There are moments when you see a series of events unfold and you think to yourself that makes sense. And there are moments when you think how did that just happen? And then there are the people who seem to somehow pull those moments off over and over again and just like magic you cannot explain it but you watch in awe. This story has all but the first. Nothing about it makes sense but then again nothing about anything Jeremy Ryan AKA NFT Demon AKA Jack Hoff does really seems to when compared against every standard you think you know.
My first encounter with him came in 2021. I was just finishing up my four years of journalism school when a friend had introduced me to memecoins. No way, I thought, could this guy be making this much money. He had gone from being a broke college student like the rest of us to buying a brand new BMW and having his tuition paid off in under a year. The secret according to him was memecoins. It cant be that easy can it? Regardless I wanted to know more. So I went over to his apartment and had him show me the ins and outs. “The secret” he said “is about who you follow here watch this”. So he grabbed my phone which I had just loaded with 1 bnb (at the time approximately $500) and he made a trade for me.
He then joined some random Telegram group where everyone had cartoon pictures and talked about going to the moon seemingly repeating the same lines over and over again. What he bought was some coin I don’t even remember the name of. But the dev or developer had gone by Jack Hoff. At the time he was entirely anonymous something that would later change and make things even more bizarre than they already were. Wen marketing someone would ask to which he’d respond fuck marketing.
An argument would erupt and a bunch of people would get upset insisting that you couldn’t “moon” a token without spending a bunch of money. Jack would simply say “We are the money” as several people would dump their bags only to be replaced hours later by other people and the cycle would repeat itself. At the time they didn’t have buy bots in Telegram channels so it was easy to lose track of your “bag”. You had to basically keep your eye glued to PancakeSwap in order to know how much you had. I was more enthralled by the spectacle that was taking place.
This was one of those situations that made no sense. And Jack Hoff, or how someone with such an odd display name could even be running something like this made no sense either. But he was also a person in which nothing made sense. However two weeks later my 1 bnb became 35 bnb. Two weeks after that my 35 was 100. And something about the way he worked seemed methodical and calculated but in a way no one else could pull off. He had a way of making people either love him or hate him there was no in between. But through the preceding months I would enter several tokens of his. Each one the group of people that trusted him grew larger and larger. And each one we all made more and more money. And each one dozens to hundreds of people would swear you couldn’t grow a token this way. But he could and he did.
Then came the moment we hoped would never happen. The final token. With a market cap of over a million dollars but not too much Jack was unsatisfied. And indeed looking back that was the start of the bear market. Dynamics had changed. Statistically the vast majority of players had left the arena. And so Jack made an announcement that he was done with tokens and would instead be switching to NFTs because those seemed easier for him to make everyone happy with he said. And so Cartel Punks was launched. It was an ambitious project. A 10,000 piece collection on BNB Chain (then called Binance Smart Chain) run by a nobody and filled with early buyers of whom it seemed had never owned a NFT before in their life as the memecoin and NFT markets were very different on BSC.
At the time not a single collection of its size had ever sold out in under a month on the chain. But in his strange methodical way Jack told us all once again “I got this”. And somehow within 2 weeks the entire collection had been minted out making it the first collection on the chain to mint out in under a month. But not only had they minted out, the floor price was 50% higher than the highest mint. And stayed that way for some time. Jack remained anonymous and launched four more collections all of which had similar success except for one which was due to a scammer stealing the art and claiming it was theirs. They eventually drained everyones wallet but the damage was done.
And literally within six months and just before the bull market ended and NFT volume plummeted virtually overnight Jack became the largest artist on BSC with multiple pieces owned by different celebrities including Eminem. And everyone was happy. Sometime in the process of all of this success Jack revealed himself to be Jeremy Ryan, a man with a history as colorful and bizarre as what everyone watched unfold. A history that included multiple runs for US congress often appearing drunk and smoking cannabis in his campaign videos something that was very much illegal in his state. Only to later be charged with false nuclear terrorism charges in which the FBI would eventually admit to having no evidence of. And the story just gets more and more bizarre the more you dig.
But here he was, the largest artist on one of the largest chains at the time, posing for pictures with celebrities and changing his middle name to NoFucks. We also found out that he only was able to do art due to a 4 year run with brain cancer which left him with that ability he didn’t have. The more I looked into this guy the more I realized he may just have the most bizarre history I’ve ever heard of. An authentic level of eccentricity that makes Joe Exotic seem normal. And somewhere along the line he became the go to consultant for celebrities and Fortune 500 companies, his Twitter alone being followed by celebrities like Snoop Dogg and John Cena. And just like anything else it’s as unexplainable as it is bizarre. But he stops running projects so we eventually lose touch.
Fast forward to a bit over a week ago. I get a message on Telegram from an account called “Jack Hoff Reloaded”. Could this be the same Jack Hoff? He explains that Telegram shut down his old account (which lacked the reloaded) and a dive through my chat history does indeed show it was deleted. He says he’s been doing well but when he lost that account he lost most of his token base. But he had a new following now and wanted to know if I was interested in investing in a token. He said it would be his first since the last bull run and that it would be followed by a bunch of celebrities. I was skeptical so I declined. It seemed bizarre even from the most bizarre person I had ever encountered.
Fast forward a couple of more days. It’s 3am in California where he lives. He sends me a message and asks if I’m still writing. I explain that I am for an independent site called The New Sentinel and he asks if I can do an article. What in the world would I do an article about I thought. And yet again another bizarre story of which could only come from him comes out. He explains that he got into a token called Bitcoin ATH and that the developer did a good job so he thought he could be trusted. He then tells me that the developer had an idea to utilize some of his celebrity connections for a token. And because the developer had proven himself in the previous token and came up with the idea, he let him handle the development work while he got celebrities to follow the page.
He starts telling me that he provided the Twitter for the token he tried to get me to enter the presale for called Belieber and that it was followed by Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Gabriel Iglesias, and Burger King. Normally I would have dismissed such an outlandish claim and blocked him right there but considering there was a chance he could actually be Jack Hoff and that from everything I knew about him the outlandish was simply the normal I allowed him to go on. He explained that the developer, who went by X on Telegram, had airdropped himself 60% of the supply and rugged the project to $4,000. But what he said next did somewhat pique my interest. He stated that the community really rallied around the token and members he had spoken with had wanted him to continue with it. So he came out of retirement and a revival had begun.
At the time the market cap had rebounded to about $20,000. I looked the token up, verified that all of the celebrities were indeed following it, and realized that there may be something here. After all I was aware of the Kanye token hitting over $16,000,000 and that wasn’t even a legitimate follow and both the Taylor Swift token and the Taylor Swifts Cat token hitting over $10,000,000 with no celebrity follows. I told him that I couldn’t possibly do an article about a token with such little gains. Also that I would need to verify that it was actually him in the most accurate way I knew how.
So I joined the Telegram. Within minutes two things became clear. The first was that this was in fact the same Jack Hoff of the glory days. Nobody can fake his unique way of going about things. The second was that this community not only believed in Jack but truly believed that this token could and would succeed. I watched for several days as the token took hit after hit from swing traders and dump after dump only to remain surprisingly stable. But I couldn’t do a story about a $20,000 token. And then everything changed. One day it shot up past $100,000 for the first time since the rug. It fell down to $40,000 but remained stable there. Overnight the floor had doubled. The community roared and vowed to hold until the millions. Within 24 hours the token had surged to over $500,000 market cap only to fall back down again to a low of about $130,000. But that didn’t last long. Within hours it was at a floor of around $300,000 of which it stayed very stable.
Then I went to bed and woke up and it was still at $300,000 market cap. It hadn’t even gone down overnight, over 500 comments in the Telegram in just hours. The community still fired up. And I realized. This isn’t just the first token to be followed by any and all of these celebrities. It’s also the first token in a long time to show that a community united can make their own destiny. That they can come back from anything and everything. And that if you just keep going you don’t need fancy marketing. And can in fact do a better job than those who have it. Because it remains clear that while many tokens come and go. The steady but consistent efforts of Belieber should ensure that the growth continues on. Jack was back! But more importantly he had found another community to rally with him to start the beginning of once again pulling off the impossible as I had seen countless times before. It was refreshing and exactly what this industry needs. And they’ve made a Belieber out of me!