Three years ago, Corey Nielsen, a middle-aged man from Tolleson, Arizona, embarked on a journey to build the world’s largest pyramid of stacked pennies. He only had a few thousand coins and a dream at the time, but today he’s inching closer to finally accomplishing his goal.

The current record for the world’s largest coin pyramid stands at 1,000,935 coins. It was set in 2014 by Vytautas Jakštas and Domas Jokubauskis, in the small Baltic country of Lithuania, as a way to celebrate the adoption of the euro. In one of his videos, Corey Nielsen claims that they had a team of 100 people working on it – although I haven’t been able to verify if that is true – but he decided he could build an even bigger one by himself. He had built smaller penny pyramids before, but this was a much bigger project, one that would take daily work over multiple years to complete. Well, after almost three years of penny stacking, he’s nearly there.

Digg recently reported that Nielsen, who goes by Penny Building Fool on YouTube, is less than 100,000 pennies away from breaking the world record. He’s been documenting his progress through periodically-released videos that show just how far he’s come in the last three years. The base of of his coin behemoth has grown constantly and it is now made up of 65 x 65 rows of stacked pennies.

Nielsen’s soon-to-be record-breaking coin pyramid currently consists of 938,322 neatly stacked pennies. That’s nearly $10,000 worth of humble pennies, with a combined weight of 5,792 pounds. The patient builder has already received the last 100,000 pennies required to break the Guinness record, and hopes to stack them all onto his giant pyramid by the end of this month.

Back in 2016, when the penny enthusiast was announcing his plans to build the world’s largest pyramid, he claimed that the ultimate goal wasn’t just to break the world record by a couple of coins, but actually double the number of coins used by Jakštas and Jokubauskis. That was three years ago, though, so who knows if he’s willing to put another three years into this project.

You may think dedicating so much time and effort to a coin pyramid is silly, but you have to admire the man’s patience and dedication. I wonder how he kept it safe all these years, though. Can you imagine someone accidentally stumbling over it and ruining years of painstaking work? That would have been brutal!