The NFT I Bought at 2.4 Ether Now Floors at 0.3

Two point four ether. That was the winning bid on OpenSea at 11:52 on a Friday night in April 2025, $4,187 at that night's price, for a cartoon axolotl in a bomber jacket, and I posted the fire emoji in the project's flex channel before the transaction finished confirming. Funded partly by 14 graded Pokemon cards sold for $1,900. The axolotl had a gold chain. I told myself it was an investment.

$4,200 was close to three months of my son's daycare, and I spent it on a JPEG with a roadmap, on the strength of a founder named Milo who showed his face on calls and a merch collaboration with a sneaker brand that had 200,000 followers. Utility, they called it. Token-gated drops, a game alpha, physical redeemables. I believed about 80 percent of it, which was exactly the margin the pitch was built on.

The floor sits at 0.3 ether as of this week, about $690, and the odd part is not the chart. It is the Discord, which ran 400 messages a day in April 2025 and now posts 11, four of them bots, with a roadmap PDF quietly updated to version 4 and no changelog anywhere in the server. The chart is the boring part.

the sticker I posted at 11:52

The buy itself took four minutes. I had watched the collection for three weeks, bid 2.4 on number 1,094 cuz it had the bomber jacket trait that the floor lacked, and woke up to a Discord where strangers called each other fam. Milo did a live space that night for 6,000 listeners and said the word ecosystem eleven times, and I counted, because by then I was the kind of person who counted.

$1,900 of cardboard

The Pokemon cards went in March, a first-edition holo plus 13 others, graded, to a dealer at a card show in Secaucus. $1,900 cash, plus $2,287 of ether I already held from a 2023 stash. The dealer asked twice if I was sure about the holo. Twice. I told him the money was going into somethin' with more upside, an axolotl cartoon with a roadmap and a founder who showed his face on video calls, which sounded like diligence at the time. He said okay the way people say it when they are done arguing.

the floor at 3.5 ether

June 2025 was the peak, and I wanna be honest about what I did with it. The floor hit 3.5 ether, about $8,800 that month, which put my axolotl up $4,600 on paper, and I screenshotted the portfolio and did not sell. Not because of a plan. Milo announced the game alpha and the sneaker collab in the same week, the channel was a wall of rocket emojis, and I listed at 3.4 once, then canceled the listing two hours later when a moderator said announcements were coming.

roadmap v4, no changelog

The slide, in milestones. August 2025: game alpha slipped to Q4, then to Q1 2026. October: the sneaker brand's collab tweet disappeared with no explanation, though the wayback machine still has it. December: Milo stopped doing the Friday calls, and the last one ran 14 minutes and ended on the phrase sizable Q1. The moderators, paid $500 a month in tokens, went unpaid in January, and two of 'em logged off mid-shift, which sounds theatrical til you watch a 40,000-member server lose its floor in a straight line.

11 messages in general

I checked the Discord on a Tuesday in April: 11 messages in general across 24 hours, four from bots that post the floor price, one from a man selling his entire collection at 0.28, under floor, with the words need rent, sorry fam. The pinned roadmap is version 4, updated February 21, no changelog, with a line about community-first rebalancing that means nothin' I could sue anybody over. The flex channel is locked now. My fire emoji is in there somewhere.

down 84 percent on paper

The whole ledger fits in three lines: in, 2.4 ether plus $23 of gas and a platform fee, call it $4,210 all-in at April 2025 prices, against a position that now quotes at $690 on a good day. Value now: 0.3 ether, about $690 at this spring's $2,300. Paper loss: $3,520, which is 84 percent.

resold within a month

A friend who was at the Secaucus show in April says the dealer resold the holo within a month, price not published, buyer a kid from Bergen County who paid cash. Paid cash. I do not want to know what he got for it. I also absolutely wanna know, which is the part of this hobby nobody warns you about, that the regret has a resale market of its own.

the axolotl still in the wallet

Listing at 0.3 would turn the paper loss into a receipt, and I have not done it, which is the part of this I like least about myself. The listing screen takes four taps. Holding is a stall, and I know it, and the number has now been 0.3 for eleven straight days.

So, Friday night, 11:52, the winning bid and the fire emoji. The axolotl sits on a hardware wallet now, which is the one piece of advice I took early and can testify works exactly as designed, in that nothing can be lost and nothin' can be sold rapidly either. The flex channel is locked. Eleven messages a day. I still have the axolotl. That is the whole position.