If you've been rug pulled in crypto, I've been there too. The first thing you need to know is that you're not alone. This has happened to a lot of us. And the longer you're in crypto, and the more projects you invest in, you're going to get rug pulled at some point.
You can even say thank you
There's a way you can even say thank you for it. I'm grateful now for the times I got rug pulled in the past, because of what I learned. So if you can ask yourself, what do I learn from this rug pull? What's the most powerful lesson I can take forward so that this never happens again? Then you can make some of the best investments of your entire life, like I've done recently.
If you're wondering what a rug pull even is, a rug pull is where you invest in a project and it basically goes to zero. Think Terra Luna, and all the other ones.
What I did after my first rug pull (the wrong lesson)
What I did after I got rug pulled on Steem is I quit crypto for years. And I don't recommend that. It took me a while. The lesson I took away was just don't do crypto, it's all scams and rug pulls.
But eventually I got a much better lesson. And that was to look for a quality investment, something with asymmetric risk, something that is very low risk and has huge value potential. I don't think a high risk, high reward play is a very good investment for the average person. Now, if you're more degen, go for it. But the average person, in my opinion, wants asymmetric risk.
The best asymmetric risk I've found
To me, the best asymmetric risk I see anywhere is a crypto that's often flying under the radar. This is my opinion from my own experience, not investment advice. To me it has the best technology anywhere in crypto. I've done a lot of other videos about it, so I'll give a very brief version. For example, AI on chain: it's the only thing that can do that. The first Bitcoin and Ethereum layer two on the same infrastructure. HTTPS outcalls, so you don't need oracles.
This is something that can transform the entire internet, because it's the only project where you can build an application like my website fully on chain, and where you can build your games, DeFi apps, and everything all on chain right now. Most of crypto is actually built off chain, with little tiny bits of computation on the blockchain, which to me makes it a huge security risk.
How getting rug pulled made me skeptical
The value that I found out of getting rug pulled enough times is that I've become very skeptical. It's hard to convince me that a crypto investment is going to be good, because 99.9% of the time, in my experience, they're not good. They're nothing more than a short term or a long term rug pull. And that's how I found Internet Computer Protocol.
So I'd encourage you, if you haven't researched Internet Computer Protocol yet, that to me is the quantum moment in crypto. There's before you've researched Internet Computer, and there's after. And really use it, use the technology. You can create an account, you can stake in OpenChat as an application like Discord directly on chain with ICP. If you want to think this kind of thing through more carefully, the hardest lesson I ever took from a project going to zero is one I wrote about in the BIL token rug pull on ICP and what it taught me.
Share your pain, don't go through it alone
One thing that can help you after a rug pull is to have a community. A lot of people I talk with described having been rug pulled so many, many times that they finally asked me to talk about what to do next. Some of them, acutely in pain, have scheduled one-on-one calls with me to share their experience. Telling other people, sharing your pain with others, and asking everyone for advice has helped me get through some really hard stuff in my life.
If you enjoyed this, you can watch my newest videos in my Money playlist.