Merry Christmas in advance. A year has already flown by. Have I grown in your eyes, or in the eyes of others, over the past year? Looking back, I think I've grown. Let's take just a half step further next year. 🙅‍♂ Why I Focused on the Gaming Sector This Year I'm incredibly selfish. I used to gloss over my shortcomings by saying I have a strong ego, but now I can say it. Most of the troubles I've had this year stemmed from my selfishness. However, there was one area where my selfishness didn't manifest: my obsession with games. Everyone has their own way of making money. I prefer to blindly waste time. I tend to profit from the fleeting sparks of opportunity and the advantages they provide. Since entering the cryptocurrency market, my strengths have always been my gaming knowledge and judgment. I'm confident that even at the end of 2025, these strengths will still be among the best in Korea. But my strengths didn't translate into a way to make money. This was my main hurdle. I had already proven myself as a game columnist. So, I wanted to prove myself as a gamer in the coin market. In February of this year, I was one of the few in Korea to hit the jackpot with the B3 token airdrop. The reversal that everyone had turned a blind eye to became a huge success, and I became overconfident. My illusion of proving myself as a gamer was completely shattered in March of this year. XTERIO was the biggest culprit. XTERIO received approximately $80 million in investment. It had to succeed. I didn't sell my NFTs, even though they reached 30-40 million won. I diligently participated in airdrop campaigns for about two years. I was convinced this game had to be my turning point. After checking the airdrop amount, I stopped thinking about it. It was malicious. It was irresponsible. No amount of rhetoric could explain it. I still feel a shiver of disgust when I see a photo of the founder. It was the moment my greatest conviction turned to dust. A few days later, I liquidated most of my game NFT assets. I abandoned the game and confronted my past failures. I sold all of my Hyperliquid airdrop holdings for $3. I started tinkering with ecosystems I'd previously avoided simply because I felt sick. Hyperliquid, Initiia, and a few other things. I don't remember exactly what I did. A figure of 100 million, which might seem insignificant to some, was stamped into my wallet. I was elated. I had accumulated over 100,000 followers through my game blog series on Naver, but if I had to recall my happiest moment, it was when I reached 10,000. It was a similar feeling. 🚫 Why I didn't yap One of the most common questions I've heard this year is, "You seem good at yaping. Why don't you do it?" Yaping is, simply put, a "coin experience group." It was a curating project called Kaito. Marketing campaigns that involved receiving tokens or monetary compensation at the TGE (Token Generation Exchange) in exchange for viral marketing on Twitter about a project became a constant. Like the Klaytn NFT season, when it seemed like a single Metacong could dominate the world, the yapping season also raged on for a year. Naturally, it's now entering a lull. Those steeped in excessive profits are denying reality, but I'd like to say that the market's inflection point has passed. I write better than 99% of yapping people. Many people were puzzled by this. Why wouldn't the person wielding the most powerful weapon be the one wielding it? In fact, it's a very trivial reason. Even when I was writing about games and even when I moved into the coin market, my father always told me not to make money by deceiving others. Perhaps that's why, even when I was writing a game column, I was sensitive to promotional content. Unless you're a big YouTuber, most creators in the game industry are considered "super-lows." Nevertheless, I often demanded autonomy in content creation and topic selection. It was my own compromise. Yapping is mechanical. Conventional content usually has a target audience (consumer). Yapping is content without a consumer, requiring lies to be presented as truth. And the first hurdle to deceiving others is deceiving myself. I couldn't overcome that hurdle. Another reason is that I wasn't inherently a creator suited to yapping. This applies equally to Grind Concept projects. When I write, I prioritize romantic stories. This market is a journey of selling dreams. Unfortunately, most projects can only produce five romantic stories at most. The yapping meta demands repetitive, mechanical content creation. It's a mismatch. If you ask me if I lost anything by not doing yapping, no. In fact, it's ridiculous to even say I lost anything. This year, I outperformed most office workers, and I have no regrets. But if there's one thing that's different, it's that I don't genuinely hate the "things only they can do" and the "profits." The job categories are different. I haven't decided where to focus next year. I'm thinking taking a break until I feel more confident is a viable option.