Snow day, Klondike and Metawhale launches, r/WSB and Elon #bitcoin
Yesterday was one of the best days in recent memory, as it was a snow day. I wasn’t expecting any, I had checked the weather on Wednesday and it showed rain, so I was pleasantly surprised Elder woke me up gently in the morning to tell me that it snowed. I was surprised to find that two inches had fallen overnight. She was happy, and so I told her to go ahead and run out and play. Some time later I heard Younger waking up, so I called out for her to look out her window. SNOW! I called her to the bed and told her to look out at the backyard, and the look of pure unadulterated joy on her face when she saw it was one that I never want to forget.
I checked into work, did a few things before donning my snow boots and joining the kids outside. The snow was slowly melting, perfect for snowballs, so I scooped one up and lobbed it forty feet across at Elder, who was building a snow fort with the other neighborhood kids. It hit her smack in the chest, a perfect throw. I had to run in and out to check on work, made some cocoa for the everyone, and took it easy while the girls exhausted themselves outside. We had their friends over for pizza and a show, while I drank beer and played card games with the dad from down the street. Good times.
It was a stark contrast to what was going on in the rest of the world. Twitter was aflame about /r/wallstreetbets; I’ll not go into that right now. I did manage to do some options trading for the first time, a June covered call for $MARA at $40, twice the current price. The premium was handsome, and I’m a bit ashamed that I didn’t figure this out sooner. MARA is something that I was planning on holding through June regardless, and if it does manage to double by then, I’ll have made roughly a 20x on the stock, plus a ridiculous premium. I needed some cash anyways, and I’ll be rolling over my equities positions into crypto anyways, so the sale will be a good way to exit my position.
Wednesday also saw the launch of a new defi project, Klondike. I hadn’t gotten wind of anything new before prelaunch like this, so I was very interested. It’s clone of Basis Cash, a rebasing, seigniorage token, with some iterations, but I really don’t understand the tokenomics of it to be honest. It was brought to my attention because it allows one to stake bDIGG, which is the staked token for BadgerDAO’s DIGG token. I didn’t want to risk my DIGG on an anon, unaudited project, so I put a small stake of wBTC instead. I did manage to look at the smart contract code and made sure that ownership was revoked. There’s nothing fancy from what I can tell, so I think the risk of loss on the wBTC and bDIGG pools is fairly low. I didn’t mess with any of the LPs though, even despite a ludicrous APY. There were too many whales, and divergence loss would have eaten any profits. Still now, I’m not impressed by my emissions, but I’m going to wait until the end of the five day mint before I do anything else.
Last night though, was the launch of MetaWhale. I am not ready to do a full write up on this one, cause it is bonkers. Because of my involvement with PRIA, I was eligible for a nice airdrop of this first project, based of PAX Gold. I’m also holding a nice NFT that entitles me to continuous rewards from all the projects in the ecosystem. So I’m hoping for the project to succeed, despite my skepticism around that it’s attempting to do. There was actually a moment of panic on my part, when one of the reserve management functions failed to work, and I thought the project was doomed. I actually sold my PRIA while it was happening. Turns out that the web page was failing to provide Metamask with enough gas to complete the function, so it kept reverting. Things appear to be moving smoothly at the minute, but I haven’t been following too closely today. I’ve just been reading over the docs, wrapping my head around it, and trying to clarify things with the creator.
I spent most of today looking for yield opportunities. Armor.Fi, an insurance protocol a la Nexus Mutual, looks promising, as does FuruCombo, which provides some defi building blocks. Looking at that got me going down a rabbit hole of pieces on flash loans and scheming of ways to build arbitrage bots with it. I can feel the pieces moving into place in my head, but it hasn’t quite clicked yet. I get the collateralized Maker vaults and so forth, but I really don’t want to do anything that leaves me in a leveraged position. I’d rather just find an opportunity, strike, and be done with it. We’ll see how that goes down the road.
Of course, today’s big news was Elon putting #bitcoin in his bio, causing a 10+% run up this morning. It pure pandemonium. This on top of the r/wsb exodus into crypto caused exchanges to go down left and right. It’s been a rather distracting day. Couple of days really, if I’m being honest. I’ve been redlining the past few days, and I can’t believe I’m saying this on a Friday night at 8:30, but I really just want to go to bed.