The Origin

The Genesis of Terrible Ideas

How Two Idiots Almost Broke DeFi (And Accidentally Built Something Cool)

Pre-August 2023 - Peak Degeneracy

Every disaster begins with overconfidence and poor judgment. Mine started during late-night chats with my German friend SMOL INTERN, while I was living abroad and we'd spend hours discussing whatever degenerate meme coin had just pumped that day.

SMOL INTERN wasn't just some random crypto Twitter personality - he'd been one of my early investors in meme coins I'd created that actually exploded. Back when being a dev meant something, when you had to understand smart contracts and tokenomics instead of just clicking a button on pump.fun to deploy whatever brainrot crossed your mind that morning.

One night, riding high on previous successes and probably too much caffeine, I dropped what I thought was revolutionary:

"What if people could bet on adult film statistics?"

The idea was exactly as sophisticated as it sounds. Users placing wagers on... well, let's say "performance metrics" and "scene compositions" in ways that would make your grandmother disown you. Think prediction markets, but for the most degenerate content imaginable.

And because I'm apparently incapable of leaving bad ideas alone, I actually started building it. PornBot became a real thing - my first venture into prediction markets, complete with screenshots from August 8th that I'll probably regret keeping forever but they perfectly capture how unhinged my thinking was.

SMOL INTERN's response was swift and merciless: "That's completely fucking retarded."

Coming from someone who'd seen me build products that actually worked and made money, this wasn't casual dismissal. When an investor who believed in your previous work calls your new idea retarded, you listen.

So PornBot joined the graveyard of terrible ideas, but it had planted a crucial seed: prediction markets were fascinating, even if my first application was completely inappropriate for civilized society.

The "Two More Weeks" Revolution

August 2023 - When Memes Become Business Models

Two weeks later (because it's always two weeks in crypto), SMOL INTERN came back with something that would consume the next two years of my life.

He'd been watching the endless parade of rugpulls and failed launches with growing amusement. Every day brought new "revolutionary" projects promising to change everything, usually involving dogs, food, or some combination thereof. The pattern was always the same: massive hype, brief pump, inevitable crash.

"You know what's hilarious?" SMOL INTERN said during one of our chats, "Everyone keeps saying 'two more weeks' until their shitcoin moons, but we both know 90% of these are going straight to zero."

The lightbulb moment hit like a freight train. People were already gambling on these tokens by buying them - why not create honest betting markets around their inevitable failure? Instead of pretending every new project was going to revolutionize DeFi, we could build something that acknowledged reality: most projects simply weren't going to make it.

And there it was. BOFA - Bet On Anything Bot - wasn't born from technical brilliance or revolutionary insight, but from the simple observation that crypto Twitter was full of people lying to themselves about obvious scams.

Our Telegram chat that day would later be immortalized with the pinned message: "has to sound slow and retarded right" - a phrase more prophetic than we realized. Not because the idea was stupid, but because we had absolutely no concept of how soul-crushingly difficult it would be to execute.

The Honeymoon Phase of Delusion

August - September 2023 - When Everything Seemed Possible

Armed with dangerous amounts of confidence and zero understanding of what we were attempting, I dove into building BOFA headfirst. The plan seemed bulletproof:

1. User drops a smart contract address in our Telegram bot
2. We fetch basic data from the blockchain
3. Create a simple yes/no betting market
4. Collect fees and retire to tropical islands

How hard could blockchain data processing be? I was a developer who'd built successful projects before! I understood APIs! I'd made money in crypto!

Narrator voice: He was about to learn that "I've built meme coins" and "I can process financial data at scale" are completely different skill sets.

The first version of BOFA was... functional, if you were extremely generous with that definition. It would sometimes do what you wanted, provided you used exactly the right commands in exactly the right format while sacrificing a small goat to the blockchain gods.

But it worked! Sort of! And for those blissful early weeks, I was convinced I was building the next Uniswap.

Reality's Brutal Awakening

Late September 2023 - When Simple Becomes Impossible

Then actual users started using BOFA, and everything went to hell faster than a Terra Luna depeg.

"Fetch some data from the blockchain" turned out to be like saying "just go to space" - technically possible, but involving approximately seven million details that would try to murder your application along the way.

Every smart contract was a unique snowflake of broken dreams and creative accounting:

• Some had liquidity pools that existed only in theory
• Others had tokenomics that would make Bernie Madoff blush
• Many were elaborate honeypots waiting to trap the next victim
• Most were just plain broken in ways their creators hadn't even discovered yet

The data requirements alone were staggering:

• Contract validation: Is this even a real token?
• Liquidity analysis: Or is it all fake volume?
• Trading pattern recognition: Or just wash trading bots?
• Historical price feeds: From which lying oracle?
• Rugpull detection: Spoiler alert - they all rugpull eventually
• Error handling for the infinite ways everything could break

Each component was its own rabbit hole of complexity. Contract validation required understanding dozens of token standards, proxy implementations, and the creative ways developers could hide malicious code. Detecting fake volume was like spotting lies in a room full of pathological liars who were all lying about different things.

I was building a house of cards during an earthquake, except each card was on fire and the earthquake was also on fire.

The Long Dark Night of Code

October 2023 - March 2024 - The Grinding Months

This is where most startup stories either end or become extremely boring. The glamorous "eureka moment" phase was over. Now it was just me, my computer, and an ever-growing list of edge cases that could destroy everything.

BOFA evolved into something increasingly complex and somehow more user-hostile with each iteration. Users had to follow exact formats:

• BET:CONTRACT:AMOUNT:TIMEFRAME:OUTCOME
• One wrong character? Try again, peasant
• Forgot the colon? Back to the main menu
• Typo in the contract address? Enjoy your cryptic error message
• Contract uses some weird proxy pattern? Good luck figuring that out

It was user experience design by a sadist, for masochists. Every interaction required the precision of a Swiss watchmaker and the patience of a saint. I was creating the digital equivalent of IKEA assembly instructions, but for gambling addicts who were also trying to analyze DeFi protocols.

The isolation was the worst part. SMOL INTERN had his own life to live, and I was deep in the technical weeds, speaking in tongues of SQL queries and regex patterns. My social life consisted of arguing with blockchain explorers about timestamp formats and wondering why Ethereum gas fees seemed personally designed to bankrupt me.

But I kept grinding because I'm either incredibly dedicated or clinically insane - honestly, the jury's still out on that one. The vision remained clear through all the technical debt: let people bet on anything crypto-related, make prediction markets accessible, solve information asymmetry in markets.

Noble goals. Terrible execution. But that's how real learning happens, right?

The Evolution to On-Chain

Mid 2024 - From Bot to Protocol

As BOFA gained traction (our user base had grown to dozens!), I realized we were hitting fundamental limitations. A Telegram bot could only scale so far, and users were asking for features that required more sophisticated infrastructure.

The vision was becoming clear: if people wanted to bet on truly anything, we needed more than a clever interface. We needed a protocol that could handle the chaos of human creativity at scale, on-chain, with real money at stake.

This is where BOFA began its transformation into what would become the ANYBID protocol. Not just a betting bot, but a comprehensive prediction market system that could handle everything from crypto prices to political outcomes to whether specific startups would succeed.

The mathematics alone consumed over a year. Not because the math is inherently difficult (though it is), but because reality kept breaking our assumptions. Users would create prediction markets we'd never imagined. Edge cases emerged from dimensions we didn't know existed.

Every "simple" feature required solving problems that would make computer science professors question their career choices:

• How do you create fair markets for subjective outcomes?
• How do you prevent manipulation while maintaining accessibility?
• How do you handle disputes when the outcome is ambiguous?
• How do you scale oracle systems beyond price feeds?
• How do you make complex financial instruments feel like a mobile game?

The AI Revolution Changes Everything

Late 2024 - When Machines Got Scary Good

Just as I was feeling proud of my beautiful, complex, hand-crafted data processing pipeline, Large Language Models happened. Suddenly I felt like I'd been coding with stone tools while everyone else had nuclear reactors.

Remember that painful Telegram interface I'd spent months perfecting? The one requiring users to format everything precisely or face error message hell?

Now users could just say: "Hey, I found this sketchy meme coin called FlokiSafeDogeMoon, 20 euros says it rugpulls within 10 days" and an AI would:

• Parse the natural language perfectly
• Identify the intent without confusion
• Find and validate the asset automatically
• Create the prediction market with proper parameters
• Handle edge cases I'd never considered
• Complete everything in seconds instead of minutes

It was beautiful and infuriating simultaneously. Beautiful because it solved every user experience problem I'd been wrestling with. Infuriating because I'd just spent a year building elaborate solutions to problems that AI could solve effortlessly.

But here's the thing - all that technical pain hadn't been wasted. Those months of wrestling with data validation, edge cases, and user flows had taught me exactly what needed to be solved. When AI tools became available, I knew precisely how to use them because I understood the underlying complexity.

The Interface Revolution

Late 2024 - Making Complex Things Simple

With AI handling the natural language processing, I could focus on what users actually wanted: an interface so intuitive that making predictions felt effortless.

This led to the development of the card-swiping interface that would later become central to the user experience. Tinder-style swiping that made complex evaluations feel natural. Super votes for strong convictions, research mode for deeper analysis.

The deliberately inverted scoring system wasn't just contrarian branding - it was psychologically sticky. When something had a high score, everyone immediately understood: this thing is probably fucked.

The Meta Moment

Early 2025 - When Self-Awareness Becomes Branding

After two years of building, grinding, and occasionally questioning my sanity, something interesting happened. The platform was working. Users were actually using it. The ANYBID protocol was processing real predictions with real money.

But I was exhausted. Burnt out. Looking at everything we'd built and thinking: "I'm probably never gonna make it as a founder. I'm just some dev who got lucky."

And that's when the final piece clicked. NGMI - "Not Gonna Make It" - wasn't just a prediction about other people's projects. It was my own self-deprecating commentary about being a founder who spent two years thinking he was definitely not gonna make it while building something that actually worked.

The irony was perfect. Here I was, creating a platform where people could evaluate whether others would succeed, while constantly doubting my own success. The self-referential humor was too good to pass up.

NGMI became the perfect branding for what we'd built - a platform that acknowledged most crypto projects fail, most predictions are wrong, and most founders (including myself) probably aren't gonna make it. But maybe, just maybe, some of us will.

The Meta Moment and What's Next

Late 2025 - When Self-Awareness Becomes Branding

After two years of building, grinding, and occasionally questioning my sanity, something interesting happened. NGMI 1.0 was working. ANYBID was processing real predictions. Users were actually using the software daily.

But I was exhausted. Burnt out. Looking at everything we'd built and thinking: "I'm probably never gonna make it as a founder. I'm just some dev who got lucky with timing."

And that's when the final piece clicked. NGMI - "Not Gonna Make It" - wasn't just about evaluating other people's projects. It was my own self-deprecating commentary about being a founder who spent two years thinking he was definitely not gonna make it while building something that actually worked.

The irony was perfect. Here I was, creating platforms where people could evaluate whether others would succeed, while constantly doubting my own success. The self-referential humor was too good to pass up.

NGMI became the perfect meta-branding for what we'd built - a system that acknowledged most crypto projects fail, most predictions are wrong, and most founders (including myself) probably aren't gonna make it. But maybe, just maybe, some of us will.

And you know what? Maybe it's time to put my money where my mouth is. If I really believe in prediction markets, if I really think this technology works, then I should make my own prediction about whether this whole journey will actually lead somewhere.

So here's my challenge to the universe: I'm creating a prediction market about myself. Will this developer - who spent two years convinced he wasn't gonna make it - actually make it?

[Link to dev's own prediction market - because if you're gonna build a platform about making predictions, you might as well bet on yourself]

The story isn't over. It's just getting started.

The Real Origin Story

So that's how this really began. Not with a grand vision or revolutionary technical insight, but with two friends who thought building prediction markets would be easy and spent two years learning exactly how wrong they were.

It started with the most inappropriate application possible (RIP PornBot), evolved through BOFA's crypto betting markets, survived the brutal reality of blockchain data processing, transformed into the ANYBID protocol, and eventually became NGMI - a self-aware commentary on the whole ridiculous journey.

It wasn't a weekend hackathon project. It wasn't a stroke of genius. It was the product of sustained delusion, technical masochism, and the kind of stubborn refusal to quit that borders on mental illness.

But sometimes that's exactly what it takes to build something real in a world full of empty promises.

The technology works now. The ANYBID protocol processes real predictions from real users making real money on real outcomes. The NGMI interface is so intuitive that people forget how much complexity we had to solve to make it feel simple.

And me? I'm still here, still building, still probably too arrogant about my code quality. But I've got something now that I didn't have during those dark months of 2023: users. Real people using real software to make real predictions about real events.

Turns out I was wrong about one crucial thing: I was definitely gonna make it. I just took the most circuitous route possible through technical hell to get there, and then named the whole thing after my impostor syndrome.

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P.S. - If you made it this far, you either genuinely care about the technology or you enjoy watching developers have public nervous breakdowns. Either way, welcome to the future of prediction markets. Just maybe don't bet your life savings on dog coins.

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Technical Note: This covers the conceptual and emotional journey. For actual implementation details, smart contract architecture, API documentation, and mathematical proofs that don't make you question humanity, see our Technical Documentation section. Warning: Contains significantly less existential crisis and more actual useful information.