Today I closed a project I had worked on for three years... the No Loss Lottery

And I feel like there is a hole in my soul.

• I thought it was such a great idea, and thought if I just kept working on it to make it great it would succeed.
• But a few months ago I found myself giving up.
• It had failed to catch popular attention, and even if it was one of my great ideas, it was growing very slowly and I had to acknowlege that I could make more money investing my time in something else.
• I thought for a while that maybe it was the bear market, but everytime I gave away a 100 Leo in prizes I couldn't help byt think...does no one else see this?
• I decided to objectively look at the pros and cons of continuing the project.
• But the cons outweighed the cons and so I decided to close it.
• So this weekend I decided to end it. I wrote the anouncement post and pulled the plug.
• The hard part was not just writing but organizing the excel spreadsheets, removing the @ sorting by alpha and then the painstaking process of returning funds through wallet transfers.
• It all requires constant attentionto details or else you send the funds to the wrong place or send the wrong amounts.
• I feel like I did a hundred wallet transfers last night.
• Cryptocurrency is an amazing technology, but it's hard, and time consuming and it requires constant attention to detail or else you have to repeat things and you can lose money.
• I think one of the ironies I learned is that I was building something to save people time and effort, but I think that unless you actually learn how to do it yourself you probably don't grasp the amazing time savings the project has to offer.
• I decided I was offerring something of value, which people who knew how to do, didn't need, and people who didn't know how to do it, didn't value.
• Ouch.
• That one hurt.

Life is a learning experience

• I have always told my children that nothing they do for their brains is ever wasted.
• And I certainly have learned many things from running these projects for three years.
• For example, last night I spent over an hour moving the EasyDefi investment funds to a new wallet.
• The Sushiswap hack exposed wallets which had previously given permissions to Sushiswap to drainage of tokens.
• The first step of protection was revoking permissions.
• The next step was to move cryptocurrency tokens to new wallets.
• When you are responsible for other peoples money you have a big responsibility to keep them safe.
• I wondered if revoking the permissions was enough.
• What if the hacker drained all the 30,000 Leo people had entrusted me with?
• So I decided to move the funds to a new wallet, to be extra safe.
• It's an easy process conceptionally: create a new wallet, fund it with a token to pay transaction fees, then withdrawal the LP tokens from the farms, cash out the LP tokens into their component pieces, transfer the component tokens to the new wallet, attach the wallet to the DEX, redeposit the funds into the LPs, acquire LP tokens, deposit LP tokens into the farms, paying transaction fees, for each move.
• The process is of course complicated by glitches, wallets don't attach, webpages don't recognize wallets, you have to search for answers on wallet website and then question answer user pages.
• But a few ours later the funds are safe.
• The investors are all sleeping, enjoying careless bliss, while the project administrator moves their funds to safety.
• It's a challenging and satisfying process.
• The beauty of decentralized finance is anyone with the persistence and a talent for research can learn it and profit.
• The challenges of defi are many, and one is keeping your ear to the ground, staying abreast of the news of hacks, explouts, rumors and moving funds and investing accordingly.

Last Words

• To my many customers of the No Loss Lottery, thank you. Close to 100 people shared my enthusiasm for this product: No Loss Lottery, and some will share my sadness at it's closure.
• To Cubfinance and Leofinance thank you for the project, and the opportunity to learn so much about decentralized finance.
• I am stepping back from projects right now to re-evaluate how I spend my time and efforts.
• It is a time of sadness and resignation, but I hope to emerge from it with better ideas and renewed sense of purpose.
  @shortsegments