How the chemistry research crypto disappeared

I'm writing this post to share a bad experience that I recently had, but also to share my idea that will be on hold for a while now, and ask for your comments/thoughts. Feel free to comment, laugh at me, help, whatever you prefer.

As you may know doing scientific research is hard, partly because of the money, so months (probably years) ago I had the idea: what if I branch my research and beside study chemistry (my research field) we could also embrace into crypto to increase the knowledge and also try to get some more money to move forward the research? It's one of my passion anyway. So I did it! Some token staked, others hodl, others traded with some algo made in house. In this way I can learn more but also other scientist and people interacting with me could be inspired and maybe enter the crypto space. Sounds good right? it still does, even a little less.

The idea is to use some computational power that is unused to run nodes and mine crypto, so to make the most out of resources that are there anyway. But mostly, investing money to increase the liquidity and the fund used to research while improving on coding by trying some algos. Everything was going decently, recently sideways as the market.

However, this past week, a computer got compromised and the keys stolen, all accounts entered. Boom basically all the investment are gone, even the one staked (come on, really?!). And once a bot is in, it's impossible to fight, even if you see that the token got unstaked and the release time starts, it's impossible to stop the process or to move the tokens as quick as they land into the wallet. One problem of self custody?

All those crypto are not recoverable, I know. But I'm here to ask to share some of your knowledge: how would you react in this situation? But mostly, is the custodian wallet scene so fragile that with just a key the funds are lost? Are there any more levels of protection similar to a 2FA? Do we need to implement them? Do I have to revert to use custodian wallet from exchanges where I lose all the freedom of owning my coins? Does an extra level of protection on the stacking/unstacking process exist? Any more comment is appreciated.