Notice on Previous Alpha Call in Alpha Digest #6

How a Promising Project Turned into a Painful Lesson

Hey everyone,

I want to apologise for making my previous call on RAT in Alpha Digest #6 on 29 November.

I was overly excited and bullish on this project, and genuinely believed that it had a lot of potential with a seemingly trustworthy leader at the helm, and a group of other experienced and season crypto traders who had been in the space since 2021 as the core team.

As a developer and builder, I initially thought that this would be a fun and interesting project to get onboard as well with all the hype. I was wrong.

As the project gained significant momentum, reaching a $5M market cap, several red flags began to appear with the founder.

First, there was a massive dip on the charts caused by an insider, followed by his dev wallet being hacked (through a common attack vector - installing a malicious file from a third-party ). This was something that should not have happened to someone with his supposed expertise being a crypto veteran for many years.

The hack drained $85k from the liquidity pool, crashing the market cap by $2.5M. Shortly after, his Discord account was also compromised—allegedly from the same hack, where attackers accessed his session tokens. This resulted in the banning of several key contributors and the deletion of important Discord channels.

What was most troubling, however, was his behaviour during these crises. As the hack unfolded, the entire core team urged him to take decisive action and be present to lead the community, including injecting more capital into the project to restore trust and confidence.

Yet, we heard nothing from him for hours as panic spread. When he finally responded, his attitude was surprisingly nonchalant as though the loss of $85k to $100k was not a big deal, further eroding our trust in his leadership.

And although there is no concrete evidence directly linking him to the cause directly or indirectly of these events that happened, the combination of these issues was enough for the six core team members, including myself, to unanimously step away from the project.

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My message in the Discord server on leaving the project completely:

A question from a community member for more details:

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Like everyone else, including core team members who had known the founder far longer than I had, I now realise that I was misled.

For context, YCC was the first paid Substack newsletter I joined several months ago, drawn in by the founder’s writing, charisma, and seemingly solid credibility.

When the token launched on pump.fun, I happened to be in the Discord and decided to join the hype by purchasing tokens as well (this was also my first time using pump.fun). I then offered to help with the tech and website as it aligned with my expertise.

At this moment, however, I have completely left the project and the team, transferring all digital assets, accounts, and the token holdings I acquired when I purchased them on pump.fun.

This totaled approximately 29M tokens, which at one point reached a value exceeding $150k from an initial investment of around 3-4 SOL (~$1000). That’s more than 150x, yet I never sold any of these tokens (all of which is fully verifiable on-chain).

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For full disclosure, my message to Duo on leaving the project completely:

By 2pm UTC, I had transferred ownership of all digital assets and website code over to Duo and a new member who took over the tech role.

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Ending Words

I would want to take responsibility for sharing what I believed was good alpha that turned out to be a disaster.

If you had bought into this project based on my newsletter and incurred losses, please reach out to me via DM here or on Twitter/X and I’ll do my best to make it right with the recovery fund that I have set aside to help those who had been negatively impacted by my call.

Again, I deeply regret the situation and appreciate your understanding.

I’ve learned from this experience and will continue striving to improve how I assess and share projects in the future—though I’ll probably steer clear of memecoins for a while.

In the weeks or months to come, I may perhaps write a longer article diving into what exactly happened and how these events unfolded, as I believe there are important lessons that can be learned and shared with everyone from this experience as a silver lining.