Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Year That Should Have Stopped Us

Every so often I stop and look back. Not to feel sorry for myself, and not to hold a grudge. I look back to learn something.

On our October 29 call I read a passage from the preface of The 48 Laws of Power. It's about Janus, the Roman god with two faces — one looking back, one looking forward. The face looking forward lives by "no days unalert." It doesn't sit around dreaming about the happy ending. It thinks through every way the plan could fail. The face looking back isn't there to reopen old wounds. It's there to learn.

That's what this article is. A straight look at where we've been this year, where we stand, and where we're headed. No excuses. Just the score.

A Dubai loss, a near-hack, two exchange failures and a Texas cease and desist. A straight look at what hit us, what was on us, how far we have come, and the work still ahead.

Looking back: what hit us

Here's the list. It's not in any order, and it's not pretty.

1. We lost about $1.15 million in Dubai. In February we had a contract with a company in Dubai. They were building what we needed for the festival work we'd been planning. Then war broke out in the region. I got a warning to catch the next flight out. Flights were canceled, the company shut down, and our money was gone. So was the work it was paying for.

2. Our own tech group came close to robbing us. We caught the development group we'd hired in the act. Basically every wallet we had was exposed to them. We stopped it before we lost any money. But we couldn't trust anything they'd touched. So we rebuilt all of it — the mempools, the block explorers, the chain, the mining pool, the wallets. It took them two and a half years to build. We rebuilt it in three or four months.

3. BitMart disappeared. BitMart was our number one exchange. They were good to us, they opened the door for our community, and we had just paid them more money to list ISK. Then they were gone overnight — along with our money, our customers' money, our miners' money, and the trading volume our whole market depended on.

4. Dex-Trade held deposits hostage. Dex-Trade was our first exchange. Then people's deposits started getting stuck, and the answer was basically, "Give us 20% and we'll send it back." That isn't what crypto is supposed to be.

5. The Texas cease and desist — the first domino. All of those were small next to the emergency order from the Texas State Securities Board in February. Here's what came after it:

• Bank accounts frozen. Millions of dollars we used to pay bills, vendors, commissions and advertising were locked up. We only got access back a few weeks ago.
• Sales stopped. We shut sales down everywhere, right after launching ISK, because nobody would tell us which law we'd supposedly broken.
• More than $5 million in legal bills. The invoices and payment receipts are public at beans.honest.money.
• We lost our hometown relationships. We'd spent at least $100,000 with the McKinney Chamber of Commerce on events and goodwill. They returned the "Downtown Digital Dollars" vehicle we bought for them. Their reason: we'd been accused of fraud.
• $85,000 gone at the Texas Music Revolution. We paid to be the exclusive in-event payment processor — real utility on our rails. It was canceled with no refund.

Being honest about whose fault is whose

Some of this was outside our control. I didn't start a war. I had no clue BitMart was about to vanish. I can't take the blame for those, and I won't pretend otherwise.

Some of it is on me. I hired that tech group. Keeping an eye on them was my job. They were building things we didn't have the skills to properly check before we relied on them. People get hacked all the time, but that doesn't excuse it — it's a lesson. Today we do all of our development in-house. It costs us a lot of money and a lot of stress, and our community is better off for it.

And the Texas case? People ask, "Bobby, come on — you had to know this was coming." Honestly, no. From 2008 to 2013 I ran the American Open Currency Standard, a private, voluntary barter currency run the same way. Regulators didn't come after me. Congress invited me to testify as an expert witness in 2012. You don't get treated as a criminal and an invited expert for the same work.

When we started TEXITcoin, I studied every project that got busted. They all had the same thing at the core: fraud, lies, Ponzi or pyramid schemes. Something dishonest. Our plan was simple: don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, build real utility. Texas sees it differently, and a judge will decide.

Our side of the case is in the filed briefs (all linked on our legal page). The short version is fair notice. It came out at the hearing that the Board had been looking at us for about eleven months before the "emergency" order. In all that time, nobody interviewed me, questioned me, or called me. Nobody said, "We think you're breaking the law — can we talk?" That's our position, and it's in front of the judge now. The decision has been pushed back more than once and is now expected in late January.

The State has unlimited time and unlimited money. We don't. What we do have is an unlimited commitment to doing the right thing. And if good people quit every time it gets hard, nothing good ever gets built.

Where we actually are

Some days I'm tempted to say we survived. I think it's fair to say we did more than that.

We're 135 weeks in. We got through a near-hack, a seven-figure loss overseas, an exchange collapse, frozen bank accounts, and more than $5 million in legal fees — and we're still here, still building, still on the air every week.

And we've been building a lot. Most of it started in May, when we took development in-house:

• NectarPay tap-to-pay works. You can tap an NFC card to pay.
• Payment splitting works. One purchase can automatically send part of the money to a fundraiser or community group. On TEXITcoin. Without smart contracts.
• A simpler merchant setup is on the way. Link a BeeKeeper wallet to a TEXITcoin address, put a QR sticker on the register you already have, and get a text when a payment comes in. No special hardware required. We're still building this, so it isn't rolled out yet.
• CoinMarketCap is almost done. We're close to a fully verified listing with full API integration. The email I got on the day of the call said there was one thing left to do. We had to call in a lot of favors and spend real money to get here. It isn't finished until it's finished, but this is a big one.

On price: if you leave out the end of 2025 and just look at 2026, we've held up better than a lot of bigger coins. XRP fell from about $2.60 to about $1.29 over the year. That's not an excuse. It's context.

To the holder who's frustrated

There's a guy who shows up on almost every one of our calls and says, "I put five grand into this and I'd like to see it." I hear you. We all hear you.

I told everyone up front: this was never a get-rich-quick deal. It took a long time to get here, and getting where we want to go could take a couple more years. I don't think that's unreasonable. Hang tight if you can. Support us if you want to. Wait on the sidelines if that's what you need to do. I won't promise you a timeline, and I won't promise you a price. I can promise you we're not quitting.

Looking forward: what's left to do

The face looking forward isn't spending money we don't have yet. It's planning for the next pothole. This is what has to happen next:

1. Finish CoinMarketCap verification. One step left.
2. Launch SEEDS. That's our non-custodial centralized exchange: we coordinate the trade and your coins stay under your keys until it happens. Listing will cost projects much less than the $30,000 to $100,000 big exchanges charge us. The catch is they have to bring a real market and real liquidity — and we'll be able to prove how much liquidity is actually there.
3. Rebuild liquidity and trading. Get the market working again so TEXITcoin trades like a real coin with a real reputation.
4. Grow everyday spending. Get NectarPay into more stores, focused on TEXITcoin and the Texas Stable Dollar.
5. Keep going while the case plays out. No matter what the judge decides, or when.

The first time through, we'd never done this before. Now we have. We've learned from the mistakes, we know the pitfalls, and we're far better at this than we were a year ago.

The bottom line

It's been a long, hard year. Nothing about it was what I expected or wanted. But the lessons were ones we had to learn anyway, and now we've learned them.

So we glance back, give ourselves a quick pat on the back for getting through it, and get back to work. The face looking forward has plenty to do.

See you Thursday at noon Central on the Honest Money Hour.

— Bobby

Watch the full October 29 call and read the transcript at texitcoin.org/zoom.