Hello everyone. Today’s newsletter will be a little different.

First off, this is the last newsletter of 2021 and I think it’s worth reflecting a bit where this all started from. I began the RoadToBabylon newsletter as a way to keep people informed about the wild world of crypto and hopefully help them get a leg up in the tumultuous, unforgiving, and often confusing crypto market. Between NFTs, decentralized finance, dog coins/meme coins, and 80,000% APY Olympus forks, it has been one heck of a year indeed. The break-neck pace of innovation in this industry, particularly around NFTs and Decentralized Finance, has been head-spinning to say the least.

Today I want to talk about using Defi and crypto to buy things in the real world. That’s right, those internet memes people people laugh at and call “magic internet money” can be turned into real assets, in the real world. Like a house, a car, or a condo. In fact, if we don’t want to sell our crypto (and incur the capital gains taxes), there are tools we can use to borrow against it as collateral, and even keep the passive-income earning potential of it in Defi.

Grayscale this past week issues its third annual “Bitcoin investor study” report. Last August they conducted an online survey of 1,000 US consumers aged 25-64 and involved in personal investing in some capacity.

The survey found a marked increase in interest and adoption from prior years, starting most notably in 2020.

We live in interesting macroeconomic times. In fact “interesting” may not do this justice, a better word would be “unprecedented”.

Interest rates are at historic lows, inflation is at historic highs. Asset markets everywhere, including stocks, real-estate, and crypto, are sitting at record highs. Is all of this cause for concern? Perhaps.

Three steps forward, two steps back has been the name of the game for Bitcoin and crypto this whole year. Let’s take a look at the Total market cap chart – an index for the entire industry.

You may have seen some buzz recently about the absolutely mind-boggling APYs (Annual Percentage Yield) on certain crypto projects. You may have seen numbers ranging anywhere from “meager” 7000% APYs all the way up to truly staggering >300,000% APYs. What the heck is going on here?!

In this week’s article I wanted to take the time and thoroughly explore + address the “copy-paste” question. I believe that the answer to this question will elucidate for everyone exactly why NFTs are so important and so revolutionary, and why they will give rise to a “creator economy” unlike anything we have ever seen.

Last week I had the privilege of staying in the heart of Manhattan (Times Square) for the landmark NFT conference in what is the landmark year of NFTs – NFT NYC 2021.

I have been going to crypto conferences since the beginning of 2018. I’ve been to conferences in San Francisco, Dallas, Las Vegas, DC, and more. I have to say this conference was unlike any other I’ve ever been to.

This past week I traveled to the West Coast for CoinAgenda. On Monday I’ll be going up to New York for NFT NYC, the largest NFT/metaverse conference ever thrown.

And the timing couldn’t be much better: the big news last week was Facebook’s announcement it will be rebranding to “Meta”.

October has not disappointed. Bitcoin reached a new all time high while Ethereum came within a hair’s breadth of it’s own all time high. Both coins face some resistance here and are now in a minor pullback – totally normal in this strong of an uptrend. I’d expect this correction to last at least a short while before we get the bullish momentum back underway. Keep in mind of course, that Bitcoin can always correct sharply at any time.

This past week, it has been reported that the SEC will not object to the approval of the first US-based Bitcoin ETF – the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF. Trading in the ETF – or Exchange Traded Fund – could begin as early as next week.

Good news. The U.S appears to be cutting a sharply contrasting strategy to China when it comes to crypto regulation.

Earlier this week, chairman Gensler of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) clearly stated his organization has no plans to ban Bitcoin or other cryptoassets. This follows a revelation just a week before where Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell confirmed the Fed has “no intention” of banning crypto either.

When it comes to cutting-edge technology, China has a pretty poor track record of being on the right side of the trend. A famous investor once said “anything that China bans, invest in it”. Over the past decade and a half, this strategy alone would have made you one of the best fund managers on Wall St.

September has been a corrective month for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the crypto markets as a whole. From a technical perspective this makes lots of sense, let’s review what’s happened since the beginning of the year.

Maybe you’ve heard this term thrown around before, but what does it mean? The prefix “meta” means “beyond”, while “verse” comes from universe (i.e., reality). So the metaverse is a world beyond reality…

The crypto ecosystem is always moving very fast, but some weeks certainly seem faster than others. This past week was one of those.

Some highlights from the past week? Two major athletes, Tom Brady and Steph Curry, signed long-term partnership deals with crypto platform FTX, and came out with their debut ad. El Salvador made their first official Bitcoin purchase, Coinbase publicly took on the SEC, and new crypto platforms Solana, Avalanche, and Arbitrum saw impressive growth.

I get asked a lot whether it’s “too late” to start getting into crypto now. If you’ve been reading these newsletters, you should already know what my answer to this question is… but today I wanted to shed a bit more light on some of the reasons why I think crypto is still quite early, and where we might be headed.

The month of August has given us more decisive action in the crypto markets than did June or July. While Bitcoin spent the past couple months ranging between the major areas of $30K and $40K, August saw a decisive breakout above the $40-$42K range (which I discussed in detail during June and July) which has since carried BTC back up to $50K.

Bitcoin’s lightning network is doing for payments what the internet and cell phones did for messaging.

I first wrote about NFTs in a detailed blog post in early March – where I highlighted why these unique digital “ownership” tokens could have a massive impact on the ecosystem. It’s time to come back and see whether any of these predictions panned out, are NFTs still undergoing a Cambrian explosion of innovation? Or is the fad losing steam? Read on.