In an earlier age of the internet, there was One Red Paperclip. The 2005 brainchild of Kyle MacDonald, the project involved MacDonald seeing just what he could accomplish by trading a series of objects, beginning with — you guessed it — one red paperclip. The answer turned out to be “a house” – and MacDonald went on to receive a host of media coverage for the project and write a book about it.
And now, 16 years later, someone’s pulled it off again. As Vulture reports, Demi Skipper of TikTok’s Trade Me Project just pulled off her own escalating series of trades, parlaying a humble bobby pin into a house. All told, it took her 28 trades to reach her goal.
An article at The Guardian has more details on how, exactly, Skipper pulled off the trades that landed her a house. It involves her having traded for a Chipotle celebrity card — something that gives the bearer a year’s worth of free food from the restaurant chain, plus a catered meal. She traded that to a fan of Chipotle who had a trailer, then traded the trailer to a Tennessee woman in exchange for a house.
Skipper has just shy of five million followers on TikTok; the project took her a year and a half total. It probably doesn’t hurt that she also knows online spaces well (as The Guardian notes, she works for Cash App) — but her accomplishment, like MacDonald’s, shows that seemingly impossible trades like this can be pulled off.
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