To offend a strong person, tell them a lie. To offend a weak person, tell them the truth. Strength values facing honesty. Weakness avoids facing reality. Strong people find the truth comforting. Weak people find the lies comforting. Which do you find more comforting, being told the truth or being lied to?

It’s funny to see all a bunch of KOLs go quiet when the markets are in the red. Real players know you accumulate during the bear market. Those of us who have been in crypto for a long time know the majority of KOLs aren’t real players, they just take money upfront to promote shit coins they don’t even invest in. And their hustle goes quiet when no one is promoting their shitcoins during a bear market. Let’s start to normalize forcing KOLs to buy tokens from a project before they promote said token. Maybe it’ll help to clean up the botted KOLs who have nothing but fake followers and fake engagement and don’t actually have incentive to push your project.

Shoutout to @furious83643 for using his Photoshop skills to edit this ChatGPT caricature image with the @BodaToken logo and a cheeky Koala 😊

I hope you are all having a good start to the New Year! I wanted to touch on a few things that I feel are important to share that some people may not already know about, especially if they have never had any experience managing a crypto project. I think most of you already know, but for those who don’t, I have been fully funding the @BodaToken project with my own personal funds since its launch in 2021. I do not earn a salary or wage from the project. The only time I earn money from BODA is when I receive rewards from my personal holdings, which is the same way that every other holder earns rewards from their own personal holdings. During 2021 I used all of the rewards I earned and put them back into costs associated with BODA. This has been entirely my own decision to do this. I am an adult and no one is forcing me to spend my personal funds to keep the project going. So please don’t mistake this as some kind of whining post. I simply just want to address the reality that is going on. It’s no secret that our trading volume has been low for the last 2 years, which results in fewer rewards. So just like everyone else I have not been earning much in rewards, which means I’ve been having to dig deeper into my personal savings to keep the project going. Here is roughly what I have spent in the last 12 months to keep BODA alive and to continue building for a future. $14,708 AUD / $9,158 USD This amount includes the costs for Web Hosting, Domain Registration, AWS, Email hosting, Facebook/Instagram Verified, X Verified, Discord Boosts to maintain Server Perks, Node Hosting for BodaSwap, and Development costs for the new upgraded swap. In addition, there is the weekly buyback & burn which is currently $50 USD per week that I fund. So that’s another $4,160 AUD / $2,600 USD per year. Managing a crypto project does not make you rich. If anything it ends up costing you more money than you make. I know there is a common misconception that people who manage a crypto project get rich, but that usually happens if the Dev/Owner or team are selling on their holders. If you try to run an honest crypto project where you don’t sell on your holders, then chances are you are not going to get rich. Admittedly there has been an option to make revenue with our current BodaSwap by charging a listing fee, but I've been too much of a "nice person" and chosen to make deals with certain projects for the benefit of our communities instead. This is an approach I will be reconsidering moving forward. We have always focused on BODA being a community-driven DeFi project, where everyone has equal opportunity. We never had a presale or private sale. Any team member, including our chat moderation helpers, has bought their own bags with their own funds. I only earn USDT rewards when everyone else does, and that’s how I personally believe a Reward Token project should operate. All of us need to get back into the community spirit and start coming together like we all did back in 2021. That was the primary reason behind our massive ATH back in 2021 because of the power of community word-of-mouth marketing. It is vital for any crypto project to have word-of-mouth marketing as that has a much higher success rate of bringing new people in compared to any paid marketing. Remember that you can make posts on social media such as X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, 4chan, and anywhere else you can think of that might help. And to quickly touch on paid marketing, about 99% of paid KOLs use bots to fake engagement. You can buy bots to like, repost, comment, and even join voice chats in TG & Discord and join live X spaces. It is difficult these days to find KOLs who have legitimate followers that will bring in new holders. The landscape has changed a lot since 2021 when a majority of KOLs back then had real followers and brought in real engagement. So if you see any of these KOLs coming in saying they can promote BODA and make it pump because of their TG group or see posts in the comments section on X, I encourage you to ask them, “Why don’t you buy a bag of BODA and tell your group about it? Since you seem to be so good at pumping tokens when you promote them.” Now to give a quick update on our development progress for the new year. I am planning to go to Japan for 5 weeks starting in February. I haven’t been back to Japan in almost 11 years so I am well overdue to see my family in Japan. In the last 3 years since BODA launched, I have left the house probably about 30 times. An average of 10 days each year. Again, that’s totally on me when I chose to spend my time focusing on BODA and trying to do as much as I could to keep things moving for the benefit of all holders. But it has definitely been affecting both my mental and physical health, so in 2025 I’m planning to spend more time outdoors and putting my health first. We do have a developer who has been helping with building the new swap so he should be able to continue working on it while I’m away. We are pretty much done with the build but we still need to do more testing across multiple chains as well as the reward system built into the swap that requires additional testing. Hopefully, we can have the new multichain swap ready for March. We also have an NFT range in the works that we might possibly get ready by the end of Jan, but I’m not sure about launching that while I’m away as I will not have access to a computer. The idea to launch a 2nd token as part of our Boda ecosystem is still on the table, but that will be more for the mid-year. I want to thank those of you who continue to show up every day and keep posting on socials and for everyone who is still holding. Remember that it doesn’t matter if you have 0 or 100,000 followers, your posts are still worth it and will still appear on newsfeeds when the algorithm picks them up! Let’s bring those 2021 vibes back in 2025!

Feels more like 5 years 😂 Not gonna lie this journey has not been easy. A lot of sleepless nights. Early on I would often have nightmares where the token was rugged in my nightmare and I would wake up in a panic and then run to my computer to check everything was ok. Building custom dApps in web3 is still a pain in the ass. Although, I don't scream at my monitor as often these days. I think one thing that has helped me get through this journey is focusing on the people and reminding myself that I first got into crypto because of the philosophy behind it. The means for anyone in the world to have access to financial freedom. And by that, I don't mean that everyone in the world gets to be financially rich because that's just not how the global economy works. But enough financial freedom that people don't have debt and aren't stressing about how they can afford their rent or electricity bill or if they can afford to buy food. I believe that if your primary objectives are to benefit people and are not focused on your selfish greed, then the universe has a way of rewarding you in the end. I'm also fully aware that the crypto space is heavily money focused and the vast majority of people are just here for the get rich quick gambles. Finding a balance between catering to those crowds as well as trying to get people to understand the philosophy behind crypto is still an ongoing challenge.