1/ Woke up to some disappointing news this morning. One of the projects that I did research on and suggested buying was rugged. I personally was quite over leveraged into Ballonsville and bought into the hype.
A thread on lessons learned ⬇️
#NFA #DYOR #NFTs #Solana
A thread on lessons learned ⬇️
#NFA #DYOR #NFTs #Solana
2/ Let’s jump into some of the details first. Ballonsville, a project with a ton of hype, that minted yesterday had the founders come out and say that the project was a scam. They justified it by blaming it on ME, which I personally think is even more messed up.
3/ The Twitter and Discord were deleted and the prices of the NFTs fell almost 95%. Many people, including me, lost a lot of money. I think it’s a good reminder that this space is still very new and this will not be the last project that pulls something like this off again.
4/ Situations like this hurt the SOL NFT space a lot. New people come into the space and buy projects like this. Maybe a friend told them. Maybe they saw a Tweet. But, after a rug pull like this, those same people joining for the first time, will probably never buy an NFT again.
5/ On my end, I pride myself on researching projects quite in depth. I take a look at the teams, what they have built, roadmap, etc. This was the first time that I bought into the hype. A lot. It was a new project, an interesting roadmap, and it had a lot of potential.
6/ So what can we do for the future? What are signs we can look for to avoid this? I personally think this will keep happening, but we can take steps to identify potential rugs, minimize our risk, and hopefully continue to participate in the space.
7/ One of the biggest lessons I am taking back is to look past the hype. Some projects these days have done an insane job at marketing and building up hype. Ballonsville was no different. They had a ton of supporters and grew quite quickly.
8/ Though had we been able to look past that. The signs were there. They had no website, had a person reading from a script doing a Youtube video, and had no audit. Each one of these are extremely big red flags for any project
9/ Another lesson for me is regardless of my conviction on a play. There is no reason to overleveraged and “ape” into plays. I suppose greed got the best of me here, but regardless, I have to understand that NFTs are still very risky and to only allocate a small % to each project
10/ Finally, and most importantly, take profits. I was up over 100% on my investment. Had I set up proper listings for even half of my balloons, I could have easily avoided losing my entire investment. Though this happened within a day of purchasing. It is still a good reminder
11/ I have been quite invested into NFTs. Though I have been in profit, I reinvest everything back into more NFTs. Going forward. Any profit I make, I will take 50% and put it in an external wallet. So if the NFT market does sees a downturn, I will have this as protection.
12/ As a community, we should do better. We should push to challenge projects, request doxxess, do in-depth research, and finally look past the hype. I personally have learned my lesson, and going forward, will implement the lessons learned above.
13/ I would like to apologize, I pride myself on researching projects in-depth. I feel I let you all down. I will push myself to do better. We are still very early and this space is truly something magical. We have to move past these situations together. Thank you for reading.
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