CRYPTOCURRENCY

That’s Great, You’ve Made Money With HOGE… But Can It Actually DO Anything?

Is there a legitimate use case for this new coin, or is it just a rug pull for early buyers to get rich off of later buyers?

NOTE: I am not a financial advisor, this is not financial advice about what you should do or when.

The first time someone told me about HOGE I scoffed, said something snide about it being a scammy gimmick, and concluded my scathing dismissiveness with a sarcastic “what could possibly go wrong?”

But one of the mental processes I’ve worked hard to adopt is to train myself to go back, take a second look at things, and say to myself “Well, that’s your initial thought but could it be wrong? Have you given the counterargument a fair hearing?”

Usually, my mind doesn’t change. But this time? Fast forward only a few weeks, and I’ve not only invested in HOGE, but it now makes up about half of my crypto portfolio. In fact, I’m seriously considering liquidating the rest of my holdings that aren’t already locked up in staking contracts to get even more HOGE at this sub 0.0002 price point.

What changed? In this article, I’ll take you through my journey from a HOGE skeptic to one of the most prolific evangelists in its writing corps. I’ll also introduce you to some of my favorite people in the emerging community.

What is DeFi?

At the start, HOGE simply billed itself as “Doge but DeFi”. Thanks to Elon Musk, anyone who knows what Tesla also knows what the Doge meme coin is too. But what on Earth does DeFi mean?

The best explanation I’ve found so far is from this video by Finematics (no association with HOGE). He does a far better job than I could, so I’m not even going to summarize. If you want to understand how the future of finance is beginning to take shape then you’ll watch this video. You’ve got to understand what’s really at stake before we can move on.

I’m old enough to remember when Blockbuster and Kodak were thriving companies that each employed tens of thousands of employees. These seemingly great businesses collapsed with shocking speed against innovative competitors armed with new technologies and/or offering an easier user experience.

Having dabbled in this world for a few months, I’m confident that crypto and DeFi are to banking what streaming was to video.

It’s going to absolutely rock the establishment.

I mean, who is going to put anything into a savings account for 0.5% growth when you can get 13.3% on dollar-backed USDC on Celsius (which by the way is technically not even decentralized)?

For that matter, who is going to fund the government’s pointless wars if the treasury bills are only paying 2.45%? Uncle Sam is going to have to figure things out real quick, I’ll tell you that much.

Despite the massive growth and enormous disruptive potential of DeFi, I have to also mention that scams abound. There is extreme risk in this space. I expected HOGE to be just another microcap hype scam that wouldn’t follow through on anything tangible and I think skepticism is always the right instinct with investment. But the people who have already made thousands of dollars from putting only $100 into HOGE aren’t leaving. They still think this coin has real future potential. I’ve come to think that too.

What is HOGE?

In addition to being DeFi, HOGE is unapologetically a meme-powered token, meaning that it has a reliable way to propagate and grow, as a legitimate business must. And we know with certainty that this works. Doge and its $7 billion market cap stand as the undeniable proof of concept for memes in the virtual finance space. HOGE is the next-generation upgrade, with much better-structured coin incentives, additional capabilities, and so much more room to grow. It is only around $100 million in size right now. In my opinion, HOGE has a very good shot at dethroning the king and surpassing Doge’s market cap within these next crucial years.

To be clear, I’m not saying that HOGE by itself is going to replace banks. What I’m saying is that it has excellent positioning in a key niche of the ecosystem which will.

Coins like HOGE and Doge use meme culture to popularize the new crypto movement. They do this to great effect just like the MAGA movement and Yang Gang did in politics. This is guerilla warfare in the attention economy. It is the strategy that allowed those underdog campaigns to overperform far beyond mainstream expectations. With HOGE, we’re deploying the same weapon of meme-generation in crypto finance and it’s obviously working like a charm because you’re reading this even though I don’t have money to advertise, I’m not famous, and I hold no official titles. Yet somehow, I still have your attention.

And believe me when I tell you that I feel supremely grateful for the attention you give me and do not intend to waste a minute of it.

Anyway, like any other movement, the most important factor in the success of HOGE will be its people. It’s community. People like us. So let me introduce you to a few of the key players.

HOGE Community Leaders

Andrew/WhiteBit.com, Joseph/Hogeman, Kyle/HODLhands

This conversation sold me. I could see and hear people who are deeply connected to the project. They seem to understand HOGE’s unique potential and are committed to its long-run success. That all put me at ease. How they’re thinking about the community, the team, and the future is exactly what I was hoping to see. We’re on the same page. After the AMA I’ve got confidence in the guys who have their hands at the wheel, and I know they’ve got confidence in us to do our part as well.

Dr. Olivier Hance

The HOGE team announced only a week ago that the accredited international lawyer, professor, and author Dr. Olivier Hance would be representing the newly formed Hoge Finance company. Hoge Finance is now a legal entity based out of France. This decorated academic has literally written the book on borderless virtual money. Since there are no developer coins set aside, in order to raise money for things like exchange listings (we have a top 30 listing in the works) and independent code audits (which we’ve passed with flying colors), the Hoge Finance team relies on donations from the community. This requires high levels of transparency, trust, and accountability. To foster that, Dr. Hance has agreed to answer community questions on a monthly basis.

Jesse Tyler Ridgeway

I get this question a lot, and yes, that entertaining and informative Jesse is indeed a completely different person than this entertaining and informative Jesse who is authoring this article. For whatever reason, HOGE seems to disproportionately attract people named Jesse into its orbit. Hopefully, someday you’ll get to see us on the same podcast as proof that we aren’t the same person. In the meantime let me say that I love your work, Jesse. Sorry, I was talking to the mirror. I love your work too, Jesse Tyler Ridgeway. Consider yourself as having a standing invite for any interview/collab you want to do because I really do admire your top-notch content.

Crypto Camel

There are only 462 Crypto Camel subscribers at this moment but expect that to change. My prediction is that this channel will blow up, based on how much value he adds. This guy does an amazing job of following the latest news in the HOGE movement, giving concise updates, and encouraging listeners to stay strong and make logic-based decisions that prevent the sort of emotional errors we later regret. Demonstrating stoic leadership for the community, he promotes open-minded maturity towards other projects as well as critics of HOGE. That’s exactly the sort of person I keep encountering in this movement and is partly why I have such confidence in our future.

Crypto Mafia

Don has actually reached out to me by email already, so we’re planning to do some crossover work soon. Well… unless that was the imposter posing as him that contacted me. What? Oh yes, believe it or not, even with only 1.15k subscribers he’s apparently already got someone pretending to be him! Take that as a compliment, Don. Somebody’s jealous because those suspenders work for ya. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Crypto Mafia is a great source of news and level-headed openness to a discussion with both fans and critics and I see big things for the future of this channel.

BitGirl Nympho

Coming to you straight from his chicken coup or his tractor, BitGirl Nympho energetically introduces himself as the “Shitcoin Shiller” aka “The Matt Wallace of HOGE” aka “The Macho Man Randy of HOGE Coin”. Anyway, he’s quite the showman. But he gives his opinion to you straight with the kind of raw honesty that you’ll only find from a man who is willing to educate you on financial topics while surrounded by cocks. And hens. Anyway, Nympho provides a very entertaining channel with a highly engaged host that I can see gathering a lot of traction in the HOGE community as time goes on. And incidentally, I also own chickens… weird.

OG & EGOH

These mysterious rappers put a lot of work into creating this anthem. You can clearly see that the community respects it, with tons of upvotes and a massive increase in views. This is only their first video release, but with reception and accolades like that, expect more to come and keep an eye out for this crew.

CryptoAnalyst69

This fellow Medium author and chat buddy of mine has been doing a stellar job of educating the public about Safemoon, one of the many copies of HOGE’s idea for those who feared they had got in too late and wanted to chase something even newer. That’s a strategy that for many people probably won’t pay off.

His analysis is really thought-provoking and well-considered and I’ve learned a lot from CryptoAnalyst69.

The HOGE Value Proposition

All of this brings me to what I see as the most important value proposition of Hoge Finance. Yes, the ability to mint Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s) is cool and worthy of its own article because few realize how valuable this will be for artists. The tokenomics of HOGE are great. I love the mini-games. But mainly, what HOGE represents to me is a way to connect with people around the world in a permissionless way to build a borderless future together. Something which benefits us both individually and communally. Something that facilitates our personal and shared growth.

Finance and art have always gone hand-in-hand, each fueling the other. The Medicis funded Michaelangelo. What new generation of artists will HOGE be able to fund in the post-pandemic Renaissance? I can’t wait to find out.

As an educator, I tell every student who listens that “skills pay bills.” No one in your career is going to care about the pedigree of your university. They don’t even ask what’s on your transcripts. The people shelling out money for your offer only want to know one thing: do you have the ability to solve the problem that they need you to solve. If you can, they shower you with money and attention. If you can’t… next.

So skill-building is what the game is all about. Over the past year, I’ve been building the skill of writing articles on Medium, knowing that writing is a highly marketable talent but having no idea what I would eventually be using that talent for.

HOGE presents us amateurs like me with a supportive community to practice our craft as we evolve into pros. My connection to the HOGE community has also given me easy access to programmers, investors, and other highly-knowledgeable people in the crypto space that are eager to help me learn and build a new cutting-edge skillset.

And I’m not strictly relying on their altruism, nor are they relying on mine. It easily makes sense for us to help one another in this common cause because our own individual success is mutually dependent on the effectiveness of our collective cooperation. It is up to each and every one of us to take HOGE to the moon and we can only do that by helping one another as a team.

In classrooms we were all pitted against one another, individually competing for the best grades, popularity, and the approval of teachers. If you played in a marching band or did team sports then you had a cooperative element too. HOGE is more like that. We all have a strong reason to root for each other to succeed as TEAM HOGE.

I really love this model of coordinating human effort. Just imagine if governmental or corporate efforts were organized voluntarily on the basis of persuasion like this, rather than coercively on the basis of compulsion (“do this or jail”; “do this or fired”).

The HOGE donation model really works, much like Go Fund Me also does. Whatever collective fundraising HOGE has done so far, contributions roll in very quickly and we are able to meet targets within about a day.

We can accomplish things together as a HOGE community that we would never be able to do in a million years as individuals on our own.

That isn’t unique to only HOGE, of course. I’m sure there are a lot of people in other crypto communities like Ethereum, Cardano, and Bitcoin that feel exactly the same way about their coins. I’m not by any stretch saying that they’re wrong to feel an attachment to those coins or that ours is the only one worth investing in. There are lots of amazing projects out there, many of which have well-funded expert dev teams.

By contrast, I believe HOGE is one of those coins which, like Doge, will endure mainly because of community strength.

There will be lots of downturns and challenges too along the way. The climb could take years and that’s fine. It isn’t soaring through the good times that forges champions. Rather, it is the ability to weather the storms and the hardship of the bad times. That’s why any coins that have “safe” as part of their name I personally won’t touch because I think they’re setting people up with the wrong expectations.

HOGE is self-organizing to support and entertain one another as a community in a healthy way, and as long as that remains the case I’m very bullish (or bull-dogish… mmm? ;p) about its future regardless of short-term price movements. I’m in it for the long haul.

Prices rise. Prices fall. But HOGE is here to stay. That’s how I see it. Do your own research.

Reach out to me at [email protected] if you are a creator who wants me to highlight your work and/or collaborate. In fact, no matter who you are, thank you for taking the time to consider my point of view, and feel free to reach out if you just have questions.