Written by: Adnan Alisic, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Alex Tahiri will forever remember that November 11th morning. With a pounding heart, he woke up in his modest condo in Huston’s suburb, reached for his iPhone, and after checking his crypto portfolio, a cold sweat washed over his body.
Just a week ago, his assets, mostly in FTT tokens, were worth $275K. Now it was less than 10K. After hearing about the potential of the blockchain industry from his cousin, he cashed all his stock options from a small start-up where he had joined in as one of the core team members and invested all that into promising cryptocurrency projects. 6 months ago, he dodged a bullet by transferring his crypto assets from Celsius onto FTX. A week later, Celsius closed withdrawals and millions of people lost their funds.
He turned on the TV, fed the cat, and sat on the sofa, drinking his steaming tea. Maelstrom of thoughts swirled in his mind as he reflected on the recent FUD surrounding the FTX exchange. The price of FTT token was around $2, a huge drop from $85, where it was just 2 months ago.
But then the glimmer of hope flooded his senses. This is crypto after all. He reflected on many projects that dropped down during past bear markets, then shoot up 100x during the bull markets.
He was reassured by the fact that FTX was supported by the world-class investors such as Sequoia Capital, Paul Tudor Jones, and Kevin O’Leary. And famous celebrities such as Tom Brady,
Shaquille O’Neil, and Stephen Curry fully endorsed FTX and they were fully behind it.
His heart found some solace after reading the latest tweet from SBF – FTX’s CEO and a young wonderkid that made that exchange into a global powerhouse. “A competitor is trying to go after us,” SBF tweeted. “ FTX is fine. Assets are fine.”
Alex took a hot sip of tea, inhaled deeply, and to satisfy his own heart, decided to transfer whatever assets he had on FTX to Metamask, a self custody wallet that was controlled only by him. After a few clicks on his MacBook, he clicked on the withdrawal button, and after reading the pop-up message, his heart skipped a beat. FTX withdrawals are temporary suspended. An ocean of violent thoughts swirled in his mind as he reflected on SBF’s last tweet: FTX is NOT fine. Assets are NOT fine.
6500 miles away, in a tiny shack in a Nigerian village of Bago, Habib was preparing for his final exam. As he was writing the essay about the colonization of Sierra Leone, his mind was drifting to how he was going to pay for his school next semester. His only source of income was cryptocurrency trading, and now, with this long bear market, he was barely surviving.
In 2017, one of his close friends had introduced him to Bitcoin, and since then he was an avid proponent of blockchain technology. As the altcoins gained popularity, he made many profitable trades, searching for promising projects on CMC and then buying on Pancake Swap or Uniswap, before they get listed on bigger centralized exchanges, then cashing out for some profit.
"Squid Game" was the latest project he was eager to invest in. He received a tip from a Telegram group of which he was a member, and without conducting any research, he decided to trust the
group, considering they had already offered him several other profitable project recommendations.
He saved the essay, then connected to Dexscreener in order to analyze the chart of Squid token. His heart fluttered as he saw many beautiful green candles, his mind calculating the profits. Again, the tip proved to be very profitable, and he scanned the telegram group and saw everyone hyped up about the project, many users claiming it was the next Dodge coin. He shifted between telegram group and dexscreener chart, and with every passing moment, the price kept rising. He decided to invest all of his assets in Squid in order to ride this wave, and then sell it a few hours later, for a decent profit. On Pancake Swap, he converted all his Alts into USDT, then, with about 5300 USDT went all in into Squid token. That was all his net worth, and he was fairly sure he would double it in the next couple of hours.
For the next couple of hours, he went outside for a brisk walk, bought some fruits and vegetables at the market, and bought some data for his phone.
By the time he came back home, the sun was already setting behind the green mountains. He settled on his raggedy couch, pulled out his phone, and checked the charts. His senses exploded with happiness as he saw many green candles shooting up. In just couple of hours, his assets nearly tripled in USDT value, now worth over $19K.
After checking the transaction history, he noticed that nearly all the orders were buy orders, with only a few sell orders, and even those sales were coming from the same wallet. He decided to sell all his assets for USDT and after a few minutes, he pressed the swap button. He got the error message and repeated the process again. After the third error, his heart started rumbling. With trembling hands, he navigated to their telegram group and noticed a flurry of activity. When he tried to ask a question in the group, he was blocked from posting. He tried to sell it again, but only got the same error message. For the next few minutes, his eyes were glued to the chart with green candles shooting up. Buy orders were filling up the transaction history and price kept going up, but he could not sell his tokens. He checked his balance and it showed $197,325 USD.
Suddenly, the huge red candle sliced through the chart and dove into the abyss. His knees buckled and a white pain shot up to his brain. With shaking hands, he navigated to the balance page and saw 0. A flashback of memories stormed through his head, and for the first time in his life, he thought how he was going to pay for tomorrow’s meal.
There are thousands of people like Habib and Alex that were defrauded by centralized and decentralized platforms. There is a huge potential in the cryptocurrency space, and where there is opportunity, there will always be bad actors trying to exploit that.
During the past decade, centralized cryptocurrency platforms had lost almost $11 billion dollars to hackers. Mount Gox, Ǫuadriga, Thodex, and FTX are the perfect examples that centralized cryptocurrency platforms can not be trusted.
Decentralized platforms came as a solution, but they are not efficient as well. Since they are fully decentralized, many bad actors are exploiting that by listing projects that turn out to be honeypots, rug pulls, or straight-out scams. Just last year, people lost over $2 billion on fully decentralized platforms.
The only solution for this problem is to incorporate a hybrid solution such as Biokript Exchange. By combining the best features of centralization and decentralization, Biokript is giving the users the full control of their own funds in a safe and secure decentralized manner, while at the same time they have the ability to trade with centralized efficiency.
In a world where trust is lost, the future of cryptocurrency trading is the hybrid approach where users control their own assets while still having access to a centralized trading experience.
Adnan Alisic, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Adnan is a Certified Islamic Banker, bestselling author, and a passionate entrepreneur who has more than seven years of experience in the crypto industry. He started his crypto journey as a successful Paxful trader where he completed thousands of trades. He currently leads a passionate team in building Biokript, the world’s first hybrid, Shariah-compliant cryptocurrency platform.
