**Loss Porn** Astonishing $14,000 crypto mistake that haunts me daily

Please learn from my mistake. This is the first article of mine that I will proclaim is financial advice. If you are invested in crypto or thinking of investing in crypto I urge you to read this story and prevent yourself from making the same mistake I made!

Picture by Jhefferson Santos from Pexels

People make mistakes every day in crypto. It’s almost par for the course because learning decentralized finance mostly relies on YouTube videos, Medium articles, Reddit, and Telegram chats. Earlier this year I made a gigantic error that I am reminded about every day. And since this mistake deals with Solana, a token getting massive amounts of hype and price acceleration, the painful memory gets triggered every single time I hear the name Solana or their champion, Sam Bankman-Fried.

I question the “not your keys not your wallet” mantra after my experience. One of the benefits of having funds in an exchange with KYC is that there is (albeit usually poor) customer service. If you lose a password, there are ways to get it back and find your cryptocurrency. You have passed KYC and can prove who you are.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a fan of centralized exchanges. I’ve read horror stories about people being locked out of accounts, unable to access their funds. For instance, in January, I was unable to transfer XRP out of my NEXO wallet when US exchanges were shutting down XRP trading. I heard back from their customer service 3 weeks later after trading XRP was banned on most US exchanges. In hindsight, this benefitted me as panic selling XRP at that time would have been bad.

Now, here’s my $14K loss story. I purchased $3500 worth of Solana for around $18 on Binance.us. I read that Solana staking paid a nice yield so I decided that I would try out the Solana network. I had to find a wallet that could house and allow for staking. I opted for the Sollet.io web wallet.

The Sollet.io web wallet is a bit different than many other web wallets in that it exists solely on your browser. There is no app for it. You simply go on Sollet.io, get your seed phrase, and transfer SOL tokens into the wallet. It all seemed fine. After getting my seed phrases (which I wrote down), you are required to re-enter the seed phrases in order and then you gain access to your wallet.