From Rugged To Riches

The Road to Redemption: From Rugged to Riches
Introduction:
I have been a crypto degenerate for almost a decade. Needless to say, I have experienced several cycles and too many different meta trends to count, surviving numerous rug pulls along the way, on and off-chain, including the countless Goose, Tomb and “NaaS” forks, the collapse of Celsius, FTX and TERRA LUNA. On January 12, 2025, I made a costly mistake. Despite my time spent in the market, aware of the dangers, I was finally hit and hit hard. That afternoon I received one notification after another of funds being moved from my wallets from the Cielo Telegram bot. I had never thought I would see my wallets doing fraudulent activity, but had been tracking so I could forward important transactions to myself on the fly. I watched in horror in real time, my carelessness cost me more than 95% of my crypto portfolio across all EVM chains, Solana and all of my Bitcoin holdings. This was across a total of 5 wallets, 8 addresses and 2 separate web browsers. Holy shit.

I was by no means rich, but this was still an obviously devastating hit, as it would be for anyone. I felt physically ill. However, I couldn’t help but be a bit impressed by the efficiency of the malware I had accidentally installed the day prior like an uninformed dumbass. As I watched my years of “honest work” and yield farming get drained and disappear forever I called in an emergency favor from a fren to create a couple safe wallets on an uncompromised computer several hundred miles away. Luckily they were available at the time. Done! Thanks, buddy, love ya.
With new public addresses in hand, while standing in the digital rubble and dust, I tenderly collected and traded the pennies and nickels that somehow went unrecognized and were left by the thief. I was going to do my best to make a castle out of the sand.
“Red coin gud.” I reminded myself of the old saying from the Rush days- apparently the scammer had zero interest in the overall ecosystem or the $AVAX token itself and that quickly became my new largest holding. I suppose it’s better than if I had ever owned and then got stuck with the Pulse Chain gas shitcoin $PLS. Gotta try to look at the positives here.
As I was digging, across multiple networks I discovered I had pigeonholed and forgotten about miniscule amounts or made small LPs on obscure exchanges and dApps (most likely while airdrop farming on chains like Scroll and Blast). Doing this was a tiring and time consuming process between all of the wallets and networks- apps like DeBank and Step helped with the process, although some network app information was incorrect- particularly when it came to the lending protocols post drain. Finding these little amounts added up but could do nothing to heal my ego or fix the damage I had done.
I was only able to scrape together a few thousand dollars between networks. But, hey, I’ll take what I can get anymore these days, right?
Moving On & Making Lemonade:
“When life gives you lemons make lemonade.” In order to make the most of a shit situation I have created this alt account and will be publishing my trades and activity here on a weekly basis, if nothing else for personal accountability and posterity. With any luck this documentation may not only improve my personal skills as a trader and investigator, but it may also spark inspiration and hope for those who have dealt with similar situations and unfortunate events. With all of that out of the way, I invite you to come along on this journey, From Rugged to Riches. LFG.
In the Month Since:
Observant readers will notice it’s been a month since the incident that I am now writing this first introductory post. I would be lying if I said the shock of my own stupidity didn’t make me step away from my computer and blockchain exploration for a few days. Upon my return I went into full-system clean, op-sec mode and was running scan after scan with a myriad of antivirus software and moving any of the sparse remaining extra documents and files off of the PC onto several XHDs. OS and software updates were checked twice daily, if not more. Call me paranoid, but after everything was completely moved out of the compromised wallets and everything pointed to the computer being “safe”, I was still afraid to import the safe wallets with fresh keys onto potentially still compromised hardware. At this point that was simply not an option.
Update 0: I’ve taken the liberty of installing several Web3 security extensions, I will be redundant if it keeps my funds safe. So far so good. It’s a sizeable list, but is as follows: Aegis Web3, Pocket Universe, Revoke Cash, Scam Sniffer, Wallet Guard and Web3 Antivirus. These create pop ups making signatures human-readable and can also detect phishing sites, including links on tweets. Using this many cases of redundancy might not be ideal for shitcoin snipers, or people who need to quickly execute transactions, but I find the safety reassuring after my recent blunder.
The market has been incredibly volatile with the recent swearing in of the first “Crypto President” of the United States, Donald Trump. First there was an initial pump and then a dump as tariffs and fears of trade wars set in. I have moved my meager EVM holdings into Aave and utilizing Dolomite on Arbitrum for slightly better rates. My equally meager holdings on SOL have been put back into various Kamino vaults. The goal is for these idle funds to earn yield, in the safest way possible, while they remain out of use, but still easily accessible.
While the market is bleeding and in the red, I have (unfortunately) deployed a small amount of fresh capital (but fortunately at a decent price) and started a hands-free BTC-USD grid trading bot at Pionex (referral) to run 24/7 in the background- I will provide weekly updates here regarding its performance. Ideally I would find a similar bot that operates on-chain and I have several leads I will be investigating further and publishing my findings next week.
I have also begun exploring the Eclipse ecosystem (admittedly hoping for an airdrop). By means of innovation there isn’t much to offer on the growing ecosystem yet, but it is still growing, and I am hopeful for the chain’s vision, Solana speed and low fees with the deep liquidity of Ethereum. The current findings by L2Beat show that the chain needs a lot of work in regards to security, I just hope it doesn’t fall the way of NEON or have similar long term performance as EVMOS. Or even worse, rug me more, lol.
Admittedly the lack of funds has dramatically stunted my ability to effectively interact on-chain, which has led me to largely consolidate completely onto Arbitrum, Base (minimally), Optimism and of course Eclipse, as mentioned above, and Solana, I have not yet bought spot BTC for personal holdings, but it’s on my to do list. I will persevere in my endeavors and rebuild what I lost.
WGMI, or else. Until next week,
-Jinzo

(This is the first issue from my weekly Substack, originally published Feb 10)