Walking Down the Orange Brick Road

Alice fell down the rabbit hole into a world of mad hatters and broken promises.

Dorothy followed the yellow brick road and made it home safely.

In 2026, the market offers us two paths:

Path #1: Down the crypto rabbit hole filled with presidential meme coins, trading giants front-running your trades, and one man delivering a 99% shareholder loss all to buy back his own companies; or

Path #2: Down the orange brick road filled with no rug pulls, no insiders, and no influencers promising price pumps.

To help you choose which path, we’re sharing the below three stories:

• The "crypto president's" $4.3 billion damage report;

• Why the house always wins (Pump.fun + Jane Street); and

• The Nakamoto Heist - How a 99% collapse turned into a personal payday.

1. The Crypto President’s Damage Report

Remember when they said Trump would be the "crypto president"? Here's what that actually delivered:

• $4.3 billion+ in retail losses (nearly all of the 2 million wallets are currently underwater).

• $600 million+ cashed out by insiders.

• $TRUMP: ATH $74.27 → Now $3.41. Down 95%.

• $MELANIA: ATH $13.73 → Now $0.12. Down 99%.

For every $1 insiders earned, retail investors lost $20.

Who got paid? Well the Trump family walked away with $300-400M+. Hayden Davis made $100-150M+, and a cluster of 58 whale wallets extracted $1.2B+ from a set of "perfectly-timed Day 1 trades".

As @MeshnetCapital put it:

"A sitting US president launched two memecoins that wiped out $4.3B+ from retail investors while insiders quietly cashed out $600M+. Crypto president my ass".

The SEC says meme coins aren't securities so there’s no insider trading laws that apply (ridiculous!).

The whales swim away free yet again while retail holds the bag.

2. Why The House Always Wins…

Think you can beat the game? Let's look at the math below…

Pump.fun, the Solana meme coin launchpad, says its mission is "to enable the average joe to make it from memecoins".

The actual numbers:

• 95.6% of traders break even or lose money

• Only 0.4% made over $10,000

• $950 million collected by the platform in fees

The "average joe" has a 0.4% chance of making $10K. The platform pocketed nearly a billion in fees alone, while 98.6% of everything launched was designed to steal your money.

But it's not just meme coins. The institutions are playing a different game entirely.

Jane Street. One of the most sophisticated trading firms on Earth have been accused of allegedly using nonpublic information from Terraform insiders to trade directly against retail.

This is what you're up against when travelling down the crypto rabbit hole. While you're trying to catch the next 100x, billion-dollar trading desks are using trading data you'll never have access to, front-running you at every turn.

The game isn't just rigged at the meme coin level. It's rigged all the way up.

3. The Nakamoto Heist

And now we arrive at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

One twitter user DM'd Justin Bechler this week: "I lost $500K and got rugged by David when he was alluding to a short squeeze and paid analyst to say the price target was $8+".

That David is David Bailey. And the story of what happened is a masterclass in how the rabbit hole really works.

In May 2025, Bailey merged his company Nakamoto Holdings into a public shell called KindlyMD. The stock exploded from $2 to over $30. Retail piled in. Bitcoin influencers celebrated. Bailey literally compared himself to “the Morgans, the Medicis, the Rothschilds”.

But PIPE investors, including some of the biggest names in Bitcoin, got their shares at $1.12, while Retail was buying all the way up to $28, $30, $31 / share.

Nine months later, NAKA trades at 29 cents. Down 99% (just like many altcoins, yes).

And this week, Bailey used that hollowed-out shell to acquire BTC Inc and UTXO Management, two companies he founded.

The deal is financed with shares priced at $1.12, nearly four times the current market price.

No additional shareholder approval required. The call option was baked into documents shareholders voted on when NAKA was trading in the $20s. Retail investors had no idea they were authorizing the future acquisition of Bailey's private businesses at a locked-in premium while the stock disintegrated beneath them.

The man who runs Bitcoin Magazine. Who organizes the largest Bitcoin conferences on Earth. Who positioned himself as a leader of the Bitcoin movement.

He raised $710 million, delivered a 99% loss, and used the wreckage to buy his own empire.

As @1914ad documented: "Bailey is the buyer, the seller, and the CEO who approves the terms".

That's the crypto rabbit hole for you. Mad hatters promising dynasties and queens taking your head.

A game where you were exit liquidity before you ever bought a single share.

The Orange Brick Road

So where does the road actually lead?

While retail lost $4.3 billion on Trump altcoins, while Jane Street allegedly front-ran traders, and while Bailey delivered a 99% loss and bought his own companies with the ashes...

Bitcoin is still here.

Down from the highs, yes. But no rugs. No insider allocations. No influencer CEO shilling leveraging his corporate control for selfish purposes.

Bitcoin’s “orange brick road” is boring, yes, but it's the only road that leads you to your destination.

Dorothy made it home safe. Alice just kept falling.

Choose your path wisely.

- Hector

Ready to walk the orange brick road? Start stacking with Rhino today 👇