You know, I've been meaning to tell this story for a while now. It's wild to think back on how something so simple turned into this massive movement across the entire crypto community. So let me take you back to where it all started.

I was just another Bitcoin pleb when I found Twitter in April 2020. Seriously, I had like 30 followers at that point. But I was obsessed with Bitcoin Twitter and the community there. That's where I discovered American HODL, and man, this guy was legendary. He'd call out scams, drop these insanely clever takes on the market, and his shitposts were absolutely unmatched. I remember thinking, this is the guy I want to be like.

One day I saw someone hating on one of his posts, and I just decided to make a meme response using nothing but the basic Android photo editor. I threw it up as a reply and American HODL retweeted it. Me. A pleb with barely any followers. I was hooked. That's when I realized I had found my thing - making memes for the Bitcoin community.

Around that same time, I connected with Gregzaj1 and Labra HODL. We just clicked immediately. We weren't trying to build some grand organization or anything. It was just us pushing each other to make better, funnier content. We'd roast shitcoins, we'd poke fun at no-coiners, and we bonded the community through shared humor. We called ourselves The Meme Factory, and honestly, we were like a team of cyber hornets armed with creativity and jokes.

Before the laser eyes crypto vision took off, I'd been experimenting with community avatars. Late 2020, I created Christmas avatars for the whole Bitcoin Twitter crew - ended up making over 1,000 of them. It was about creating this sense of unity, you know? Everyone rocking the same look, feeling like part of something bigger. Then we did New Year's avatars, and I helped put Hodlonaut helmets on people showing support for the cat against CSW. These little projects taught me how much the community loved having something visual to rally around.

Fast forward to early February 2021. Bitcoin was sitting around $42,000, and we were just doing what we always did - memeing the hell out of everything. Pedro hit me up asking if I could add laser eyes to one of his kangaroo memes for extra impact. I threw some basic lasers on it, and then it just hit me - what if everyone in our crew had laser eyes? I went through and gave all the boys the crypto eyes treatment. Well, except RD got derpy googly eyes instead.

I showed the crew what I'd made and told them, 'When we need to go full offensive meme mode, we activate laser eyes.' Everyone was immediately down. So I threw out an idea: 'What if we kick this off with #LaserRayUntil100K?' That hashtag had never been used before. The energy was there, and we knew we had something special.

Plan Marcus suggested we wait until Bitcoin hit $50,000 to officially launch. We all agreed. I reached out to American HODL - the guy who inspired all of this - and told him the plan. He said, 'I'm in.' That was it. We were locked in.

February 16, 2021. Game on. The Meme Factory came out swinging. Within three days, members of Congress, celebrities, regular plebs - everyone was rocking the laser eyes. It blew up so fast that mainstream media started covering it. That's when we knew the crypto eyes movement had transcended just our little crew.

What came after $100K? Well, obviously #LaserEyesUntilFiatDies. The mission never really ends, does it?

It's crazy to look back and see how a simple idea between friends turned into this global movement. El Salvador's president wearing the crypto eyes, Congress members posting them, random people across the world adopting them - it all started because we just wanted to have fun and bond the community. Sometimes the best things happen when you're not even trying to make them happen.