I didn’t expect to be writing this post, honestly. I got into Jujutsu Kaisen the same way most people did, someone on Twitter wouldn’t shut up about Gojo, I caved and watched the first episode, and three days later I’d finished the anime and started the manga. Standard fan pipeline.
What surprised me was noticing, over the next year or so, how many people in the JJK corners of the internet were also deep into crypto. Not “casually own some Bitcoin” deep. Like, running Discord servers, minting fan art as NFTs, tipping translators in USDT deep. It didn’t fit the stereotype of what a crypto person is supposed to look like, and it made me curious.
So I started paying attention. Here’s what I’ve figured out.
Anime fans have basically always been doing this
The thing people forget is that anime fandom was running on weird internet money long before crypto existed. If you wanted a rare figure from Japan in 2008, you were wiring money to a proxy service. If you were commissioning a Korean artist in 2015, you were probably doing PayPal gymnastics to avoid fees eating half the payment. Fansubbers passed hats. Doujin circles took foreign orders through god knows how many workarounds.
The point is, the muscle memory for “pay a stranger in another country for a piece of fan culture” was already there. Crypto just showed up as another tool in the toolbox, and a lot of fans picked it up because it was faster than the alternatives, not because they’d read a whitepaper.
Why JJK specifically
I’ve thought about this a lot and I think it comes down to three things.
The art style translates. Gojo’s blindfold, Sukuna’s face markings, the whole visual grammar of domain expansions, this stuff looks incredible as a PFP or in pixel art. Fan artists have a field day with it, and if you’re an artist trying to make actual money from your work, selling limited editions is one of the few ways that pays.
The audience is young and online in a specific way. Not just “on the internet” but comfortable with things like joining a Discord, holding a wallet, sending crypto to a friend. That’s not a universal skill set. It’s a demographic.
And, this is only partly a joke, the fandom is really good at speculation. Watch a JJK power-scaling thread go for 400 replies about whether Sukuna’s slashes can hit Gojo through Infinity, and you’re basically watching people do the same thing crypto Twitter does all day. Build a model, argue the edges, refuse to concede. Same brain.
What people actually use it for
Most of it is boring, which I think is a good sign.
Tipping is the big one. If you’ve ever read a scanlation and wondered how the translator gets paid, the answer is increasingly “somebody sent them $20 in USDT.” It skips the whole PayPal-doesn’t-work-in-my-country problem that a lot of fan translators run into.
Buying from Japan is another one. A few small shops and resellers take crypto now, and if you’ve ever been quoted a shipping-plus-conversion-fee total that made you close the tab, you get why that matters.
And funding fan stuff, podcasts, indie animation, doujin projects, has moved partly onto token-gated communities and small crowdfunds. Nothing revolutionary. Just Patreon with different plumbing.
If you’re curious and want to try it
Look, I’m not going to pretend I know what I’m doing well enough to give real financial advice. But I’ve watched enough friends lose money to bad first moves that I can at least tell you what not to do.
Don’t start with meme coins. I know they’re funny. Don’t.
Learn what a wallet actually is before you put money in one. Custodial, non-custodial, seed phrases, why you never screenshot the seed phrase, this is the boring part and it’s the part that matters. If you skip it and get phished, that’s the whole story.
Use a real exchange for your first purchase, not some random site a stranger DMed you. Something like a secure crypto exchange that handles the major coins is fine as a starting point, you want boring reliability for your on-ramp, not a flashy interface. Fees, withdrawal speed, whether it actually works when the market is moving. That’s what matters.
Start with a small amount. Like, embarrassingly small. Move it around, send it to yourself, get a feel for how the mechanics work when the stakes are basically zero. The number of people who lose money because they were still figuring out the UI when they made a real trade is genuinely depressing.
And obviously, nothing you can’t afford to lose. This is written on the wall of every crypto space in seventeen languages and people still don’t listen.
Anyway
I don’t think anime and crypto are about to merge into some grand unified culture. Most JJK fans will never touch a wallet, and honestly, most of them shouldn’t bother. But the overlap is real, it’s bigger than people realize, and it’s mostly made up of fans doing normal fan things paying artists, buying merch, funding creators, with tools that happen to work better for their situation than the old ones did.
Which is, when you think about it, a very JJK way to end up somewhere unexpected. You start off just trying to help your friends and next thing you know you’re four arcs deep in something you didn’t sign up for.
Sounds about right.