The Glow Up – RugDoc.io’s 2021 End of Year Team AMA

Hold onto your party hats because this one's going to be a wild ride! Get ready for RugDoc's 2021 Year-End AMA! In this article, we ask the RugDoc team some interesting questions such as the most profitable plays of the year and important advice to keep in mind when going into 2022.

Rugdoc.io – The Glow up

What a year it’s been for crypto! The end of 2021 marks 10 months of RugDoc.io and growing from humble beginnings with the nostalgic Google Sheet, we have evolved into a fully-fledged DeFi education and community-focused project aimed to arm newbies and veterans alike with well-researched information.

Today, we sit down with some of the key members on the RugDoc.io team and take a closer look at their experiences with DeFi last year.

What was Crypto like for you, before Rugdoc.io?

RugDoc: It was really uncertain – I was basically gambling and hoping I didn’t get rugged…and getting rugged. The whole reason RugDoc.io was started was because my husband got rugged really badly on some swap farm. That was a large shock. Before RugDoc, I basically just scanned around Reddit and some Telegram shill groups and aped into the one that seemed to have the most hype and most degen APR. Obviously we all now know that’s a terrible decision and not a strategy at all. Getting rugged a few times was a great learning experience though and motivated me to learn Solidity to start actually reviewing contracts for safety.

Carlos: I was literally scanning the blockchain explorer for “MasterChef” contracts which had liquidity in them for one reason or another. I wouldn’t do any due diligence other than “Is this contract printing?” and “Is the code safe?”. Then one day I saw hundreds of thousands of dollars going into a rug contract, as would happen daily during this period, and while DMing everyone in the project chat to withdraw ASAP, people asked me if I was from “RugSteemer”.

J Tamari: Opaque! I could’ve been rugged so many times early on smdh, and just got lucky I guess. As soon as I discovered the old google sheet and tg chat I was like ohhhhh man, I should really dig into these contract thingies a little more… and then somehow they made me a scanner.

Tim: It was a highly dangerous place where you were at a serious disadvantage against most crypto scammers.  Unless you were able to afford hiring out a senior solidity developer for each farm / project to check, you had to just blindly ape based on nothing other than gut feeling / vibes from their socials.

Baymax: Rugpulls everywhere. Lost money in 3 projects to rugpulls prior to RugDoc. It was a crazy space and the lack of education was one where you’re basically just chasing numbers and hoping you wake up without losing everywhere. 

Butts: I was a token chaser and a mediocre farmer. My overly cautious nature had helped me to avoid farm rugs and after I found RugSteemer I used my decent radar to try and help others steer clear of common rugs. But I was getting honeypotted left and right lol. Biggest honeypot loss was $1000 USD, doh.

Ninja Guy: Before RugDoc, yield farming was like a drug. Heck, the first yield farm I remember aping into was a farm called Farming Bad where we all farmed $METH. Good times. As a newbie, I aped into almost every yield farm opportunity that arose. As soon as a new yield farm launched, I was in—I’d often ape in and out of a few different farms a day. As I didn’t have the lovely RugDoc resources to rely on, I relied on the old tried-and-true tool, the DiffChecker. It wasn’t the most reliable, but it did the job for the most part. That is, until I got rugged more than I could afford to lose and had that “butterfly in the stomach” feeling for a long while. Luckily, shortly afterwards, I found RugDoc and learned to properly manage my risk a little bit better.

And after Rugdoc.io was launched?

RugDoc: I had a large change in how I viewed DeFi and investment strategies in DeFi. I went from being a yield farm gambler to a pretty well rounded investor with a mix of value coin holding, yield optimizers, degen farming, large protocol farming, airdrop hunting, NFT trading, and moon token chasing. It changed how I viewed my relationship with the traditional banking system as well and how I managed my personal finances. I was much less of a crypto maximalist and while I still keep a diverse portfolio of traditional investments, real estate, hard assets, alongside my crypto, I’m definitely more allocated in DeFi and use DeFi as my main income these days. I think one of the biggest shifts for me was leaving my professional career to start a business in DeFi which is something Id never have believed previously. Being a business owner in the space really changed my relationship with crypto and made me appreciate the amazing versatility of DeFi. Its such a new space full of so much potential which is motivating to keep building in. I really feel like I make a difference in people’s lives now from being able to promote safer DeFi behaviors to actually paying people all around the world good, professional wages for their hard work in the space. Every day I wake up excited to see what the community is doing and how we can work with that to make it more accessible. It’s so rewarding. 

Carlos: After RugDoc launched a big mentality shift occurred. While I was originally warning my friends to “stay out of DeFi at all cost as it is a wild west without mercy”, I noticed that this phrase became less and less true with every week of hard work the team and I put into the platform. Instead of blindly aping into projects, users would first visit RugDoc and the ones that didn’t would soon learn that this could save them a whole lot of money. After some time even the projects started to actively adapt in line with better consumer protection practices.

J Tamari: After the site launched, we were really able to consolidate the review style and become a lot more honed and focused on what issues we were looking out for. With the addition of the calendar, tools, wiki, and other resources, it let us cross reference all of the issues we talk about in our reviews and pack as much info as we can in those tiny reviews.

Tim: Even before the original Google Sheet that evolved into the website, RugDoc allowed those of us who were tired of every project trying to rug to come together and discuss project code safety in regards to getting hard rugged.  That in and of itself makes a tight-knit and purpose-driven community.

Baymax: Being able to understand the risk that the reviewers from RugDoc have listed out in easy to understand English and deciding which one is applicable for my risk appetite. Unrivaled in the DeFi space. 

Butts: RugDoc became a community for apes to gather and both commiserate on their losses as well as meme with others about general Defi goings on. It has been for me and I hope for others a bastion for the community to gather in and educate themselves as well as keep abreast of scams and news throughout the space. It’s important to me to always have fun in the chat so that the mood stays light and helps to ease the burden of a financial loss that some may incur.

Ninja Guy: Phew. I want to say RugDoc changed my life, from a degen yield-farming addict to now a “refined” yield farmer, if you can say that. I now pick and choose my projects with a MUCH more delicate eye. Projects that don’t have staying power for more than a week or so get a hard pass from me. I also learned the importance of a strong community. RugDoc has a powerful community of like-minded people who truly want to help each other out. And trust, it turns out, is vital in this decentralized space where anyone can remain anonymous and friends may be harder to build lasting bonds with. RugDoc has the elements of trust, camaraderie, and professionalism and that’s why they are a leader in the DeFi space.

Anything that interested you this year?

RugDoc: Given that the whole space is so, so new it felt like I was able to see so many new trends and features emerge, die, and a cyclical nature of the whole space start to emerge. I feel like I saw the birth of this cheap, fast, accessible DeFi with the rise of BSC this year, the movement from yield farming to all sorts of new protocols, and the explosive growth of all sorts of chains and features. I’m so interested in how people enter the space, build in the space, and what motivates them toward certain trends or protocols. I love seeing how the human element behind DeFi manifests. 

Carlos: The cyclical nature of everything in this space.

J Tamari: Lending, mirrored assets, traditional finance concepts with a DeFi spin. Basically anything that shows that DeFi may actually be useful for something, haha!

Tim: Being that 2021 encompasses a 12-month period where yield farming itself is only ~18 months old, it feels like you’re watching the birth and death of a galaxy.  Super interesting to see different ideas / experiments rapidly iterate from Pancakeswap forking Sushi, to Goose forking Pancakeswap and fixing migrator and syrup bug and adding deposit fees, to Pantherswap adding harvest locks, etc.  It has definitely also been the year of not underestimating the left bell curve IQ degen.  People are stupidly wrong on so many things, but when they’re collectively all stupidly wrong, you can see top 2 dog coins in the top 15 in market cap.  Algo stables are always super interesting to monitor as they go boom and bust, and a new generation of  ̶s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶rs– err investors don’t know the history and end up getting rekt.

Baymax: How fast time flies. It’s been already 8 months since we launched RugDoc.io and how fast and big it has grown and the relationships we have established within the team and beyond with partners and owners of all sorts of projects. 

Butts: I like the idea of protocols that use a vault or treasury as underlying support of the primary asset. Seen with Ohm and Defilabs tokens (meta whales, cake monster), and I like that both seemed to come up with the idea independent of one another. To me this speaks to the merit of the concept. Excited to see if it catches on!

Ninja Guy: As a long-time gamer, definitely the crypto gaming space has caught my attention. As new games like Axie Infinity, Illuvium, and more become more popularized, lame games that are designed to funnel money into the system and without a true backbone will start to dissolve. Truly enjoyable games will arise, allowing a new wave of income earners to be born from this crypto space.

Most profitable play this year?

RugDoc: Oh man there have been quite a few since the space is so young most things you can still take advantage of an early mover advantage. I’d say for yield farms it was this farm called Jaguar Swap that showed up around the same time as the PancakeSwap v1 to v2 movement. A lot of people who got into the farm only had v2 LP and didn’t understand how to make the phased out v1 LP which JaguarSwap was on, so if you made a v1 LP and staked it was just an absolute money printer. All my chats with people in the farm were just silent as we all furiously harvested. Uranium before it was hacked/rugged was also absurdly good for weeks. In terms of coins I’ve made a lot just getting in early to gas and dominant DEX tokens on new chains. I made a lot off MATIC/QUICK, AVAX/JOE, FTM/BOO, CRO, KDA. I’ve overall just been able to take more risks and diversify more through staking/farming since they serve as a natural hedge by giving me interest on coins I’m curious about. 

Carlos: It’s not my most profitable play but right after I joined RugDoc this one degen farm “Jaguar Swap”, got requested, and for some reason it literally was printing thousands of dollars an hour. Probably one of my most crazy memories.

J Tamari: AVAX, 20,000% gain (fine, that was technically a 2020 play)

Tim: JOE – farmed it from day 1 + bought more around $0.04 for ~100X at decent volume

Baymax: $SMRT – brought back the thrill of degen and it was printing. 

Butts: I buy anything Defilabs has a hand in. Cake Monster is what I’m known for loving but they have quite a few tokens that I have bags of that all are doing very well.

Ninja Guy: I bought some random doggo coin I thought would disappear into the depths of Mordor. To my amazement, it turns out this “crap” coin I received would run up over 20X.

Least profitable play this year (including rugs!)

RugDoc: I’m actually a pretty conservative degen in that I split my bags in everything I do which means maybe I dont moon bag as much as other people do, but I also get rekt a lot less. I’ve lost small amounts in a lot of protocols but I honestly treat most new things I go into very experimentally and expect to lose. My biggest loss maybe was from the Uranium hack/rug.

Carlos: $ICE

J Tamari: AVAX, lol. I shorted. Too early. Got rekt. Down 40%. Could’ve should’ve would’ve.

Tim: 7 figure loss in WallStreetBets since they removed the migrator (after a bunch of projects used it to hard rug), but were the first project to hard rug through tampered LP’s.  Ironically enough, it came out the same day as another PCS fork with their own LP’s called Apeswap that looked equally fly-by-night but is obviously still alive today.  

Baymax: Parrot Protocol 

Butts: All the honeypots I’ve bought, laughing at me on bsc scan 🙁 

Ninja Guy: Iron Finance. Algo stablecoins are not so stable sometimes…

In one sentence can you give any advice to Crypto newbies for 2022?

RugDoc: Split your bags and take it slow. Don’t allocate yourself too heavily into any one thing since even if whatever you’re going into isn’t a scam, there is no guarantee it’s going to take off. The market is unpredictable and sometimes even tokens with what seems like a lot of potential just fail to launch and then you’re down 80%. Play around on PancakeSwap until you understand what’s going on since the fees are minimal and it’s a very large and predictable protocol so it’s hard to actually get rekt on Pancake past just putting yourself in a bad pool. Don’t forget to take profits along the way, either!!

Carlos: Stick to buying and staking ETH/BTC until you know what you’re doing. Take small steps outwards with amounts you can consider “learning losses”, because most of those funds indeed will be lost.

J Tamari: Learn what the hell your wallet is actually doing each time you interact with it.

Tim: You need a strategy.  If you farm with non-native, you need a huge amount to make a tiny %, and you need to NEVER get hard rugged since it’ll take months if not years to make it back.  If you don’t have much of a stack, you need to take more risk but still have a strategy.  Take advantage of the fact that the highest loss you can take in a native play is -100%, but the highest gain you can make is 100000x+.  Make statistics and strategy work for you or else you’re going to lose.

Baymax: Take profit and leave some for moonshot

Butts: Due diligence for everything all the time, no exceptions. 

Ninja Guy: If you want the biggest gains, you’ve definitely got to find that “alpha.” This might mean being in a group of people you trust who do their hours and hours of research. Avoid mainstream “hype-only” peeps like Bitboy.

What’s next? Wen RugDoc Token?

We have big plans for 2022, and while we can’t reveal much as of yet, we can confirm that there are still no plans on creating a RugDoc token. but we do have something interesting that rhymes with ‘Mandolin’ coming your way…

This doesn’t sidetrack us from our bread and butter of continuously providing free reviews for the community, and after 10 months into DeFi we have reviewed over 2,500 projects with plans to further develop our suite of community focused DeFi tools (Honeypot Checker, Emergency Withdraw) to help the everyday investor degen safely.

Finally, we’re also in deep partnership talks with some household DeFi brands you’ve probably heard of. This  builds on our strong track record of having partnerships with established names such as Avalanche, Iotex, Apeswap, Oasis and Paladin.

That’s all for now, see you and make sure you DYOR!
The RugDoc Team

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🟢 For owners who have made impactful changes and would like an update to their farm review:

1️⃣ Use #update at @RugDocChat with your description and proof of changes and it will be forwarded to our scanners.

2️⃣ This does not guarantee a change in your review.

3️⃣ Owners who have difficulty solving the issues can consider our Consultation Package – please contact @BaymaxCrypto on Telegram to discuss.

Our mission here at RugDoc is to screen for hard rug code that results in 100% theft of ALL underlying funds for ALL participants.

This is the ONE part of the due diligence process that most people cannot simply do on their own as it costs thousands of dollars to hire a senior solidity developer to look over a farm for safety.

A project coin with terrible code can go up in price, and a project with good code and a good team can also go down in price.

Do NOT use our ratings to refer to your likelihood in making money if you invest in the project. They are ONLY in reference to code safety.

Everything else beyond code safety is YOUR responsibility to go do research on. We just make sure the casino you’re betting in won’t rob you before you even get to place a bet.

Our reviews for projects are organized into a few colors.

🟢 Least Risk
These projects are the least likely to hard or soft rug. Usually reserved for cornerstone projects of an ecosystem where it makes no financial sense for them to rug in any manner as they make more money just being legit.

🔵 Low Risk
These projects are usually established projects in an ecosystem that have a track record of success or have KYC’d to us or other authoritative sources in the real world. As a result, it is extremely unlikely for them to soft rug or hard rug their projects. The projects can still fail and the token price can go down, but usually more as a result of natural market forces.

⚪️ Some Risk
This is the default rating for projects with unknown teams but have code that is unlikely to have hard rug risk. Since the team is unknown and doesn’t have a track record of success, it’s entirely possible that they may try to soft rug by dumping tokens, abandoning the project, etc. Even a last minute contract swap to a malicious contract is possible. The only thing that is unlikely is a complete hard rug as long as you are 100% sure you deposit into the contract we review.

🟠 Medium Risk
Similar to Some Risk, but the underlying code itself is custom enough or complex enough that it warrants an elevated risk rating that needs deeper research. Make sure you read every point presented to make sure you’re comfortable with that before entering. Still unlikely to hard rug, but more chances of custom code behaving incorrectly and causing other issues.

🔴 High Risk
Project contains code or practices that are HIGHLY LIKELY to lead to catastrophic losses as they are right now. Make sure you read the description carefully as we will always warn what these issues are. If you see the words Hard Rug anywhere in the review, STAY FAR AWAY!

⚫️ Not Eligible
We reserve the right to not review exceedingly complex projects that would require tens of thousands of dollars of senior security analyst man hours. Typically these are projects that deal with leverage, lending, options, derivatives, and anything that is overly complex and which requires tons of peer reviews and audits from top audit companies.