Hello Hive...

Who Is CRVNE.ᵉᵗʰ

My name is Jordan, also known as CRVNE.ᵉᵗʰ. I’ve been on Hive for about two weeks now, and I’m really enjoying it. I intend to stick around, so I figured it was about time I wrote my intro post.

I’m a ’90s kid with a lot of the same passions many ’90s kids seem to share: good games, fantasy universes, and technology. Now in my 30s, I work as the operations manager of a lead generation agency that specializes in generating large volumes of inbound calls for call centers. On the side, I also build CRMs, automation workflows, and email campaigns for businesses. I guess you could say I got my start on this career path around 2015, when I began learning SEO and building WordPress websites for individuals and small businesses.

I’m also a collector of many things and a real sucker for almost anything limited edition. Slap a serial number (###/###) on your product, and I’ll probably buy it. My hobbies include gaming, practicing jiu-jitsu (10th Planet blue belt at the time of this writing), SCUBA diving (which I don’t get to do as often as I’d like), and collecting, trading, & selling various types of limited, collectible merchandise; shoes, cards, Funkos, pins, Unicornos, and more.

I was born and raised in Orange County, Southern California, but I lived in Northern California and Southern Oregon for about 10 years, up until 2021, when I moved back to my hometowne.

So that’s me, in a nutshell, for the most part. If you aren’t tired of me already, maybe you’ll be interested in reading further about how I got into crypto and eventually found my way to Hive.

The Silk Road Thread that Changed Everything

I discovered Bitcoin way back in 2011 when I was browsing some forums and saw an obscure post titled “Silk Road.” I clicked on it because I used to play an MMORPG called Silkroad Online, so it immediately caught my eye. If you know the history of crypto, then you know Silk Road was an integral part of its development and expansion into where we are today. But that marketplace is not what really earned my attention.

The Bitcoin Whitepaper is what truly hooked me and sent me down a rabbit hole I’ve never really come out of.

Unfortunately, back then I was just a young, broke kid with exactly $0 in savings, so even though I purchased and transacted BTC at less than $5 each, I never saved any. I have many “BTC pizza” stories of my own. Here’s an old BTC address I used to do some shopping with on Bitcoin Black Friday 2013: *16QB7PRUX9a714BpovAVpKot87R4LGYWBS*.

I used to drop paper wallets with 1 BTC on them around my community college with instructions on how to claim them. Many a foolish thing I did with BTC back then because, though I did believe in the system and philosophy myself, I never expected it to grow as much, or as quickly, as it did. Still, I don’t really regret any of it. At the end of the day, I know there is no way I would have hodl'd from then 'til now, and I learned a lot of lessons along the way that made me who I am today.

I guess it just isn’t my time to be a millionaire (or billionaire)... yet.

From CryptoKitties to the NFT Wave

Anyways, fast forward to around 2017. That’s when I started digging deeper into crypto and blockchain itself, and discovered ETH & ENS Domains, along with CryptoKitties.

As a collector, and someone who’s always been into farming and breeding games, CK was immediately attractive to me. I still have a bunch of old Kitties sitting in one of my Ethereum wallets. Unfortunately, they aren’t worth anything now, and I also did a hard pass on CryptoPunks because I thought they were “stupid”. I mean, you couldn’t even breed them.

After realizing those past blunders, I dove deep into NFTs, starting with NBA Top Shot and VeVe once they began to come to the spotlight in 2020–21. I founded and operated the VeVeHive Discord community for almost two years, which was the largest and only VeVe marketplace before one was natively available on their app. During that time, I was involved with a multitude of other NFT projects such as DeadHeads, VOIDS aka ImmaDegen (my forever web3 identity), Bulls on the Block, Wolf Game, Creatures, Superlative, Midnight Breeze, and many more that I can’t, and likely will never, remember (unless I decide to dig through my blockchain history of course).

Having learned from past lessons, I did pretty well monetarily during that period because I took money off the table when it was available, and I knew the ins and outs of the tech behind the products (in most cases, the lack thereof). That helped me spot winners a little more readily than most, or at least I like to think so.

Of course, there were some losses and bad bets, but all in all, I walked away in the black before it all fizzled into the remnants of a past time that it is currently. That doesn’t mean I think NFTs are “dead” or useless, though. I just think they were way overhyped and underutilized. People were getting too excited over digital country clubs that provided zero intrinsic value or “utility,” and their only motivation to buy or participate was “number go up”.

In any case, this is a whole different conversation that I’ll save for another day.

The Philosophy That Stuck

During that NFT hype wave, I was a very active member of the VeVe community, and VeVePunkz was formed as a way for me and a couple of my mods in VeVeHive to express our fandom for the platform while simultaneously jumping into the NFT hype cycle ourselves.

VeVePunkz quickly transformed into what is now known as the Good Game DAO (GG DAO) because I simply could not get behind selling pictures with a promise of riches while providing little to nothing by way of ingenuity or effort.

That is why, over 5 years later, I am adamant about sticking to that philosophy and ensuring GG DAO remains a game publishing platform and gaming guild first and foremost, with tokenization and crypto integration or distribution only implemented and leveraged where they can actually provide value or benefit to the games or the ecosystem as a whole.

Why Hive Makes Perfect Sense to Me

Hive feels familiar to me in the best way. It’s a place where identity matters, where participation actually means something, and where people are building instead of just speculating.

After everything I’ve seen over the years, that combination carries more weight than hype ever did.

I’m not here chasing the next cycle or trying to sell anyone on anything. I’m here to write, to build, to learn, and to contribute where I can. If that leads to collaboration or new ideas, great. If it just leads to good conversations and better perspective, that’s enough too.

Either way, I’m glad I found my way here and I look forward to what the future brings for Hive, crypto, and blockchain as a whole.