Baby's First Cryptocurrency
I've been aware of cryptocurrencies for many years, but only started investing in them just under two years ago. A friend of mine explained the concept to me, and I made the decision to invest in a lesser known cryptocurrency with a purpose I could really get behind - ABY, or ArtByte, previously known as AppleByte. Its stated goal was to be used as a way to pay artists, which was especially relevant to me as a freelance artist.
And so it was that on 4 December 2017, I bought cryptocurrency for the first time in my life - about 20 euros' worth of ArtByte on Litebit. A very small investment, but we all have to start somewhere. At first, I simply reveled in the experience of being part of something new, but I eventually started participating in the community and even using their specialized faucet.
A Lost Art
For a while things seemed to be going alright with the ABY. It's tough to find any hard data at this time for reasons we'll get into later, but as its listing on Coinmarketcap reveals, it reached a high point of $0,049949 on January 11th 2018, just two months after I bought it. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly. Its community was vibrant, people were tipping ABY to artists on Twitter and Reddit, and it all seemed to be reaching ever new heights. But then some cracks started to show - first their faucet closed, and their forum followed soon after. I'm not entirely sure why this was, but I speculate that it's because people were just in it to earn ABY. You see, the forum rewarded members with ABY for making many posts, which led to a lot of spam, people posting low effort responses or even making topics with copy-pasted Wiki articles. The forum was replaced with a simpler system of 'artist profiles,' pages artists could post updates and artwork on, which still exists today but isn't particularly active.
Of course, getting rid of a forum or a faucet won't kill a cryptocurrency. But nothing could prepare ABY for the crypto crash of 2018. I don't know if things were happening behind the screens that we don't know about, or if the crash just hit the ABY at a vulnerable time, but it never recovered. After a steady decline of many months, we finally reached the middle of 2019 with no signs of improvement and no real news from the people behind this once-promising cryptocurrency. And the few ambitious platforms that had hosted ABY to buy or trade slowly began to delist it, starting with Litebit on July 10th 2019 (https://twitter.com/litebiteu/status/1146744394332155904) - which means it was no longer sold anywhere and could only be traded on the last remaining websites that allowed it. One of those websites, Nova Exchange, ceased all trading just over a month ago as of writing this article, leaving only Yobit as a place to trade ABY. To make matters worse, Yobit's ABY wallet has been under 'maintenance' for a long time with no updates, which means ABY buying and trading is as good as dead.
And that's the awkward position this once-valued cryptocurrency is in today. With no word from the developers and no place to buy, sell or trade, ABY will simply stay in people's wallets and continue to decrease in value as it has been doing for a long time.
Lessons to be Learned
Regardless of all the signs that it was time to jump ship, I stubbornly held on to all my ABY. By the time I finally thought of selling it, it was barely worth doing so anymore, so I still have about 28 000 ABY just sitting in my wallet. At this point, it's worth about 7-8 dollars in BTC in total. I never invested too much money into it, but ABY's current state still feels like a major disappointment because I invested a lot of time in the community around it, only for that community to disappear. My experience with ABY proved to be a lesson not only in investing money, but in investing time and energy as well.
Of course, though the situation looks hopeless, there is still a chance the ABY team is working on a revival behind the scenes. Maybe this article proclaiming ABY to have been a bad investment will look ridiculous in a few years? That's just the way it goes with these smaller, specialized cryptocurrencies. If nothing else, we can at least look forward to Yobit finally finishing maintenance on their ABY wallet. That should revive trading in some small way. That's why I'll hold on to the ABY I still have - most likely, it'll just diminish in value even more, but at least it'll be an interesting relic of the past if nothing else. And if it ever does make a comeback I can pretend I knew it all along.
_
Though my experience with ABY was very educational, I actually made similar mistakes with other cryptocurrencies shortly after investing in it - this was before everything went wrong with ABY, mind you. One cryptocurrency I invested in that proceeded to fade away was 2GIVE. If people enjoy this article about my experience with ABY, I might write an article about that one as well. As I said, all feedback is appreciated!
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