Earthlings Twin Talk Twitter Spaces - Crypto Scam Stories, what can we learn from them? (Part 1)

In this Twitter Spaces hosted by Earthlings and HashPack, we dive deep into some of the crypto scams the panelists have been impacted by, what they have learned from it, and what can be done to avoid them in the future.

Transcription

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍So, I think we've got most of them on board. Still waiting for MaD Vapes, but we've got so many speakers tonight that, well, you know, if they don't join or come late, then I think we'll fill the space anyway. Um, so let's see who we have. We've got HashPack, of course, HeadStarter, Leemon Swap HashGuild, myself, my brother, and we even got a famous one from, I see a thumbs-down. One second, Master Oogway. Sorry, sorry, you're here, you're here. Look, look, there you are. Sorry for that. I didn't mean to be rude with all those thumbs downs. There's another one who is, Sitcoms. Let's see, introduce yourself, because I know up already. Up, you'll get your term as well this evening. But Cigtoshi, who's behind Cigtoshi? Before we do the whole introduction of the show, I wonder who you are. Okay, we'll kick it off then. So welcome all to another twin show, but actually also we do a lot of these shows together with HashPack. HashPack is here as well. He'll introduce himself as well in a second. We've got many guests, actually, as you can see, Headstarter, Leemon Swap, Hash Guild, my brother Marcel, and Ziktos, for Matt Vapes. And what else do we have? We have Master Oogway. We all know Master Oogway. We've got our app. I never know if I pronounce it right. We've had many, ah, and I see Iron at as well. And Iron Ant, if you want to go on the stage, you're more than welcome, of course. I'll just send you an invite. Where did you go to? You just, because you're now gone again. So, we have a very interesting space today, and I've got HashPack backing me up here, helping me with the questions. Thank you. Yeah, and we'll talk. We'll do these shows every two weeks, and every week, we'll have a show from Earthlings. But every two weeks, Marcel and I, we're gonna do something. Of course, last week, Marcel and I did a show where our community asked us all the difficult questions. I really felt like I was at the bank applying for a loan, and I wanted to undress me. But that was cool, because they've got the right to do that, of course. And this week, well, this week, we're going to talk about the crypto scene, because unfortunately, and all the, well, I don't like the worst, but the scams and the rug pulls and all the dangers that you can encounter in the scene. And unfortunately, the crypto scene is a bit known for many scams. Is that farewell? We're going to talk about that too, of course, because I don't think it's always fair. In real life, I met so many scammers, but that's not the first subject that we're going to talk about. We'll see if we have some time left for that, and I think we can help protect each other a bit, just with sharing experiences. And we all like a juicy story as well. Let's be honest, Leemon Swap likes juice. As well, so we will ask each speaker to share a personal story. After every story, I'll ask what could have been done to prevent a scam, rock pool, bad investment, or whatever your story is. If you don't have a story, you might have some advice from your niche in this market to share as well. This evening, I'll start with Marcel, my brother, because I know Mars is very busy and he's going to be a bit on the sideline today as well because we have so many guests. But after Marcel, we'll go to all the specialists because all these different projects we've got well. Us with gaming, HashPack with the crypto wallet of course. We even have a Dax Leemon Swap, and they probably have something to tell about their niche marketing here as well. We've got HashGuild that make it complete with the NFT platform, but we've got someone from Mad Vapes as well. They are an NFT project on V chain, and I did see Iron and I look fast. Precisely, he's now here too. And we've got everything covered here, and everyone will tell something. By the way, I want every project to introduce yourself shortly because we've got a long list of people, and then share your experience. What did you experience? Because we like stories and how do you think you could prevent that? One last note, and then I'll give the words to someone else, is we try not to mention other existing projects by name. Why not? Because we don't want to bash or down talk on other projects. If it's, of course, a worldwide known scandal, everyone knows about it, then it doesn't hurt. But we don't like down talk on other projects because it can be seen as an opinion sometimes as well, and we just want to be careful with that. So for everyone in the space, press the retweet button, like, love, share, so as many people can come up. Let's give the words to HashPack and see what they want to say. Introduce yourself just shortly, and then you can take over a little bit to give the word to Marcel to share his experience, and then we'll kick it off further with you. Can you first introduce yourself?

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍Yeah, hello everyone, thank you, Patrick. Hello, everyone that's here on the panel and everyone joining and listening down there. So I'm Marc, Director of Operations here at HashPack. We are the leading wallet in the ecosystem. I guess this is very fitting because we come up with a lot of different scams and rug pools and all that with HashPack. A lot of people come into us and share their stories. A lot of them are heartbreaking, and yeah, personally, I mean, I think the biggest one that I've kind of been a part of is just kind of before HashPack, way before it. It's the whole you know not your keys, not your crypto. You know, trusting on Exchange and then you know that Exchange kind of just not taking their security properly and... and then me not taking custody properly and... losing, my tokens through that. And then I'd like to share another one that it's actually very fitting because a lot of people, unfortunately, have fallen for those, is the people reaching out to, you know, users and asking for private keys. And that's, that's the disclaimer that we say so many, so many times, but it still happens. And, you know, just as a disclaimer, will never ask as HashPack or really any wallet. Nobody should really ever ask you for your private keys, and we've seen some instances where some users have lost, you know, a big chunk of their savings because they were approached by a malicious actor, and they had to import their private keys, and then from there, they just lost complete control from their of their account, and those stories are heartbreaking. Yeah, they're very, very sad, and everything that we've been trying to do is, educate people to let them know that, you know, they should never share your private keys. I think that introducing email login that makes it a little harder, but yeah, that's my two cents. I'll pass it back to you, Patrick. I don't know if, yeah, or whoever wants to go next.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, we're gonna, pass into to, Marcel, but that's amazing. People still hand over their private keys, and you, you see this still a lot.

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍Yeah, yeah, it happens more often than not, and it's very heartbreaking, like I said, it's very sad because, you know, people are probably sometimes, trying to get some support, and then somebody just reaches out to them to the DMS, to Discord, through whatever, and then they just, yeah, they go through that, and then they come to us, it's like, hey, this happened, and unfortunately, because of the nature of web3, hashgraph, and, you know, dlts as a whole, it's irreversible, right? So yeah, we spend a lot of time educating users. That's actually also one of the reasons why, and Patrick actually sent me that message this past week, about, you know, people have been using the memos to send, malicious links to people, and so we introduced that, alert like warning message to make sure that people don't check, don't, don't click on that, and yeah, we're working more stuff to keep our users secure, but I think that the biggest lift is just educating those users and making sure that they know that, you know, your seed phrase is basically your key to your bank, and you shouldn't share that with anyone.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Well, good to say that, good to tell this Mesh, it's because if so many people still fall for that. I do see, by the way, Dawn, that you also requested to be a speaker. I'm gonna throw my brother out to replacing with you in a second, but let's hear because it is the twin show. We're fully booked today, so I told Marcel you can speak in the beginning, and then I'll just have to throw you out to make plays for someone else, but Marcel, come on, share us your story. What did, where did you mess up in the crypto space? What stories do you have?

Earthlings – Marcel De Grijs - Founder
‍Yeah, it's actually me. I messed up. That's how I feel, how it feels. But it's so important, to share all this info. Like, HashPack just said, we need to share it over and over again, especially for the new users. Um, yeah, but it's a twin show, so that's why I need to have a story also. But I have one. Um, it was back in 2017. My 'stay safe and don't get scammed' story, actually. Um, well, the crypto space is full of scammers and wanna-be 'latest,' and unfortunately, um, I also have heard stories of people getting tricked in trading their NFTs in our community also. Um, and, and they didn't get their NFT returned, and they saw it getting sold on, um, on the secondary markets. But anyway, uh, yeah, my story. Sorry, I had this guy. It was back in 2017. I was just new at crypto, and, um, there was this guy who was supposed to be a trader. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna tell his name, but he made a very good crypto call group, actually, and he had people paying a lot of dollars every month. I think I paid about 500 dollars, so I feel really stupid that I did this, uh, but, but anyway, let me finish. Um, and he had, uh, he had this core group making trades, and he had two, um, traders also working for him. Um, he was paying them, but in the end, he wasn't paying them anymore. So he actually had a very big trading group with tens of, well, I think about 40 or 50 paying customers, and it was going really well. But in the end, um, he made us do very, very risky trades. Uh, one of his favorite coins was, uh, Trump T-Rex TRX, and there were people that were putting in thousands of dollars. Um, in this coin, and it, it just crashed, and he just kept telling us, "Stay and stay, and it's going to go up. It's going to go up." And there was this guy, he lost 40,000 dollars, and of course, it was at the end of 2017, beginning 2018, and it never came back up again. He made a lot of people angry, and he just, he just ran. But it's, it's this Twitter, profile now that's only about him showing how his camera, he was pretending to be a millionaire that he made his millions with, trading, and then look, I was lucky I didn't lose too much money because I wasn't in, um, in with a big amount, luckily. But, um, yeah, then he just ran away and never heard of him, and in this other Twitter accounts that was calling him out, we saw these videos on YouTube, he was doing other scams, and he turned out that he was still living at home. There's, well, there's more to say about that, but it was, it was bad for a lot of people in the group who lost a lot of money by just gambling on what he was putting out there? He was taking trades from other Twitter people and just, well, he wasn't good at trading after all and he just ran with his money. But it was a bad experience and I almost tried to put other people, also my friends in the group, like he's really good, and I feel a bit a little bit ashamed because I really thought he was this kind of crypto trade God, and I really thought he was a millionaire. And you start looking up to someone like that and when you just after, well, it feels really, really weird if you find out he was a scammer. But that's my, well, I hope it kept it short, but that's my short story.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Well, I think lesson learned. First of all, if you can pay someone 500 euros a month for that much, so you can miss some money.

Earthlings – Marcel De Grijs - Founder
‍Well, you know who he was, and I almost pulled you in. Also, luckily, yeah, you didn't join, but man, you feel so stupid afterwards.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍How could you have prevented this? What was the lesson learned?

Earthlings – Marcel De Grijs - Founder
‍I think everyone goes, I think most people, it's greed, it's greed. That's what it is. You believe the stories. He was the so-called self-made millionaire, and I asked him why are you doing this, and he said, 'Yeah, I don't want to go sit around to be on my PlayStation every day when I can help people.' I said, 'Yeah, but you make so,' yeah, that's what he said. So looking back, it's all the signals you missed, and none of his calls were right, and it was always next time, next time. Anyway, that's it.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍I think the lesson learned is as well that if you follow someone like that, do some research on the guy as well, you know? And anyway, you can't guarantee that a trade goes up or down because the markets are pretty unpredictable. So, but anyway, myself, we're Marc, HashPack Marc. Can you throw Marcel off because then we have another place myself? Thank you for your story, you're putting in there. Bye-bye, yeah, okay, it was a great one. Okay, so let's go back to the next one. I just have, let's just follow the list here that we have on top. So, who's behind the Headstarter? But the who wants to share some love there.

Headstarter – Tudor - Founder
‍Hey, friends, how's it going? This is Tudor, as per usual. I'm still looking forward to the day when hopefully Ben or Master Ogway will take over the handle for the Twitter spaces. Unfortunately, for the moment, it's still me. It's really great to be here with you guys. I love this topic because it strikes home, and it's great to be here with so many friends and fellow builders in the community. Even, I mean, I want to give a special shout out to the guys in the audience, H Bar Joe, Celestial Being, Exes, and all the other friends that we have in the community that are joining the spaces sometimes just to listen to us sharing and giving our thoughts to the community. Now to bring a bit of context to this topic. There are scammers everywhere. If you turn on Instagram today, going back to Marcel's story, there are so many Millionaires, there are so many Traders, there are so many people that come out of nowhere, buy some fancy clothes, and all of a sudden they are someone, and people buy into these things. Today, there are daily, I always send to my team, I get uh emails, messages all the time, people trying to scam us on different things. There are people that fall today, to the scam of giving away your social security number, your Puck number from your sim card. There's so many scams circling all the time. And if I look back at the scams that I fell for, there was a day I was pretty young. I was going to French classes and I had maybe the equivalent of uh ten dollars to pay for my for the French classes. The classes were canceled so I was sitting at the bus stop waiting for the bus. This is to people who don't know, I'm a Romanian. I grew up in Romania, and I was at the bus stop, and there were these guys. You sometimes see them if you're from London. You see them on the London Bridge. They have a ball, they have three different boxes, and you need to find where the ball is, right? So I got scammed out of my French class money there, right? And a lot of the times, the bad apples sometimes dictate and show people make opinions about a certain group of people, a certain nationality, whatever it is. People build stereotypes based on the bad apples and the things that generally create the news, which are the bad things, right? But people don't really see all the value that is being built. That's why I feel so passionate about crypto because I really feel like the web 3 Industry opened up the imagination of so many people that today, the people that are trying to do something here are the people that the or that they have the same makeup as the people who hundreds of years ago, went to America to find a better life. Sorry if I sound like a, like an old person right now, but um, what the point I'm trying to make is that there will be crypto scams, there will be rug pools, there will be projects that fail. That doesn't mean that that person, the founder, is set up with that intention necessarily, right? There could be that that particular project had all the bad intentions, all the good intentions in the world. It's just things didn't add up. We speak to dozens, and we've spoken to hundreds of projects, and generally, we speak to their Founders, and they're all very passionate about their project, and that's how entrepreneurs, that's how visionaries are. They want to do stuff, and they have a good sense of where it can reach. They sometimes need help to get a better sense of reality and how the evolution of a startup is, and it can, it's generally a grind, right? So for the people that ultimately end up doing a rock pool, end up scrapping the project, I just want to bring to everybody's awareness that maybe they don't always start with bad intentions in mind, on the crypto side of things, I got scammed a few times, a few times I got rugged by the SEC with a few projects that they banned. I remember Ship Chain, there's a few others, there's a few times that I got. For example, I rushed into Uniswap to buy a hot new token, that was only one time. I wanted to buy a hot new token, I put in the name and I didn't put the address once of the token, and I bought something else, right? So, that was a one-eighth mistake. But, I think that there's a lot to be done here. It starts with education and that's why Head Starter is so much focused on the most reputable projects and bringing them to the light. And that's why we brought to life Sentinel project. For the people that are not aware, Sentinel project is a open project and token rating methodology, so that people, whenever they do a DYOR on projects on Hedera, they will be able to look into some important metrics that we felt were objective to see if they want to trust that project to look deeper into them or not. So, we want to give at least the solid outline of that respective Hedera project that has a Fungible token. Obviously, we'd want to do this in an NFT for the NFT projects as well. It might require a lot more workload, but yeah. As I say in all the spaces, on the NFT side of things, if there's people who have ideas of how we can come up with methodology and objective metrics that we can judge in NFT project by, I'll be more than happy to try to spin off an NFT flavor for the Sentinel project. And to people who are not aware of it, it's sentinel.headstarter.org. So yeah, I think that's about it. Obviously, when it comes to Head Starter, we see the community that goes through us as a set of Trustees in us. So, we take the due diligence part very responsibly and we will continue to bring forth only the most reputable projects that we feel are right. We're at a certain point in time. That's not to say that other projects are not going to be successful. Obviously, Hedera is very young. They're whatever we're building today in 2023. If it withstands the test of time in a few years, it will be seen as the OGs, as the blue chip. So, kudos to everybody listening to my rambling. I hope that I made Patrick proud in terms of the duration of the monologue.

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍So, I just wanted to make a quick comment here to again, and I've done this in the past, but I think that what you guys are doing with the Sentinel, and you said, you know, being open to suggestions and, you know, on how to make it even more tamper-proof, I think it's incredible. I think it's another step to try and safeguard the users coming into the space because like you said, there's a lot of people and also like Marcel said, there's a lot of people that just kind of see numbers go up and they just kind of want to jump into that, but having a background on, the team and making sure that you know there's some boxes that have been checked is very important. So, I think that what you guys are doing with something else is awesome, and I just wanted to make a quick comment on that.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍One second before you go back on, I'll give you a turn again. Just wanted to say to people, because I think we're gonna go over the hour a bit because this is an interesting topic, and I love shows like this where it goes a bit sideways. I love that. If there are any, but because I would like to have everyone that's at least on my list today to have a speaking to it, if there are people here who need to speak before the hour, then raise your hand. I already see Appraising his hand because I can still, of course, ugive someone else a turn before another because I don't trust coffee from Leemon Swap either. To keep it short, um, actually looking forward to your talk. Leave a coffee. So, I'm gonna go to Head Starter, and you have your hands up, so I'll go to you then first and then to Fast Society to see if they want to do their talk first. Oh, wow, now all these hands are going up. Okay, keep it short, and then I'll do these other three hands first and then let's try to give them some time to,

Headstarter – Tudor - Founder
‍Yeah, yeah, really short. So, I, by, it was through Sentinel, uh, by the way, it's an open methodology. We reviewed it with the community, with our partners, and it's still open for improvements, whatever improvements we want to make it as robust as possible. So again, open to criticism, open to feedback, open to improvements. Uh, thank you very much, Marc, for the kind words there, and I just wanted to say before, uh, and but I forgot, for any type of scams, scam attempts, any type of shady activity, uh, always refer at the moment the go-to place is Chain Abuse. So you need to report the incident on Chain Abuse because like in the real world, there will be people that monitor that help out that flag the transaction, the account IDs, if there's a person behind it, uh, all much better. So, um, yeah, that's a way at the moment to safeguard ourselves from bad actors and hopefully get justice at some point.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Okay, and I hope you still stay tuned because at the end of the show we can go off the hour, but let's, and because I love all this talk, but let's go to the ones who raised their hand out because they might not have that time. Um, so, Mad V Apes, I'm so happy you came here. Sectors introduce your project, uh, shortly and give us your stories and add advice, please.

Mad V Apes – Cigtoshi Nakamoto
‍Yeah, I appreciate the time. I think it's a great topic. I'm Cigtoshi Nakamoto. I'm a community team member at Mad V Apes on Vechain We're one of the top projects on V chain, and we have a pretty solid Community. I'll kind of give you a little Perspective on what this kind of looks like from, you know, a totally different chain in communities. That on Vechain, I wouldn't say there's necessarily even that many rugs, and that's due to the community kind of putting their foot down a while ago and making sure that if people are coming out with a new project on Vchain, they need to first spend time with the community and get to know people and let the community get to know them and understand that their intentions are right and solid. And so, that's kind of been the process for new people launching projects on V chain, and if someone kind of wants to bypass that, they're going to have a tough time. They're going to have a tough time, and I think it's good, but again, we have a pretty small ecosystem, right? So, we all kind of know each other and look out for each other. If there's rumors about so and so who's coming to Mint a project on Vechain, hey, I'm going to talk to, you know, one of the marketplaces, and I'm gonna say, "Hey, have you heard about this? Can you look into this?" They're going to talk to the other Marketplace. You know they're competitors, but they also understand that they have to look out for the community, at least the best that they can, as launch pads and marketplaces. So that's interesting. It's a we've been lucky, knock on wood, right? We've been lucky enough to not have that many rugs recently. What we have been seeing, especially in, in you know, our project, just because we are getting bigger and more successful and more exposure, are people coming into the Discord and trying to scam the holders. And it's terrible, and it's something that we have been taking very seriously as far as prevention goes. Um, like I'll give you a for instance, we had a new member come over from Kronos, and he was so hyped, he just bought his first ape, he got his second ape, and he was doing all these tweets, and then like the next day, literally the next day, he comes in, he said, "I just got scammed, I lost everything." And it's like, there was this link and blah blah blah, and it's just like heartbreaking, right? Because that's somebody who took a chance to come over to V chain, took a chance on our project, you know, that's their hard-earned money, and someone with me, you know, bad intentions took that from him, right? And it's just, it's hard to see. So, I think especially if we all, if crypto is going where we all believe it's going, and mass adoption is on the horizon, and more people are going to be coming into crypto and NFTs, we need to just stay, you know, vigilant in the fact that we make sure we just remind people never click links you know, never share your seed phrase. Uh, all those things that we all know because we've been here a little while. I think just constant reminders of that stuff uh will really go a long way. You know, another scam that we've been seeing is someone will be looking to trade NFTs with somebody uh, and then be like, "I'll call in a uh, or I'll grab one of the mods or one of the team members. To be the third party for this trade." Well, it's a fake profile with that mod's picture, that mod's name, but with like one letter that's different, right, or a number that's different. Uh, and then they are acting like the third party, uh, and then the one person sends him the NFTs and boom, they're gone and they're on their way. And it's like a team-up effort. Um, so these scammers are getting more and more creative. They're not going anywhere, they're gonna keep trying. They're gonna keep, you know, trying to expose and exploit the system and the communities and the people in there. Um, so we as project leaders uh just need to protect our community the best we can, and if that means like daily reminders of not clicking any links you know unless it's in the verified links channel or whatever or not sharing your seed phrase with anybody or you know we'll never DM you first, that sort of stuff, I think we need to do that. I think we need to do that. So, um, I think these kind of discussions are super important and there needs to be more of them, um, and more safeguards for the community who you know trust in us as projects and leaders and things like that. So, I appreciate the time and I'm gonna hang out and if anyone has any questions, uh, feel free to DM me. I'm an open book and happy to help.

Earthlings – Patrick De Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Great, great to have you on the show. It's, yeah, I have one of your Matt ba so better not be a rock pool because I'm saving that and I want it to be worth a lot in the future. Save some extra feet, a feature as well anyway. So, thanks for joining us, that was great. So, um, I did see that Up and Fast Society had their hands up. Anyone of you are a bit pressured for time because then I'll give you the seat now? Okay, we'll get Up, do you think? Come on, uh, oh but yeah, well yes.

Apph
‍Thank you, Patrick. You pronounce the name correctly, it's my OG wild name but uh, I'm Christian or Apph guys. Uh, I might have heard my voice with uh, Brandon Hbar interview like uh, prior to the special swap launch and so I've been in the space for about a year. Um, and I invested in their seed rounds uh, about like 30,000 and then dumped a lot of that money into the NFT ecosystem. Um, and I've experienced a lot of different projects and have been burnt by a couple, but uh, overall, I do consider that a bit of uh, the cost of doing business in the space. So the first uh experience I had being a scam was actually, you know, someone a part of the original uh whale group at Saucer Swap. So we all had put in and I think it was a minimum of 20,000 to have like more than 10 sets of their original NFTs, and this was such A nascent uh Community before there even was a DEX or actually Hedera had not even made the code available so a DEX could be created on uh on the network. And so this guy lead uh brought us all together and rounded the troops, and we, you know, did a giveaway for like 200,000 sauce and all those things, and then he was the one on launch that uh ended up uh dumping that initial dump on launch and completely cashed out to like, I think it was like 2.2 million H bar. And then completely disappeared from the server and everything else and try to play it off, but as you guys know that on blockchain, you can go back, and I went into um hashgraph.io, and you can go in and track every single transaction. There's nothing that you can't hide completely from the blockchain. So you know, we made sure that you know, the social reputation was taken care of, and then we've moved on and helped seed projects, like Earthlings and others from that launch and made sure that you know, Sasha Swap with lower liquidity wasn't drained and it had a chance to come to fruition when more users came in the fall, which which is what happened. So I find that the ones that you are closest to, you end up being the ones that betray you the most. So you have to have in Web 3 a level of street smarts, and you can't just be trusting like you can in real life, and I think the real dynamic there is in real life you have reputational risk. So you, if you want to burn your neighbor, you still gotta live next to them. So that's the reason, that's what keeps people on track, and Web 3 there's a degree of anonymity, so people are more likely that's why you have more intense you know polarization of opinions and you have people that are living halfway across the world, and so they don't really care when it comes down to the money and those sorts of things, so you have to be a little bit more street smart I think with Web 3. My second rug pull was with an NFT mint in the fall, and it was something cheap and easy, 96 H bar per mint. It was no big deal. I was like, why would someone rug their reputation in the ecosystem for for about 40 or 50,000 H bar? What they ended up doing it they were always promising they would lie straight to your face. You would ask them, and they would they were they had my own tent. So I think the key to that uh that project which is now defunct. Was to look for immaturity, uh I believe they were kids, like, you know, teenage kids that were smart, and they just wanted to, uh, rug pull something along those lines. Um, and it wasn't that big deal, it was like 2500 hbar, and that was the only time I really lost money with the rug and the ecosystem, and I just consider that being a part of the cost of doing business because I made so much money elsewhere. Um, so I think doxing for projects is important so that the founders of projects have reputational risk, and so in a sense, the community can hold a developer accountable. And I think that is very important and one of the criteria that I use before putting in serious money. So, like, you know, when Saucer Swap, they were doxed via, you know, an internal conflict, and you can see all their names and addresses on legal documents, I was like, okay, so they're a real team, I know where they are, they're not, you know, they have good intents, they're very intelligent, and so I, you know, I'm more comfortable than putting five figures into that project because of that. So I think, to create a more or to attract a more serious investor, I think doxing is very important for projects because it both keeps the developer accountable but also it helps kind of protect, you know, kind of that relationship between investor and the project. So I also keep a private Discord for myself, and, I know Patrick Wayne, it always makes a joke, but yeah, I know, I take screenshots when a developer says one thing and it does another, like you know, obviously with startups there can be a deviation between, you know, the plan versus reality or versus, you know, FTX collapsing versus SEC, you know, throwing a wrench into the system, but if it's consistent and systematic, I always find it important, as part of a strategy of long-term cooperation. So if you read Game Theory, um, especially with parties that you can't completely trust and you're putting in thousands or, you know, in my case, tens of thousand dollars into projects, you know, you want to have the optimal strategy for launcher cooperation, which is Tit for Tat. So you begin, you're early, you're positive, you bring in with cooperation, and then you mirror your counterparty, so if they cooperate, you cooperate, and then you continue that mutual benefit relationship, you know, in the future. But then when something happens or appears to be some sort of malicious behavior, you counter that behavior with equal weight. So you know, if for example, I was in another project that was more of a meme coin but they were solving puzzles and doing some fun things and then the founder had the pool at seventeen thousand dollars and I'm talking to him almost every day and we're having plans to have the farm set up on saucer swap, etc., and so and I'm help funding the project, helping them out, giving him good advice, and then all of a sudden the pool goes from 17,000 to 700, and I'm like, you know, what's going on? I put about $2,000 into it very early, so like, it's not like I had a big risk. And, I'm actually telling us what's going on and it's getting a lot of shady answers. You know, I ended up convincing him to put like $3,000 back into the quality pool. Then, I pulled my initial investment out without telling him. So, like, I'm whole but it definitely was a Rug. It was going to be a rug. I didn't kind of guilt him into it because of his reputational risk in the ecosystem, but I, you know, it, I come to find out it wasn't him. It was another founder that convinced him to pull the liquidity in their project. And we have since made amends and actually are now collaborating on other projects. He's very talented, and I did my best to kind of mend that whole situation, make sure everyone that was affected by it was made whole. And then, so we're, you know, there is some level of forgiveness as long as there's not malicious behavior. I think that's needed as well because, you know, we're such an nascent industry and a nascent network. So there's a lot of potential in the long run. So, in addition to that, my strategies for like keys, so like, I think the number one rule in crypto is don't tell other people that you have a lot of crypto. Don't become a target. So, that is like the most important thing because then people will then target you, not only on digital life but also they can come to your house, and there have been people that have a lot of money on the bigger chains that have been victimized and forced people to give keys. So, you know, don't brag about it and try to guess as far as like, you know, the end user and a retail investor, keep it quiet. The strategy that I use is I only do my keys on paper, pieces of paper. They're never copied to a clipboard on your computer. There are some apps and extensions that can access the copy paste function on your computer, so it's paper only or a cold wallet is just as good. That's what Vitalik uses. You know, he bought an HP laptop from Best Buy, and that's where his seed phrase, etc., is on a clean system. And then, I also have a secondary backup to my seed phrase, which is, you know, when there's one of those metal tubes, I just bury it in a forest nearby, and it's only me and one person that know about it.