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Excuse Me Is Everybody Smoking Hopium

Everybody’s bullish and greedy again. But for every price direction (up, down) there is a corresponding argument.

Down Argument

We’ve seen this before. It’s formed a left shoulder, a head, and now it’s going to form a right shoulder and plunge down.

Before 2017, BTCUSD was going sideways for a few years at 600USD. In 2017, it made ATH after ATH, all the way up to 3000, 4000, 7000, then finally 20000 in December 2017!

Now what are the odds of that happening again? Seriously, we just doubled our previous ATH at 20000, surely there will be a cooldown period longer than a few months at least. Not to mention, DOGE and SHIB pumped.

Other bearish signs: mainstream media reporting about crypto, and the fact that everyone else is so bullish. When everyone else is bullish, be very careful. Look for the contrarian opinion.

Even SecretsOfCrypto said shitcoins pump at the end of a season, and to be honest, these guys are OGs and might have a point.

Up Argument

BTCUSD 1D logarithmic with previous bullruns highlighted and halving events marked.

Every time Bitcoin’s block reward halves (and it did last month), the price soars. The graph above is logarithmic – each tiny tick up is a lot, and if you look at it that way, 100000 is a fair goal. It usually takes a few months for the supply shock to impact the price. (Ethereum also has such a supply shock incoming – thanks to EIP1559, the supply of ETH is actually decreasing)

Glassnode also has some pretty convincing bullish metrics.

I’m torn. On one side, you can make a lot of money by going against what everybody else is thinking. On the other hand, you can see how there is a good argument for the price continuing to go up – and in the world of crypto, if enough people believe something, it shall be so.

Emotional Management

Personally, doing the opposite of what everyone says has always been profitable. Listen to your gut (I initially started this post being bearish).

Set things up so that no matter what happens, it’ll benefit me.

That means I’ll sell a small portion (like, less than 10%) of my Bitcoin. If it dumps, that’s fine, I get to pick more BTC up. If it continues to go up, that’s fine too.

I’m still heavily weighted into crypto though so if it all goes down 99% of my net worth goes down with it.

I’ve also managed to get myself out of some bad trades that I got into last bullrun with minimal losses.

In Case Bullrun: Dip A Toe Into “The Obvious Bets”

There were some “obvious bets” that I never really went into, because I was looking for the “unobvious bets” which were going to be 10x hitters. Well, turns out many of them can be losers too, so why not look at the more obvious bets?

Since the obvious bets have mostly already pumped, I will go into them with small sizes and increase my position as I see fit. For this little experiment I will classify them into 3 categories: scary (won’t put money into them), meh (0.02 BTC), ok (0.03 BTC).

But ser why are these coins obvious bets?

Traction. FTX looks like the next Binance. Polkadot is inserting itself into some DeFi spaces, and the parachain auction seemed hotly contested. Fantom is an Ethereum sidechain out of nowhere. Sushiswap is much more than a Uniswap V2 clone these days. Chainlink is the oracle solution when your smart contract needs data about the outside world. Polygon/MATIC – nothing to say there. The Graph – truly useful, I’ve used it myself. Decentraland MANA: really is a fun virtual world where it seems things are happening.

FTTBTC: scary, just pumped. FTX could be the next challenger to Binance, and FTT is their token. What’s not to like, as long as you keep the entry size small?
DOTBTC: scary, just pumped.
FTMBTC: scary, just pumped. You’ve heard me mention Fantom before.
SUSHIBTC: meh
LINKBTC: meh, I know I’m not getting a good deal
MATICBTC: meh
GRTBTC: ok, good deal. The Graph is very useful to developers after all.
MANABTC: ok. To be honest, I’m not excited about the entry, which is still near ATH levels. But I do think Decentraland is doing very well as an online metaverse. And I’m keeping my entry small, 0.03 BTC. Not even enough to buy the cheapest plot of virtual land, ngmi.

Time will tell.

Going Sideways, Not Up; Why NFTs Matter

Market Situation

BTCUSD, 1D

We’re going sideways. Sure there was a rally, but we’re not gonna go higher than May.

Now boys and girls, as BTC goes sideways, what season is it?

“Alt season!”

That’s right, it’s alt season! Actually I almost forgot, until SecretsOfCrypto reminded me. He lays it out better than me so I advise you to check out his interpretation. Click the link for the entire thread. And follow him, he is a real OG and gives good advice.

Image

This playbook is what happened the last bullrun. Nevertheless, things seem different this cycle. It does not seem to be the case anymore that the BTC value of an alt goes down as BTCUSD goes up – in fact, they mostly stay the same, and when BTCUSD goes down, the alts go down with it.

It used to be that BTC would pump and everything else would go down, and then the alts and ETH would start pumping; this bullrun, everything was pumping at the same time, and everything is going down at the same time.

I think this is because we now have crypto stablecoins (USDC, USDT, DAI…). Before, if you wanted to go into an alt, you went into through Bitcoin mostly, and there was no real way to lock your gains from the alt except by selling out into Bitcoin. Now, you can sell into stablecoins, and every proper exchange has a altUSDT pair. So it makes sense that alts are starting to behave more in sync with Bitcoin’s behaviour now.

This tweet is still 100% true though.

Am I an influencer? don’t follow anything I say, nothing here is financial advice!

Knowing all this, what can we do? Just keep finding promising projects who haven’t risen as much and DCA into them. It used to be that the name of the game is to accumulate BTC. Now, with stablecoins, BTC is just one of the many assets that you can try to accumulate through trading.

OK so most coins are up there in terms of USD. What if I have some BTC to invest? What are my options?

Just going from top to bottom on Coinmarketcap’s DeFi list. I only consider projects with a real argument for their existence.

SUSHIBTC – solid project, but this is not a “OMG deal” situation. More like “fair price”
SNXBTC – I don’t like the look of this graph, so no
COMPBTC – solid project, the first to introduce yield farming. “Fair price”, I’d say.
GRTBTC might not have hit the floor yet, but it’s looking good.
CRVBTC will blow up one day. Pretty good price if you ask me.
UMABTC it’s always bad to assume “this is the floor”. Nevertheless, looking good already.
RENBTC matching the previous ATL is always a good point, maybe don’t be too greedy and dip a toe in. Besides, REN’s renBTC product is actively being used.
LRCBTC graph looks similar to RENBTC but no zkRollups are production ready atm so I think it should be cheaper. Why does a Ethereum L2 zkRollup need its own coin anyway? Gotta look closer at the economics.
ALPHABTC I have heard of their product Alpha Homora, so I’d trust their project not to rugpull people in DeFi. However the price could look more attractive.
BANDBTC to be honest, this graph looks very good. It’s like Chainlink (oracles) but for Cosmos. Unlike LINK, though, nobody’s building DeFi on Cosmos, and DeFi projects are not looking at Cosmos. They’re looking at Fantom, Polygon, BSC, even Solana for the Rust die-hards. For the other Rust die-hards, HydraDX is on Polkadot and tooting their own horn. Why isn’t Cosmos selling itself to the DeFi community?
FILBTC Filecoin is a solid project, maybe later

New Things I Heard

Ethereum recently changed its economic policy through a hard fork. If you want to make a transaction on Ethereum, you have to pay a transaction fee (in ETH). Previously, this went to the miners. Now, part of it gets burnt/destroyed, increasing the scarcity of ETH. So far, it’s been working very well, 15000 ETH has been destroyed. The more people use Ethereum, the more valuable ETH will become.

A big chunk of these ETH transactions are because of Axie Infinity. There’s even ‘scholarships’ for Axie Infinity now. It’s huge in the Philippines, imagine earning a living by simply playing a game! Let’s have a look at AXS’s USD value.

I don’t care how popular the game is, I’m shorting that.

DSLA is a service level agreement payment resolver. Basically, most companies rely on other companies, and they have Service Level Agreements – the service should be up 99.9% of the time, or else free/rebates. Think Deutsche Bahn, if train arrives 30 minutes late, you get a refund. Turns out making refunds go out automatically when things go wrong is a major PITA, so how can we automate that with smart contracts on the blockchain?

Makes sense to me. Let’s take a look at the graph.

DSLAUSDT: not bad at all, although I probably shoulda got in earlier (I heard about this a week or two ago at EthCC)

There have been some rumblings about a thing called the metaverse. Remember the movie Ready Player One? People are thinking of creating a virtual universe just like that. VR provides the immersive experience, NFTs provide the provably unique in-game items, crypto transfers provide the money transfers between characters. You can do all this in a game, sure, but each game is still very much its own silo. The idea is for some interoperability to exist, such that you can bring certain things between worlds. All this is still very far away, but we’ll probably see this theme resurface now and then.

Losing Big, what to do.

Do you employ a formal procedure to cut your losses?

Not at all. In fact, if something goes wrong and I know what it is, but I think that the original thesis is valid, and that the damage is coming from an extraneous source, I am more likely to increase my position than to sell out. I need to know why I’m losing money.

Soros on Soros

Bonus: Why NFTs matter

click it and read the whole thing you lazy cunt

Bank Account Got Blocked! So I flew to Paris… EthCC tidbits

My bank account got blocked. This is how I flew down to Paris, booked a hostel, and had fun anyway.

(of course I used crypto. wtf you think)

Hello dear subscribers, yes it’s been a long time! I was down in Paris for EthCC 4, Europe’s biggest Ethereum congress, second only to DEVCON in size (I think). For some perspective, in 2020 I went to EthCC 3 and got COVID.

Since I am a terrible social media newb I have no selfies of myself there, nor could I even get into the event itself (what?) I just went for the side events where you didn’t need to get the highly coveted ticket to EthCC itself.

Why My Bank Account Got Blocked

Because of a little disagreement with the Finanzamt, my bank account was blocked for over 2 months. They eventually accepted that I had been making a big fat 0 in 2020 and 2021, but it took ages for them to unlock my account. This is apparently how it works:

  1. Updated numbers need to percolate through their system (~3 days)
  2. They have to print a letter
  3. Said letter needs to be sent by post to the bank (~3 days) no it is not even fax like they first claimed
  4. Letter needs to actually be read by the bank (~2 days)

Meanwhile EthCC is starting on July 20 and it was already July 17! Was I really going to miss a great networking opportunity because of some fat Karen in a government building who sees me as just a number, a case file?

This is NOT a Sponsorship – my Monolith VISA debit

freedom from governmental repression is here 😭

16 July, a Friday: I decide to go to Paris. I activate my Monolith VISA card.
18 July, a Sunday: I convert 0.6 ETH into 1000USDT, send it to Monolith, top up the VISA debit card and book my flight and hostel.

Imagine doing that with a bank on a Sunday.

When I came back, I found a big fat letter from Deutsche Bank. In case you don’t know, DB is terribly uncool in that it blocks transactions to and from all crypto institutions, insists that you keep your transaction history in paper because it doesn’t want to keep it for you, and has a terrible iOS app.

Apparently they’re increasing their prices, and I’m supposed to read their two thick booklets and spot the price differences. And send back my agreement via mail, because I have all the time in the world to care this much about a bank account that can be confiscated at any time.

(note: my bank account that was blocked was not with Deutsche Bank)

Monolith is based in the UK and is controlled via an app, just like N26/Revolut. It is purely an interface between crypto/the real world. I heard good things about Revolut though, so I’ll try that out soon.

What I learned in Paris hobnobbing with the Ethereum community

Random tidbits

Whenever I tell normal people I’m here for an Ethereum conference, they have no idea what it is. I have to invoke the magic word, “Bitcoin”. And then they go “aha”. Even though Ethereum and Bitcoin are totally different things.

Blockchain projects don’t just want to build on Ethereum anymore. They want to be on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon (MATIC), Fantom (FTM), Solana (SOL), and they’re hiring for that. I heard these chains being mentioned over and over again, so look out for their coins.

If you’re a frontend dev and can write Solidity, you can basically write your own destiny. Everybody’s hiring for Solidity/frontend devs, but those devs are busy building their own projects already (see mlnl.finance).

How to get into crypto

If you want to get involved in this industry, become a volunteer for an event. You’ll get to see more, attend the event for free, and you don’t really have to do that much work (schlep a few cables around, man the doors, organize the speakers). Contact the organizers a few weeks before the event starts. Tickets for EthCC were around 200USD, so being a volunteer and getting in for free is a huge advantage.

There are Market Makers for Hire

Let’s say you’re a crypto project and your token is listed on an exchange, like Bitstamp, Binance, FTX. At first, nobody will buy your token because they don’t know about it. Then this type of situation will happen all too often:

A wants to sell your coin for 40000
B wants to buy your coin for 10000
C looks at the situation and goes “this market is a joke, let me find another coin”

And this is what a market maker does – with some capital, they will step in between, sell to B (and hope to buy back for 1% less later), and buy from A (and hopes to sell for 1% more later). Of course, if the price moves too much, the market maker is going to lose money.

Normally these market makers show up organically if the general public thinks your coin is worth trading. Which is why unestablished crypto projects can actually hire a market maker to make their market. Expect most of the liquidity on a normal exchange to come from market makers, not other people wanting to trade like you (retail).

Expect 90% of all trading volume shown here to be from market makers.
1: the volume indicator. this is what a healthy trading volume looks like
2. order book. Look at the green section, the bid part. Someone is willing to buy 0.04 BTC at a price of 38478.3 USDT. Since it’s such a neat amount, it’s most likely a single person. In contrast, several peoples’ bids are probably aggregated into the 38484.8 USDT level.
this is just someone trading with themselves, i.e. wash trading.
This coin can’t possibly be in demand/useful.

So just like you hire companies for your marketing image, it is possible to hire market makers to make you look good on the exchange. See this video for very good explanation of a market maker.

Regulations are Coming – which is why everyone is decentralizing

Apparently new rules and regulations (in the US, I think) are incoming. The signs are showing:

  1. Binance reduced its daily withdrawal limit for non-KYC customers from 2 BTC to 0.06 BTC.
  2. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, Shapeshift decentralized itself recently. More details in this interview with Laura Shin.
  3. MakerDAO dissolved its Foundation. The blogpost doesn’t mention this purpose, but it certainly reduces the surface area for any legal attack.

The regulators are really circling around Binance. The 0.06 BTC limit is already reason enough to start looking for other exchanges.

Quadratic Funding: Your Opinion Matters Again

Market Update

The rally I thought would happen last issue didn’t happen. We’re still going down. People are calling it a ‘crab market’. Sure it’s going sideways, but it’s threatening to break down even further.

I found a great website to practice trading: Bitcoin Flip. You can long and short with leverage, and as you watch the price fluctuate, observe what your mind says to yourself. It’s no coincidence that good poker players do well in trading.

  1. Have a system for determining when you’ll go long/short.
  2. Have a system for determining how much profit/loss is enough.
  3. The market has 2 modes: trending and ranging. You’ll have a different system for each of these modes.
  4. Lots of small losses and a few big wins are normal. Think about VCs. They do all that research, and still rely on a few investments to stay profitable.

I’ll figure out more on my own and write about it later.

News Curio: Shapeshift Dissolves Itself

Shapeshift is a company that makes crypto wallets that are easy to use (like Exodus!) and lets you easily exchange coins within it. Today the company announced it is dissolving and becoming a Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

What does that mean?

It means all its code will become public, the company won’t exist anymore, and instead of the founders+investors deciding what to do, whoever has FOX tokens can now vote on how to spend the treasury and what to do.

Obviously this is big. Read all about why and how here.

Banks are in Trouble

Former Wall Street Playboys (now BowTiedBull, they used to work on Wall Street) wrote about how banks make money, and why they’re in for a world of hurt (thanks to DeFi).

You know how when you walk into a shop that sells glasses to order contact lenses, they just log into some website that you could’ve gone to and click order…. when you could’ve done all that yourself and had it shipped directly to your house, but for less money?

What if banks were reduced to exactly that, thanks to DeFi?

Software, the Grim Reaper

Quadratic Funding – your opinion matters again

Let’s say a decision has to be made within a group of people.

1 person 1 vote

Sounds fair but the minority never gets heard. It’s the tyrannic rule of the majority. Imagine 1 sheep, 5 wolves voting on whether or not to eat the sheep.

You can buy votes

The wolves don’t care so much about eating the sheep (they can eat other things) but the sheep really wants to stay alive, luckily now it can spend lots of money to express its strong desire.

But what if the sheep was the richest by far (as wealth is wont to be distributed). Then the whole voting process is a farce.

So in voting, we need to balance “strength of preference” with “majority opinion”.

How about a system where the nth vote costs n:

Buying 1 vote will cost you 1.
Buying 2 votes will cost you 1+2=3.
Buying 3 votes will cost you 1+2+3=6.
etc.

Turns out we need something like this to decide where funds should go.

Gitcoin Grants works like this:

  1. Collect donations from a group of large companies and put them in a pool.
  2. At the same time, run a crowdfunding campaign for some projects. People can donate to projects they find most interesting.

The end of the whole campaign looks like this:

Money collected from big companies: $1000

Money collected from crowdfunding:

Project 1$1+$1+$1+$1+$1
Project 2$1+$5
Project 30
Project 3 was really unpopular

The $1000 collected from the big sponsors would then mostly go to Project 1, because it has more supporters. Even though Project 2 had a large contributor. And of course, the Projects receive the community’s paltry contributions as well.

play with the numbers yourself on wtfisqf.com

The weights are calculated thusly:
Project 1: (sqrt(1)+sqrt(1)+sqrt(1)+sqrt(1)+sqrt(1))2
Project 2: (sqrt(1)+sqrt(5))2
The actual equation is more complex to prevent people from coordinating to game the system/putting an upper limit on how much larger the Match Amount can be, but obviously you can still take advantage of the fact that sqrt(1) is 1.

You can read about it here or run the code yourself.

OK so why are you telling us this. Who cares? Which token is gonna pump next?

The point is that crypto can do so much more than just make you rich. It can make it worthwhile to vote again, for example. Society can agree upon new ways to work together, and iterate faster to fix problems that come up (see the section Pairwise-bounded quadratic funding vs traditional quadratic funding).

Haven’t we known that the public’s opinion is disconnected from what the government does in like, forever?

Ethereum is the only coin where these idealists, playing with ideas of governance, funding, societal change gather. I am not kidding. Gitcoin Grants is basically their way of distributing funding to Ethereum’s infrastructure (think about veins, distributing funds/blood to different parts of the body).

So yes, if you want to hear what coin will pump next, it’s ETH. But I hope you learned more than that today.

Coin Recommendations, or which coins are legit projects

Hello dear subscribers,
As usual the rest of the world doesn’t care about crypto anymore, but this is exactly how you get ahead of them!

Well, not really, I’ve mostly been sitting on my lazy bum binge watching this Japanese fisherman and strolling around IKEA. Like the rest of the world, I’m taking it easy in summer too.

Elsewhere, celebrities have been making their move: Jay-Z bought an ENS domain, turned his Twitter pic into a CryptoPunk, and sold a NFT on Sotheby’s, while Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen bought equity in FTX, a crypto exchange that’s setting out to be Binance’s competitor. Here’s how that happened, and FTX’s marketing strategy.

Market overview

We are still going down. But prices never go straight down like a rock. Just like life, there are smaller waves that go up and down within inside a huge wave.

The huge wave is going down.
The smaller wave has hit bottom right now and is going to go up soon.

It’s not quite a chance to go long and get fabulously rich. More like a short term (a week or two?) “make some extra cash” or “need to turn that 80% loss into a 20% loss”.

Trading is supposed to be a (relaxing) side income where you profit by sitting back and doing mostly nothing. Make sure not grow too many white hairs over your positions!

Coin Recommendations

So many of you have been asking me for coin recommendations.

I hope this means “which coin is NOT a scam” not “which coin will go up”. The first question I can answer. The second one I cannot.

Mostly, the market goes up and down and over time, the big winners go down less.

Even Ethereum had its competitors back in 2015, 2016 and it was not clear whether it would succeed. Ethereum mooned in 2017 (going frorm 40USD to 300) because of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announcement. Back then, many companies were creating their own forks/variations based on the Ethereum code – EEA was formed to create a standard so that these forks could interoperate.

Notice, companies were already busy creating their Ethereum forks before 40 USD. But once “we have made a standards body” was announced, the price went up. So as you can see, actual value does not equal positive price action.

Anyway, let’s get back to the topic. There are scam coins and legit projects. Legit projects occupy a spectrum from

< will sink and fail ————— will survive —————– will become a household name >

That’s difficult to predict though, and I’m not sure anybody can really predict this.

So I’m just going to share with you the coins I’m watching, and a summary of each. You ready?

A Very Incomplete List of Legit Projects

BTC (Bitcoin): depending on who you ask, it’s a money for poor people that’s better than Argentinian pesos/1920s Deutsche Mark or a store of value for rich people who see the USD as going down the same path as aforementioned currencies. (for a long time, the Bitcoin community itself wasn’t sure what it was most useful for)

ETH (Ethereum): a computer, but owned by no one – once you upload your program there, everybody can read it and run it. Since anyone can read and understand the program, you can be sure it’s working exactly as advertised, so it’s perfect for removing trust from the equation. It’s big because all the visionaries who imagine the use cases congregate here. Also because programming for its competitors is extremely painful in comparison.

ETC (Ethereum Classic): people think it’s “just like Ethereum, but cheaper” – no, it is part of the original Ethereum community that adheres more to Bitcoin cypherpunk values. The code may be able to run the same smart contracts, yes, but the community is very different.

ZEN (Horizen): a copy of ZCash, which uses zero knowledge cryptography to keep people’s balances and transactions private. Unlike ZCash, which just goes down, ZEN kinda goes up and down, which is why it’s on my watchlist.

ANT (Aragon): built on Ethereum, it writes software that makes it easy for you to start your own organizations on Ethereum. Voting processes, mainly. It’s got to be valuable somehow. Recently there has been a bit of a spat where key members left, though. We shall see, usually these things are not so significant as long as the project keeps ticking (e.g. Charles Hoskinson leaving Ethereum to found Cardano after an argument).

DCR (Decred): unlike Bitcoin, Decred has a more tight-knit, cohesive community that isn’t arguing within itself most of the time. And they’re actually innovating. If they could only market themselves better, this could be a Bitcoin killer if people decide to move away from Bitcoin.

ADA (Cardano): Ethereum competitor, except that it hires academia to really make sure all its tech is pitch perfect and publish papers about it. In practice this just means it’s been moving slower than Ethereum and other competitors, but thanks to Charles Hoskinson’s Youtube channel, people really believe in it.

UNI (Uniswap): built on Ethereum, it’s an exchange that lets you convert coins without having to sign up for an account or take a photo of your passport (normal exchanges do, because the governments require them to – they don’t want to do it either actually).

SUSHI (Sushiswap): built on Ethereum. Originally just a copy of Uniswap, it grew beyond the original “exchange” concept and now has entire ecosystem “coin launching” ventures. Certainly one to keep an eye on, might even surpass Uniswap.

ZRX (0x): I don’t remember why this one is here?

RDN (Raiden): a long time ago, Raiden was posited as the solution to make Ethereum faster. I still don’t know why it has a token?

MKR (MakerDAO): built on Ethereum. creating a coin that is pegged to the USD (DAI) without relying on any institutions/authorities is very difficult, but this is what Maker has done, and it was the first such project to do so. Should anything go wrong with the peg, MKR will be sacrificed to keep the peg fixed. Definitely worth something.

ZIL (Zilliqa): an Ethereum competitor whose main claim to fame is that it’s faster.

SC (Siacoin): like Dropbox, or Amazon S3 storage, but way cheaper, because there are no companies running the servers – normal people at home do. You pay for storage with SC, or you can offer up your storage to earn SC too.

GRIN (GRIN): originally a collection of proposed improvements to Bitcoin that never made it in (I told you Bitcoin’s community has a problem with innovation), it became its own coin. The big thing is privacy is guaranteed, and you can even delete old data, which means you don’t have to free up 500GB to run a GRIN node. The community is Bitcoinish in ethos.

BEAM (BEAM): Just like GRIN but with a company, backed with VC funding. Does that mean it’s more likely to succeed?

AUDIO (Audius): built on Ethereum. like Spotify, but artists have voting power because they hold AUDIO, so they could vote to increase their cut (so far no such vote has happened). Or just transact with their fans directly in AUDIO. VC funded, it’s the only thing of its kind out there that’s actually working.

LPT (Livepeer): built on Ethereum. did you know that if you upload a video to Youtube, Google has lots of dedicated servers working in the background to convert that video into proper standardized formats? now, if you do that service with your computer, you earn LPT. It works.

OCEAN (Ocean Protocol): built on Ethereum. like Amazon, but for data, or data feeds. Who buys data feeds? Well, nobody, because at the moment, there is no Amazon for data. But machine learning researchers will. Certainly a novel idea if nothing else.

DOT (Polkadot): wants to be the chain that connects all other chains. Right now, if you want to send Bitcoin to Ethereum, it just doesn’t make sense. They’re two different things completely.

ATOM (Cosmos): like Polkadot, it wants to be the chain that connects all other chains. Unlike Polkadot, it doesn’t want to be the absolute center of it all – just a hub. Copies of Cosmos with their own token can also be hubs that connect blockchains together. So it’s less “one ring to rule them all”.

LINK (Chainlink): smart contracts running in the blockchain sometimes need to know things about the outside world. Who’s gonna be a trusted source of that information? Chainlink is one of those with a solution, you have to pay them in LINK though.

COMP (Compound): built on Ethereum. It works like a pawn shop: you’ve got some ETH but don’t want to really let it go, but you need some USD for the time being. So you go to Compound, put ETH down, get some DAI (for example) in exchange, and go sell that for USD. Again, there is no company, no office – it just works as a website that you don’t even have to sign up to.

SNX (Synthetix): built on Ethereum. Makes synthetic coins of other things out there, like synthetic stocks, so you can ‘trade stocks’ on Ethereum. Or gold, or whatever.

CVP (Powerpool): built on Ethereum. A crypto hedge fund. Normally, you need to be ‘accredited’, which means you need to be rich. But this is crypto. Again, you don’t even have to sign up for an account.

1INCH (1inch exchange): built on Ethereum. There are many exchanges like Uniswap, Sushiswap, Balancer, Curve out there. 1INCH sits in front of them and finds the best exchange rate. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

BAL (Balancer): built on Ethereum. Also an exchange, but since Uniswap got most of the attention, they’ve made themselves useful in other, differentiated ways.

FIL (Filecoin): a competitor to Siacoin. Quite famous too, ever heard of IPFS?

AAVE (AAVE): built on Ethereum. Competitor to Compound, but more successful.

MANA (Decentraland): built on Ethereum. Decentraland is a virtual world, and you can buy land in this virtual world with MANA.

VIB (Viberate): errr, why is this here?

MCB (MCDex): trade perpetual futures in a decentralized way, like Uniswap. Not sure I understand it myself, but futures are unlike just buying coins. Anyway it should be good for something.

RLY (Rally): built on Ethereum. Helps influencers create their own coins, and takes a small cut as a return.

ICP (Internet Computer): wants to be a decentralized Amazon Web Services. Launched recently with a lot of fanfare but word is on the street that the exchange listing event was tailored to let insiders dump on hopeful investors (and even seed investors).

COMBO (Furucombo): built on Ethereum. Doing anything in DeFi can be quite a few steps, so Furucombo you can make your own combos (haha) and submit it as one transaction, saving you gas. Nifty.

AVAX (Avalanche): new Ethereum competitor. Its main selling point is that it uses gossip (Snowball) to reach consensus, not proof of stake or proof of work.

CRV (Curve): built on Ethereum. An exchange just like Uniswap, but specialized in stablecoins. Very popular. Definitely going places.

CVX (Convex): built on Ethereum. Convex wants to own a major stake of CRV. So they’ve set things up so that you’ll earn more CRV (and CVX) by using Curve through them. Yearn Finance isn’t taking this sitting down either, so they’ve spun up a “Backscratcher” to compete.

YFI (Yearn Finance): built on Ethereum. Remember AAVE, Compound and all these lending projects? They give lots of incentives to use their platform. But the rewards change all the time, and who wants to change between them all? So just deposit your money with Yearn and it will auto switch between the best yielding programs for you. This is called yield farming.

Conclusion

No entertaining pics this time, sorry. But you got a lot of meat and little bone, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Hopefully you have enough data to see for yourself what is a scam and what is not.

But then after that comes the question of whether the team can execute, and whether society will welcome the idea. Hey, we’ve become proper investors now, haven’t we?

Quietly Making Money

(what did I say last week? institutions aren’t gonna prop up the price for us, we’re all going down… and we did go down!)

Hello dear subscribers,

It’s quiet now. Nobody’s coming up and asking me about crypto. No “what coin should I buy now” questions. Thank god. Who wants people who only show up when the going’s good?

We’re pros, after all. And the quiet time is when real wealth and real value is built.

Somebody in particular has been making a killing shorting coins.

Let’s see what is going on through his mind.

ADAUSDT shorted at 1.56

This guy is playing with huge money, so let’s assume he knows what he’s doing.

If so, then the one time where he could have shorted ADAUSDT at 1.56 was ~14 June. Everything before that is too uncertain.

DOGEUSDT shorted at 0.442310

If he entered this trade on 19 May, we could say he got lucky. A more rational trader would’ve entered on 4 June.

4 June: He shorted near the top of a little wave (a rally). He doesn’t always get it right at the top. In this case he was a bit late, in other cases a bit too early. But one can never know these things.

DOGE is a memecoin though so when it dumps it dumps hard. He’s already profiting 2x from this.

ETCUSDT shorted at 58.681

To me this looks like a dangerous trade, because after a period of quiet drifting down, the price can pump quite suddenly. In his case, it continued to go down and dumped even more on 21 June (on the day he posted that tweet).

So I’d say he got lucky on this one.

BTCUSDT short at 38831.62

Nobody can always hit the top so reliably, so my guess is: after seeing BTCUSDT peak around this level on 26-27 May, 4-5 June, he went in on 13 June. This went against him and for a while he was in danger (but not so much, remember the whole market is going down), but it went back down again.

BAKEUSDT short at 3.0133

There is no reason for him to have entered on 8 June. However, seeing it stay at that level, he probably bet it would go down on 12 June. Then it went against him.

Assuming everything went perfectly, for him, 18 June is the more rational entry point, once he saw the little rally from the 13th onwards didn’t have any strength.

Most likely institutional money: What individual has a million bucks to throw on a trade? Unless he’s trading for a firm.

Short term trader (in and out in a matter of weeks)

Goes with the overall zeitgeist: The big picture is, the market is going down. You go with the flow. So whenever it goes up, you bet that it’s going to go down.

Logs in every few days: This is generally bad for my mental health so I don’t do it (I tend to be more long term), but he makes a trade every few days (which further proves he’s a short term trader). Most likely he was quite active on 14 June.

Doesn’t short just because “it’s all going down”: he waits for either a local rally or a local price floor that he bets will be broken.

Conclusion

I never knew how to short before, so I never considered it. But now that I think about it, I’m starting to understand why shorting is great.

  1. Make money on the down and up!
  2. Bear markets usually last longer than bull markets
  3. Think of how many failed projects there are, compared to successful ones!