly handled the trades, but I had access to both wallets and could see the transactions happening in real time.
We — mostly Don — also regularly tracked the coins on Twitter and Dex Screener. Viral trends drive meme coins, and you can follow the buzz online to predict if it’ll have traction. It’s almost like how people who follow the stock market can tell when a company is about to lose value because of how often they track the progress.
The first coin we tried was Trump’s coin ($TRUMP). I gave Don £200, and we made a £700 profit in two days.
Instead of taking out the profit, we put it all back in the market. That’s how we started. I kept giving Don more money, and he spread it across different meme coins. We diversified our portfolio like that to hedge against big losses. You never know when you could get rug-pulled, so it was safer not to bet on one coin.
Every day, Don watched out for meme coins generating buzz on Dex Screener, coins that could potentially get picked up by crypto whales, and we’d put money in them. We also had Telegram bots trading for us. It was a fun time.
By March, our portfolio had grown to $5000. Then we made our first mistake: we put all the funds in WOLF. To be fair, the coin looked good. It reached a market cap of $42m in two days. I thought, “Even if we make five times this amount, we’re good.” We could’ve made bank.
Instead, we woke up to $200. It was an obvious rug pull. We couldn’t even try to rebuild our portfolio because there was no guarantee that the coin would regain any value. So, we counted our losses and took out the $200.
Crypto giveth, crypto taketh.
For a few days, water stopped tasting like water to me. I lost my appetite and didn’t even want to look at my phone. But then, I figured there was no use crying over spilt milk. People face worse situations. The money wasn’t even in my account, so I guess it helped to make it not feel real.
Don took the loss much harder than I did. It took him months to get over it. We’d have shared the money, and his share was supposed to take him out of the trenches. The plan was that he wouldn’t have to work all year. My guy eventually had to find a 9-5 job.
He even offered to find money and pay me back at some point, but I told him to forget it. We went into it together.
If I could do it all over again, I’d have taken out my profits from the start — at least I’d have put my money in the real world.
However, I’m never doing that shit again. Crypto is not for me. You have to dedicate time and sleepless nights to battle bots run by supercomputers just to get crumbs while some people are raking in profit from these coins. The worst thing to do is to follow influencers in the cryptoverse. Some of them have insider information and are behind these rug pulls.
My advice to anyone reading this: Don’t do crypto, you’ll cry. The winners will always be fewer than the losers. It’s even worse when you can see those losses happen in a linear, real-time swoop. Just don’t do it.
Me, I know I’ll never do it again. I’ve counted my losses, and I’m moving on. Life continues.
*Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.
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