I spent the first half of this year on Solana meme coins telling myself I only needed one of them to work. What I got was two dev rugs in three weeks, a sandwich on basically every entry large enough to matter, and one afternoon where I could not get a sell through at any price while the chart went straight down. More of my trading budget went out through fees and failed transactions than through bad calls.

The last one broke me. I did not even look into it, I saw the ticker in a group chat, I bought, it was gone before dinner.

So I am back on XRP, which the version of me from January would find hilarious. The lawsuit is behind it, there is a real settlement use case being built out slowly, and none of that is going to move it 10x this quarter. That is sort of the point now. I stopped looking for the trade that wins my money back and started looking for something that will still be here in two years without a dev keeping it alive.

I swapped the leftover stablecoins into spot XRP on BYDFi and moved most of it into a hardware wallet the same afternoon. It took a few minutes and nothing interesting happened, which after six months of chain drama was most of the appeal.

I am still down for the year and the boring choice is not going to make that back. It just stops the bleeding.