Wow! That's about all I have to say for this past week. I mean, how do you put the roller coaster ride we have been on into words. So Uptober seems to have turned out to be a total bummer. I've been up north in Michigan at an ed tech conference that I attend every year, so I haven't kept a very close eye on the markets which right now might not be a totally bad thing.
I know, I know, all you need to do is zoom out and you can see that things don't really look as bad as they seem. At least as far as BTC is concerned. Alts on the other hand are a totally different story. I got an alert today that Cosmos (ATOM) fell below $3.00 per token. I remember a time when ATOM was sitting steady right around $20 per token. In fact, it's one of the tokens that I was dollar cost averaging into for quite some time and the majority of those tokens were purchased near that $20 mark.
Talk about a gut punch...
Despite that, I haven't given up on crypto. I still have faith that we might see some kind of alt season, but the closer we get to 2026, the more that hope is starting to fade. I can't help but regret all the money I didn't put into BTC over the years. Right now the Bitcoin Maxi's have a lot of us eating some crow whether things eventually turn out okay or not.
The title of this post is "Making Moves" though, so it's not like I have just been sitting on my holdings and lamenting the moves I didn't make. Let me break down some of them for you right now:
I've mentioned before that I invested a portion of my gains in 2020 into a token called COTI. Due to the horrible policy the US had regarding crypto in the past bear market, users inside the United States weren't able to participate in some of the staking options that the COTI token offers. That means while others outside the US were earning some decent returns, my tokens were just sitting there doing nothing.
Eventually, COTI moved things over to the ERC20 network and with the help of a VPN, I was finally able to take advantage. Earlier this year, COTI was finally able to open their services fully to US citizens without a VPN, but as I found out, I still wasn't taking full advantage.
When you lock up your tokens for staking with COTI, you can also boost your interest rate by staking the GCOTI token along with your COTI tokens. I was crawling along earning 5% interest on my tokens not realizing that if I bought just a bit more GCOTI I could be earning closer to 60% interest. Especially after a whole lot of people got liquidated a short time ago.
This past weekend I moved some of my ETH into GCOTI while the price of ETH was up and the price of GCOTI was down (though not as low as it is now). I bridged those GCOTI tokens over to the COTI network and boosted my deposit with them. I am now earning 50% and 40% respectively on my two deposits over there.
With the announcement of Alpha Vials being able to be opened in just a couple of days (November 2nd), I got looking a little closer at my 
At the very least it should still be above 3%. I'm really looking forward to cracking my vials open on Sunday and getting a clearer picture of how this game is going to play out. The posts by 
The contributor rewards for the last quarter of 2025 have been dropped for the Travala token. I have never used the platform to complete a booking, but I know several people on here have and it seems to work out well for them. I earned about 94 AVA tokens from the handful of tasks I was required to do in their platform. I don't think that is too bad though at current prices it only amounts to about $20.
At one time it was closer to $200 in rewards, but hopefully prices recover and my tokens will be worth that if not more again. I still plan on doing the contributor tasks in the future because I think Travala has a really great idea. I'd love to get my hands on a couple of the Travel Tiger NFT's, but the price is way too prohibitive right now.
If alt season would ever show up it might be a bit more do-able for me, but all I can do now is wait.
I still haven't picked up my holiday silver yet. I made the decision to stay out of the #silvergoldstackers secret santa draw this year. The price is just too prohibitive and I have purchases I need to make for myself and my nephew. With prices still hovering close to $50 per ounce, my spending power has been greatly depleted.
That being said, my crypto stock Fortuna Silver Mines (FSM) has been trading closer to $10 than I have seen in quite some time. At least as far as I remember. It's hovering right below that $9 mark as I write this and it kind of feels like it could keep going up.
I actually expected a lot more positive movement this week given some of the news that was coming down the pipe about crypto, but I guess we just have to wait. Maybe November will turn out to be everything we were hoping for in October.
All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 
