The $130,000 Self-Rug: Best NFT Minting Practices.

The minute you get lazy is the minute you rug yourself.

If you haven’t heard, three noteworthy hacks roiled the NFT world last week: Baepes (a spin-off of Monkey Kingdom), Fractals, and MonkeyBall. All happened on the same day.

I was trying to mint Baepes as it happened, but luckily enough the site kept crashing and I could never mint. One minter was not so lucky. The hackers were able to drain 650 SOL (about $130,000) from his wallet (Monkey Kingdom made him whole again, which is a truly stand-up action and why I want to be part of the Baepes mint when it’s rescheduled — true faith in that team.)

Back to the point: I know how that loser of 650 SOL feels. Same thing happened to me just days earlier with the Solapes mint. My loss was much smaller, just 5 SOL (about $875). But I can assure you it feels like a million bucks the minute you realize what just happened.

But that’s not the worst of it.

I was chatting with a member of a DAO I’m in, and she told me the story of losing 1,000 SOL (about $125,000 at the time) during a mint she took part in back in August.

And here’s the point: Every one of us who had our wallets drained by a hacker has one person to blame…

Ourselves.

It’s natural to want to blame the hackers (and, truthfully, give me a hacker, an hour, and a rusty tin-can lid… but I digress). The fact remains that hackers are a part of the…