Zeneca

Zeneca is the pen name of Roy Bhasin, an Australian who played poker professionally for roughly fifteen years before crypto. He touched the market in 2016 and 2017, walked away in the bear, and came back hard in early 2021, when NFTs pulled him in for good. He bought three Bored Apes on pure fear of missing out, then kept going into CryptoPunks, Art Blocks generative work and a pile of goblintown, and built a collection of several thousand pieces inside a year. What he is really known for is what he did with the audience that followed. In late 2021 he tried to build an all in one NFT education platform, decided the plan was too ambitious, and opened a plain Discord server instead. It passed ten thousand members in a couple of months and became ZenAcademy. He wrote that story into the Genesis membership NFT itself, dated November 9, 2021, as a letter to holders. He also launched The 333 Club, a 333 token inner tier at 3.33 ETH. He co-hosted the Two Bored Apes podcast, writes the weekly newsletter Letters from a Zeneca, and has said plainly that he reached eight figures and then gave a lot of it back. In July 2022 his X and Discord accounts were compromised and used to push a fake ZenAcademy founders pass.

He collects across blue chip PFPs and generative art rather than making work himself. His wallet holds Bright Moments editions from the ten city gallery run, Chain Runners, Art Gobblers and a long tail of small projects and airdrops. On the building side he ran ZenAcademy's token economy, moving members from ERC-1155 letters to ERC-721 passes and then running a burn called the Summoning: Genesis holders burned for a ZenChest, 333 Club holders were upgraded and got three, and ZenChests burned again for Denizens PFPs. He chose that route over minting a fresh collection for revenue.

• Founding ZenAcademy, which started as a Discord server and passed 10,000 members
• The 333 Club, the 3.33 ETH inner tier of ZenAcademy
• Fifteen years as a professional poker player before NFTs
• Buying three Bored Apes on FOMO in 2021
• The Summoning burn, upgrading Genesis and 333 holders into ZenChests and Denizens instead of minting a new collection
• Letters from a Zeneca, his weekly crypto newsletter
• Co-hosting the Two Bored Apes podcast

On the show