Unit 4 · Level 5 · Protocol due diligence: capstone
The graduate's rules
Everything distills to seven rules: 1) Your keys, your coins: guard the seed phrase with your life. 2) Ask where every yield comes from. 3) Verify claims; don't trust faces, DMs, or urgency. 4) Stacked layers = stacked risks. 5) Read the wrapper on anything 'backed'. 6) Respect the narrative cycle and don't be exit liquidity. 7) Size frontier bets for total loss. Boring? Absolutely. So is surviving every cycle.
Free to play. No ads, no token, no account needed to start.
What you get asked
Match each disaster to the graduate's rule that would have dodged it
Four of crypto's most expensive lessons, each preventable by one sentence. The rules are cheap; ignoring them cost people billions.
What do the seven rules have in common that makes them durable across cycles?
Greed, urgency, misplaced trust, and overconfidence predate blockchains by millennia. Tech changes every cycle; the exploits of human nature don't. That's also why no rule promises profit, only survival.
The rules share one engine: replace trust with ___. Check the claim, the code, the custody, and the yield source yourself.
That's Bitcoin's founding idea from League 1, scaled up to a life skill: don't trust, verify. It applies to whitepapers, yield farms, and video calls equally.
A brand-new meta appears next year, something nobody's even named yet. How do the rules handle a sector that didn't exist when you learned them?
The rules never mention specific tech, and that's the design. Restaking and AI coins didn't exist when 'where's the yield from?' was coined, and it dissected both on arrival.
The real mark of a Formiga crypto graduate is...
Not abstinence, not omniscience: selectivity. You can now vet anything, size what passes, and skip the rest without FOMO. One boss fight left: prove it. 🐜
The rest of this unit
The full framework: vet anything, size it for the frontier, and graduate scam-proof.