$PEPE $SHIB $DOGE

The crypto world is not short of legends of getting rich overnight; what’s lacking are the lucky ones who can cash out alive.

Stories of turning $62 into $1.5 million, with over 20,000x gains, are everywhere. But there’s a more sobering real case right in front of us—someone bought the dip at $27 when PEPE was on the verge of collapse, and their account balance once soared to 67 million. Sounds crazy, right? The problem is, they will never get that money.

**Cannot sell. Cannot transfer. Cannot exchange.**

Why? Because PEPE’s smart contract has been fully controlled by the developers from the very beginning. If they want to freeze someone’s assets, they just need one operation—blacklist the address, and the enormous wealth instantly turns into a digital illusion. This is not an extreme case but a common script in the Meme coin ecosystem.

This reveals the coldest truth in the crypto world: **If you don’t control the contract code, you never truly own the assets.**

How many people rush into unverified tokens, only looking at candlestick charts, listening to stories, scrolling through comments, never once inspecting the contract code? Gambling based on intuition, essentially handing over their hard-earned money to strangers’ luck. Some make money, but most end up zero.

But this doesn’t mean the opportunity is gone. Quite the opposite—the market is undergoing a fierce reshuffle. The impatient gamblers and blindly following retail investors are being gradually pushed out. Once this round of reshuffling ends, only those with solid fundamentals will stand out.

There are indeed new opportunities brewing on the ETH chain, but the prerequisite is learning to identify risks. Meme coins explode every day—most of them die the next day. The common scam techniques are just a few.

**Remember this iron rule:**

If you don’t understand the logic of the smart contract, you will become a puppet in the hands of the contract creator. Not verifying the developer’s background and token distribution could be your last blow.

Understand the rules clearly before you get in; only then will your money truly belong to you. Spending half an hour verifying a contract before investing can save you from a regretful zero. The market is never short of 10x, 100x, or even 1000x opportunities, but those who truly seize them are often the most cautious.