The crypto space has been filled with fear, uncertainty & doubt for as long as the crypto space itself has existed. This ambiguity has been a major cause of blood pressure spikes in investors. Two factors primarily cause panic among the investors — (unfavorable) measures by regulatory bodies and the articles/write-ups doing rounds on the internet which are based on ill understanding of the technology and implications of actions of both developers and regulators.

My learning came when the Indian banking regulator, The Reserve Bank of India, in its first monetary policy review of 2018–19, set out a direction for entities affiliated to it to immediately disengage from any person or entity dealing with virtual currencies (note that the RBI, in no way, banned cryptocurrencies). Those banks and financial institutions who were already providing services to such entities were given a window of 3 months to terminate their services.

As was expected, there was a massive outcry within the Indian crypto space which caused panic selling by investors crashing Indian crypto markets by flat 25–30% in less than an hour of the issuing of the RBI notification. The foreign exchanges, on the other hand, did not show any substantial fluctuations because of the same. Here begins my personal grievance. As a remedial measure, I planned to move my XRPs from an Indian exchange to a secure personal wallet since I had no intention to sell my investments in the window of 3 months. In fact, I had been intending to do the exchange-to-wallet transfer since the last 2–3 months but never got the time (I should admit here that I’m a pro at procrastination) or felt the urgency to do so.

On looking up relevant subreddits like r/ripple, r/XRP and r/CryptoCurrency (Reddit happens to be my primary source of information for all the crypto updates) and reading on various websites, I narrowed down to the option of making a paper wallet to hodl my XRPs for the long run. After having read in detail the process of setting up and activating a paper wallet and sending XRPs in and out of it, I went ahead and set up my first (and most probably the last) paper wallet using the Minimalist Ripple Client. I activated it by sending XRPs from my exchange account and successfully did transfers in and out of the newly made wallet. I was happy; even proud of myself for having done a task which appeared to be and was indeed pretty technical.

Just before moving all of my XRPs into the wallet, I realized that I needed to test a few other functionalities of the wallet as well. This was my undoing! I read about re-keying my wallet, which according to the explanations given on Github meant changing the secret key to my wallet. I assumed that the process would be similar in ease of use to the prior steps that I had successfully taken on reading from the same source (Github). I went ahead and used the command. It appeared to work well and gave me a new key. I tried doing a transfer out of my wallet. It failed! I tried again. Failed. Again. Failed. Again. Failed.

I looked up the error on the internet (Google, Reddit and XRP Chat, to be precise) and kept on digging down the rabbit hole for at least a week when I came to realize that I had lost access to my wallet and the funds in it. Following is the error message that the network returns every time I try to transact using my wallet (I’ve tried to be as exhaustive as possible with appropriate citations and content throughout this post so as to drive out the element of ambiguity that entails crypto land):

{“result”:”tejMaxLedger”,”result_message”:”Transaction LastLedgerSequence exceeded”,”engine_result”:”tejMaxLedger”,”engine_result_message”:”Transaction LastLedgerSequence exceeded”,”message”:”Transaction LastLedgerSequence exceeded”}

It so happened that the re-key option set a new private key to my wallet and presented me a sequence of characters which are not the new secret key! In the process, the Minimalist Ripple Client disabled my master key which basically renders my old secret key useless. In simple words, by rekeying my wallet, my old password has been locked and my new password has not been provided to me.

Throughout the course of my research I never lost hope and kept on telling people who knew about this fiasco that I’d eventually be able to set things right. But I was wrong. I’d like to draw attention towards a particular comment on XRP Chat by PFTQ the developer of The World Exchange. Among other things, PFTQ has very clearly stated the following:

“this topic (of re-keying wallets) needs more explanation and should be pinned, warned for all new users. The old minimalist client (which I highly discourage using as it’s using old Ripple code from 2014) should never be used for re-keying. It disables your master key and assigns the regular key to a new random Ripple address to do this, but the new secret key it gives you does not conform to the modern Ripple format (it doesn’t start with “s”). I had trouble trying to login to the account even using the minimalist client itself.”

This person who is a pro in the cryptoverse being the developer of an exchange faced problem using the re-key option. I wonder what is to happen to the likes of people like me who aren’t as informed with the technical intricacies of this dimension. This entire episode has been full of learning and loss. The monetary loss that I endured by losing access to my wallet cannot be made good but I want to set this incident as a learning for other (relatively new and technically less abled) users so that they do not face similar problems and end up losing hard earned money like I did.

I would like to reach out to the developers of various applications, gateways and interfaces (specially the developer of minimalist ripple paper wallet client since I faced the problem while using it) to remove any discrepancies that their code might have and also request them to provide simple (ELI5) explanations to concepts and easy to follow series of steps for users like me who I am sure constitute a major part of the crypto investor population.

Where do I move my balance XRPs from the exchange now? Another Paper Wallet? I think I’ll give it a pass this time. But third party held wallets aren’t as secure as a paper wallet. I am, yet again, faced with the ever-looming question.

Best wishes to all of you and happy investing. I hope my efforts help you somewhere in your tryst with cryptocurrencies.

Disclaimer: I hold nothing against XRP. I am 100% invested in XRP :)