Note: I am not a financial advisor, nor am I in any way giving financial advice. This post should be considered for informational purposes only, and is about my recent personal adventures with crypto currencies.
Any investment, whether of crypto, real estate, stocks, or otherwise should be considered to be speculative, and you could lose everything, so do not invest with money that you cannot afford to lose.
So… you may know that I’ve personally been investing in crypto for a while, and lately I’ve been focused on a couple auto compounding protocols, specifically TITANO and LIBERO.
I’m especially high on TITANO, and that will be the topic today.
I invested starting in January this year, so just over 2 months ago as I write this.
TITANO pays a guaranteed yield (in tokens, not cash) of 1.9% daily, compounded 48 times daily (every 30 minutes). That produces a yield of over 102,000% APY. Compared to the .5% APY that I receive from a so-called “high yield” savings account, pretty nice.
However, the value of a token can go up or down, sometimes quickly in either direction, whereas the value of my savings account is based in US dollars, and FDIC insured.
I’ll take the risk when faced with a possibility of 102,000% APY and a crypto price that can rise. I invested money that I could afford to lose, even though I really didn’t want to lose it.
Until 2 days ago, the price had risen since I first invested, and things looked very good.
Then, on March 28, the price started dropping.
I found out that someone had set up bots that were messaging folks in the TITANO discord channel, telling them about an airdrop of TITANO tokens that they could have if they connected their wallet to a website.
Once they did that, their wallets were emptied. Gone. Zero. With no hope of recovery.
By the way, an airdrop is an issuance of free coins or tokens, and something that you should be very wary of, if you aren’t expecting one.
The people who were scammed believed that the news was true because it came from within the TITANO Discord channel.
Once their wallets were emptied, hundreds, probably thousands, maybe more of them, the scammer(s) started dumping their ill-gotten gains, seriously depressing the price of the TITANO token.
Over the course of around 36 hours or so, that dumping, combined with other investors who panicked when they saw the price drop, believing that the sky was falling, and selling themselves, caused about a 25% decline in the value of a TITANO token.
At first, I was in shock, but I wasn’t about to panic.
I’ll admit, I did stare at the live chart for hours watching the prices go down and down and down.
I knew that at some point things had to turn around. I couldn’t believe the worst, because I had a lot of tokens that were quickly going down in value.
There was also a lot of positivity inside the Discord channel where people were actually cheering the drop, because it gave them a chance to “buy the dip”, in other words add to their stake of TITANO at bargain-basement pricing.
That buying activity served to prop the price back up, but the selling pressure kept causing the price to drop.
I also had a mindset “aha” moment, when I realized that a 25% drop in the value of my holdings would be eliminated quickly, since I would receive a 1.9% daily increase. That would mean the 25% drop would be made up in less than 2 weeks, once the price stopped going down.
I went to bed secure that all would be well, and woke up to see that the price had not only stabilized, but rose back up, almost to where it was before the scam started.
Now, let’s look at what happened and learn a lesson or two.
First, crypto is very volatile. We all should know that by now. Outside forces play a part, including things like wars and the economy in general, and pandemics, and yes… scams and false information (the famous FUD factor, which is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).
If a regular coin such as Bitcoin were to drop 25% in 48 hours, that would be horrible.Psychological factors would spread the carnage across many other coins such as Ethereum, Solana, actually most of them.
Likewise if the price of a stock such as Amazon or Microsoft or Tesla or Apple were to drop 25%, a lot of people would be wiped out.
TITANO is considered a DeFi (Decentralized Finance) protocol, and pays, as stated earlier, a very high yield, 1.9% daily, compounded.
It’s classified as an extremely risky investment. I’m personally willing to take that risk because I’ve done a lot of research and keep watch on what’s happening. I don’t consider myself a large investor by any stretch of the imagination, but my daily earnings from TITANO, when the price is stable, is over $1,000 per day… yesterday my account value went down almost $10,000, by the way. Volatility, thy name is crypto.
I’ve also started a regular practice of withdrawing some of my initial investment on a mostly-daily basis, while leaving some of the daily yield to grow my account, so that if the worst happens, what will remain in my account will be profits, not my initial investment. Basic money management, in other words.
So, my mindset during this scam attack and panic attack was strong, which is important.
Another lesson is to secure your account. Don’t fall for the greed of potential free airdrops. It’s not worth the risk.
Also, in the form of security, I’ve invested in a hardware wallet, which makes it impossible for anyone to take coins or tokens out of my wallet without my knowledge and specific approval. Someone could deposit into my wallet, but they couldn’t take anything.
I bought a Ledger Nano X, there are other brands including Trezor. If you have any size crypto holding that you would hate to lose, I highly recommend the relatively small investment in the hardware wallet.
If you’d like to know more about some of the topics I’ve discussed in this post, here’s where to get that.
We’ve written two guides that will help you navigate the sometimes complex world of crypto:
Bitcoin and Beyond: Crypto Made Simple
Beginners Crypto Security Guide
As far as auto compounding protocols, a friend has put together a series of videos I highly recommend. If you purchase that guide through my link, I throw in a bonus of what I consider essential reading and tools, my “Magic Spreadsheets” (not currently available separately).
For more information about TITANO, here’s is their site:
Hardware wallets:
Again, do your own due diligence, but if you decide to invest in crypto currencies, the information above is very highly recommended before you commit your funds.