Morning notes

So I read this “Roadmap for the Future” post last night and it’s all I can think about since I woke up this morning. There are about four or five replies chained to this thread, so it will take about twenty minutes to read. Other than a few points about the long-term ramifications of UBI, I think the piece is spot on. I’m waiting for a hard copy to share with friends. This is basically the resignation letter that I’ve been wanting to write.

I’m going to break this down later. As the FEI launch is later today and I’ve got a lot of catch up to do to figure out whether and how much I want to allocate to the launch. An associate of mine said he’s deploying $25k, but I didn’t ask what sort of risk management he’s got on that. Smart contract repos and audits are available, as well as several medium articles, so I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. I was able to get in touch with the man behind DeFiSafety.com, and he gave me permission to use his process quality report. It’s mainly a deep dive into code coverage and test quality. He said he’d be willing to post my contributions on his website, so that’ll be nice. I started working though Integral yesterday, but the repos aren’t available yet.

I’ve deployed half of my B-risk tranche into the Yearn Iron Bank vault after seeing this tweet from one of the Curve devs:

For those who aren’t familiar, the range shows the CRV rewards on vault deposits. You have to stake CRV (veCRV) to get the higher boost, but the Yearn vaults earn this and compound their rewards. I’d be stupid not to put funds here, but I’m sticking to the framework that I’ve established and not going all-in. This is almost a C-tranche deposit, as the Iron Bank is very new, but Yearn/Curve are established player. These rates are only good for two weeks, which equates to about a 70% return during this period. If my numbers are right, this should return roughly the same amount I’m anticipating out of the A-tranche over the entire year.

Ape indeed.

Refirement update

Spring seems to have arrived. Missus mentioned seeing a beautiful blue jay and robin flying around our deck a few days ago, and this morning I noticed the latter flying around the trees in the backyard. It’s still a bit chilly in the morning, but we’ve had several very warm days already this month, and I’m pretty sure this summer will probably be one of the hottest on record. Maybe reduced economic activity from COVID will have an impact, we’ll see.

I’m not really focused yet this morning, despite the chai. I got to a very critical part in Shantaram last night and couldn’t put it down, and didn’t fall asleep until after midnight, but I do feel pretty well rested. It’s amazing how much better I feel when I don’t drink a six-pack of beer, I don’t know why I keep falling back into that habit.

I’ve got a couple articles that I want to write. My personal update, the draft title for my “retirement” announcement, has been open in this web browser for over a week, and I don’t think I’ve looked at it once in the two weeks since I started writing it. Missus and I keep fighting about it. I’ve also got things I want to write about my USDC farming, a report on this Integral launch, and I want to help the GridPlus team build out their documentation.

But there’s work, and there’s the main reason that it has to go. I still have several projects that I need to wrap up before I can consider it a clean break. April 1st is Thursday, and that gives me sixty days to retire. (I’m pretty sure I started my Sixty to Six Figures goal around this time last year, if I recall..) Missus is still mad about it, or at me, rather, but keep oscillating in how she express it. She’s always lived the responsible life, and has been my cornerstone in many ways over the sixteen years we’ve been together. She’s been following the simple path to wealth, to borrow a phrase, putting in her years at her government job with an eye toward a pension. She’s halfway there, but the golden handcuffs are becoming more and more uncomfortable.

I’m trying to do everything I can to convince here that I’m not being irresponsible, but she’s seen me self-destruct several times over the years: a failed business, thirteen months on unemployment; I’m basically one for three as far as holding down a job has gone since we’ve been together. But also during that time we’ve had two kids, bought a house together, I’ve run for office twice and finished my bachelor’s degree. So it’s been an upward trajectory.

Her main concern is that I’ll revert to late-night drinking and video games, while she’ll be stuck holding down a real job so that she can provide health insurance for our family, which she’s done for the near decade that we’ve been together. It’s a valid concern, but not one that I’m worried about, as I’m confident that I’ll be able to hold things together. But it’s also true that I’ve been doing the brunt of managing the kids and household during COVID, playing peacemaker, cook, and tutor for the kids while she’s on the clock, locked in the room upstairs. The health insurance question is something I am struggling with though.

Her other main objection is our mortgage and my student loan debt, the latter of which is suspended until September. No telling what the Biden administration is going to do, but there’s no way I’m paying a dime of that off before it’s due. I thought that having eighteen months’ expenses in cash would be enough to assaugue her concerns, but when I filled up the little fundraising thermometer on our fridge’s whiteboard I think it actually set her off. “I’ve got $x in cash, does that mean I can retire too?” she asked.

Based on my early calculations, I need around $1.2m in capital to hit my FIRE number — monthly expenses * 300 ( or annual * 24). That was considering all of the mortgage debt. Just my portion, including my upcoming student loan payments, is about a million, and the high end case there is just under $1.4m. This FIRE number is basically what we need to live off of, considering a 4% interest annual gain. ($1.4m * 0.04 = $56k, which is slightly under my annual salary. Adding up all of our net assets, including my debts, our house and our retirement accounts, Missus and I blew through all of these numbers in the past six months.

DeFi has changed this calculation significantly. BlockFi and other crypto lenders are currently offering upwards of eight percent which cuts our refirement number in half. And even better yields can be found on chain, with Curve and Yearn vaults providing rates anywhere from 15-40%. These are the “safe” options. There are newer protocols and launches that are offering more than 100% APY, although these opportunities are fast and fleeting. A risk-adjusted capital allocation to these pools should be able to return between 33-63% APY, depending on risk allocation. I’m currently targeting the low end of the curve.

Maintaining an income is going to be a bit trickier. There are vault transaction fees that will make moving in and out of these positions a bit expensive, but compounding results will make this a bit easier to swallow. And we’re only talking about managing a fraction of my net worth. I’ve still got a lot of options available if I need cash. For that there’s the restt of my portfolio, including my bitcoin stash.

I’ve tried to explain the opportunity cost to paying off our/my debts to Missus. All she sees is the numbers on the board. As a percentage of net worth, it’s nowhere near what it was a year ago. (I need to add those numbers to our whiteboard.) I figure the next two months will make them even smaller. If bitcoin does what bitcoin does, then wiping that board clean come June 1 should be an easy decision. I could do it now, but I’ve already taken a considerable amount out of the market, and will wait for $100k BTC. Considering that I expect $300-400 BTC before the end of the year, I don’t want to convert funds too early, but my expedited timeline might make that a necessity.

Of course I have IRA funds available. Taking the early withdrawal penalty plus short term capital gains would seem boneheaded to your standard wealth manager, but I’d rather take the one-time hit and still have BTC on hand than sell the BTC and be relatively broke. The money in the IRA grew so fast thanks to GBTC, MARA, RIOT, and Voyager, so I have no problem taking the penalty on those funds to keep cash on hand.

So we’ve got at least two months for things to play out before I need to make any decisions. For now, I’ve got work to do.

A long day

full moon and gray clouds during nighttime

Today has been completely exhausting.

I went to bed early last night, tired, and woke up at 2:30AM. I decided to interrupt my usual insomnia but going downstairs to start my day as I usually do, but meditating, but I decided that getting in front of a screen to write would probably upset my circadian too much for any possibility of sleep, so I laid down on the couch and managed to fall asleep for another three or four hours. Blessed.

I got up, ready write, and checked my phone. There was a text from my friend, T. It said “well I got hacked. I’m done with crypto, best of luck.” Apparently he lost about $11k after someone on the DELTA launch Telegram referred him to a fake website. He wound up putting the private keys to his Trezor into this fake website, and all of his funds were promptly drained from his wallet. He’s fucked. The only thing still in his wallet was the DELTA itself, which is in some un-transferrable state until the vesting contract unlocks or something, so we’re trying to figure out how to retrieve this last $2400 of funds. Unless the attacker forgets about it, I don’t think there’s a way, but there might be.

I had planned to write a post about my USDC farming, but that will have to wait another day. I did manage to get in on the Integral launch, almost by accident. The basic plan behind it is to vampire attack CEXs. I glossed over the basics of it, it uses some sort of five-minute delay to trade off of the TWAP price on an exchange, or something. They didn’t have any single asset pools, but I figured the USDC/ETH LP was safe enough for now, so I put in half the high-risk tranche C funds into it, along with additional ETH. The launch was botched, but the team was communicative and promised additional airdrops and gas refunds to make up for the mistake. Right now I’m earning about 130% APY right now, even though the ITGR tokens have a six month vesting period.

I was actually going to stake some WBTC as well, but my Lattice1 has some problems pulling funds from the Float Protocol pool. Apparently the Float community decided to end the pool 1 staking, so now those funds are just sitting there. I’m guessing after that we’ll be seeing less of these mercenary liquidity type launches, so we may wind up taking more risk that I wanted to.

Speaking of risk-taking, my wife’s ease with my intended retirement plans changes daily. She’s really not comfortable with it and says that I’m “single-handedly ruining our marriage, but I think the numbers will speak for themselves by the time June 1 rolls around. I may even have a new job lined up by then, but I’m still hoping to pull something together to keep me working full time for myself. I’ve got to get these USDC funds deployed, then that can take a backseat to the other two main projects I’m working on.

I had to take an onsite trip for my real job today, a local non-profit had some phone issues or something, turns out they had some carpeting and painting done and the crew just ripped up all the phone jacks and left them hanging off the ceiling. I told Bossmang to make them an offer they couldn’t afford and move on. I’m so glad the window is closing on this one. Hopefully by the time Younger starts kindergarten I will be able to secure twice my salary if I do need to keep a job.

Macro-wise, the Ever Given has been freed, but the backlog in supply chain might screw things up royally. Some big hedge fund dumped about $20 billion in tech stocks today, but bitcoin went up as did my cryptoequity positions. So it was a green day for me.

Other than that, I took the girls for a bike ride to the park. It was about a mile and a half each way, and the girls played for an hour, I’m really proud of Younger. She’s decided that she doesn’t wear diapers anymore and has started putting herself to bed for the past week. She’s so big.

I don’t know how much else I’m going to get done tonight. I’ve got a headache, and want to get to bed on time and try and get tomorrow off on the right foot.

ReFIREment unlocked

Well, I did it. Last night I sold off the remaining majority of my BadgerDAO LP, and completed funding of my USDC retirement funds. I actually overfunded it by 14% to be honest, which will actually pay my mortgage for the next five or six months. The funds, which equate to my current annual salary, will be deposited into a variety of yield farming opportunities, and should fund my expenses for the next eighteen months or so. Having this vault of funds set aside will allow me to quit my current day job so that I can focus on crypto full time. If things go well, I won’t need to rely on the USDC funds at all, but will be able to live off of the rest of my crypto holdings through investing, trading, or ideally, launching my own products.

Now that this runway has been fully funded, I need to wrap up my risk assessment of the various staking pools and start deploying funds. I’m almost settled on the safest tranche of funds, the A tranche, and will probably move the first allocation of funds into the Yearn 3crv pool after I finish writing this up. The only question remaining is whether I will allocate all of the tranche funds into one project, or if I want to split it into two. It’s the difference between managing three or six allocations.

Once I have the A tranche deployed I can move my attention to the B and C tranches. I’ll probably require much more time to make these decisions. I’ll probably do some DeFi Safety assessments on some of the newer projects before I fund them. Or, I may reserve the ‘extra’ funds for aping into new launch projects. Decisions, decisions.

As I wrote yesterday, there is a lot of other things going on, and managing these investments is going to be a full time job, at least in the beginning. Staying on top of DeFi and everything going on is a time sink, this really is a amazing industry to be in.

I finally made the decision to sell my Badger LP after looking at the charts last night. I’d been monitoring the USD and BTC pairs, and had some S/R lines I’d drawn on the chart. I told myself that I would wait for it to break both charts to sell, and just got tired of waiting. It’d been falling against BTC pretty steadily for some time, and frankly it was just too much mental energy watching it twice a day. I still retain a modest share of bBadger, as well as staked Digg and Digg LP. I’ll probably hold that and wait for Badger to release CLAWS and their other products. It really is a wonderful community, and I made a lot of money with them, but my goals have shifted.

Last note: Last evening I attended a crypto meetup event. It was outdoors at the house of someone I met on Discord, and there were about seven of us in all, a few friends and several other people I’d met online over the last year. Most of us hadn’t been to an event in well over a year. It was good to chat with others, enjoy some food and talk crypto. I loved it, and had a great time. To think that in a month or two from now I’ll be able to hang out with people without worrying about wearing a mask. I can’t wait.

Galaxy brain

My head is everywhere this morning. Yesterday I finally got a wire through to an exchange, so I’ve got one-tenth of my IRA on exchanges right now, only a fraction of that is actually in my wallet. I think I may be going a bit mad. I need to put a capital allocation plan together pronto, as my mind is racing as to what to do with the funds.

My original intention was to allocate a 40/40/20 deployment to BTC/ETH/DPI, but I also was looking at deploying some funds to the MUG TokenSet. However, I’ve since become occupied with USDC yield projects, stablecoin projects, Uniswap sniping, and now, some Curve clone on BSC called EPS.

My life is being overrun with spreadsheets. And I’m getting a bit of choice paralysis as well, trying to figure out what to do, and what to focus on first. I don’t know if it’s my hangover, but my head is spinning with possibility. There’s so much I need to do, everything is moving so fast, and keeping myself centered is taking all of my energy. Trying to maintain a house and be a husband and father is almost enough as it is, but yet I have this, tearing my thoughts away. I feel slightly crazy.

  1. Retirement runway: I have just over half a year’s salary in USDC right now that is not deployed. I finished evaluating Curve pools yesterday and have figured out the safest option available, the 3pool. Getting the highest APYs will require staking an equivalent dollar amount of CRV tokens for up to four years. Earning Curve might have advantages, but autocompounding via the Yearn vault with the higher rate might might be a better allocation, even with the increased risk. Once I’ve deployed the first half of the low risk A tranche I can start looking for the other A candidate.
  2. IRA funds: I’ve got another spreadsheet to do on this one, and probably a separate Cointracking account to keep tabs on it. 40/40/20 BTC/ETH/DPI seems like a decent start, but I can’t get DPI on exchanges, so we’ll have to start with a 40/60 BTC/ETH as I start making purchases. I even considered 50/50 BTC/wBTC for staking opportunities on Ethereum, but those seems to be far and few between besides LP farming, which would put me at risk for IL. I’ll have to do some more consideration as to whether this is worth it or not. Since it’s going to take weeks and months to move funds out of my brokerage account, I’ll have to be careful with over trading this account and burning a lot of gas. And I may wind up allocating a portion of funds to other plays using a two percent risk allocation, but I have to look at the math on that.
  3. Uniswap sniping: I had mixed results from my initial snipes, losing almost an ETH on some counterfeit projects, but my later plays have actually put me in the black. I have a 4x with LABS and a couple 2xs with a couple others, and if my math is right I’m actually up half an Eth right now. I’m working on a Python program to alert me to new pools, I’m hoping this will give me a heads up on any IDOs or other launches that flew under my radar. Once I can ID the legit token contract address, I can either try to snipe the projects as soon as the liquidity is provided, or alternatively, wait for the initial froth to subside and pick them up later.

I’ve got another idea right now, leveraging the power of my friends in my Signal group. Some sort of crowdsourced project list, so we can do research together and try to find projects. Maybe we can even do some sort of pooled investment fund. TokenSets would be nice, but I think that may be overcomplicating things at the moment.

For now though, I’ve got to go outside and do yard work. Spring is here, and that means it’s time to cut the grass. And for me to sweat off this hangover.

Morning pages

Missus and I have managed to “Atomic Habits” ourselves this week, so I feel pretty well balanced. I’ve been getting into a bit of a swing: wake up, meditate, drink tea and write; the day is pretty busy, then after the kids go to bed, I code, then off to bed at ten, read for an hour, and out. It’s a good routine if I can keep from interrupting it.

I get my first COVID shot today. I’m actually kind of impressed that I was offered it so quickly, I figured it would be May before I did, but I registered with my state weeks ago and got the invitation and confirmed my appointment for this afternoon.

My dad came by for several hours yesterday while he got his truck worked on. I finally convinced him to take a Lyft over here and he hung out. I put him through the ringer with the kids, I made him take them to the park and had him help Younger with her reading practice. I think it was good for all of us. I ran him through updates in the family business, mainly about cash reserves and trying to explain our BadgerDAO holdings. I told him about PoolTogether since he’s a lotto guy, but I don’t think he really got it.

I’ve completed two of the outstanding projects that I have left for work. At some point while we were on the phone my coworker asked me about bitcoin. We’ve talked about it many times before, but I don’t like working with him so we don’t really converse. Anyways I opened the firehose on him and told him what I’ve really been doing the past few months, as well as my retirement plans. He’s got bitcoin, but I don’t think he’s been staking through the bear market. I told him we could talk more about it later, but I doubt I’ll want to keep in touch with him in any capacity after I leave.

With these projects nearing completion and my cash reserves more than half full, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I need to finish working on my retirement announcement this weekend and get it released before the end of the month so that there’s no turning back. I want to spend the second half of 2021 just working on my on project, helping out with other projects where I can, and basically be able to focus on managing the house and helping Elder get started with her self-directed education.

I sat down to work on my new coding project and decided to get my butt in TDD mode before I got any further with it. It’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten. Just trying to get pytest working took me a half hour it seemed, and I had problems working through things properly. I did manage to get it working, and started on the process of trying to properly mock out API calls to Alchemy so I don’t overuse my call allotment running tests. Even though I got my degree last year, I still don’t feel like much of a programmer. I’ve got one program I wrote that I use every day, my value averaging program that buys stocks in my IRA brokerage, but I haven’t touched the code in probably two years. It’s very fragile. I never completed the Ether Auction either, the smart contract code should be code complete but I got hung up on a front end library and never went any further.

I spend so much of my day staring at charts and checking things in spreadsheets that I just kind of ignored the programming part of things. I’ve never been as proficient at it as I’ve wanted, never able to build a complete program that I’ve been proud of and willing to release unto the wild, so to speak. It’s a craft, and I am not at the point that I am a very good coding craftsman. I’ll have to work on that.

Cutting myself loose from the MSP space is going to be a great change for me. I’ve got a lot to learn in DeFi and Ethereum, and all these other L1 and L2s that are coming out will ensure that I’ll be busy as hell for the foreseeable future. We just got to get through this bull run. It’s hard to work when you’re making money hand over foot. Maybe I’ll get used to it, or maybe it’s going to take a downturn and another extended bear cycle to get me properly motivated.

Maybe, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to stay properly motivated working for myself this time.

Uniswap sniper bot design notes

So I started testing out some ideas last night.

I had heard mentioned that some people are using the Brownie Ethereum testing package to interact with DeFi, which I thought was fascinating, so I’d been meaning to take a look. I’ve got a bit of experience working with Hardhat, but I’ve been working with Python and was looking forward to doing more work with it. One of the fascinating things I read was that you can specify an external contract address and it will download the verified source code from Etherscan for it.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time watching the Uniswap factory to catch new LPs going up. I caught a lot of scam tokens going up and blew through half an Eth chasing after new projects. There’s a lot of bot activity, and I really need to figure out how to make my own. Asynchronous programming is something that’s been giving me trouble, and I need to figure it out.

My plan is to build a bot that can watch the blockchain (and mempool) for these new Uniswap pool creation events. The events return the component pair addresses, so these tokens must be looked up as well to get the data. My vetting process while watching Merv.Tech’s new Uni page has been to lookup the token address on Etherscan to get the token symbol, then use their token lookup page for the same symbol to see if the token is legit. There are a lot of scams out there. By this point I can usually tell whether a project is legit or not. The trick is automating this as much as possible.

I had about a 50% hit rate after randomly throwing money at new pools. There were a lot that were straight fakes and rugs, and I may have stumbled across one or two that weren’t proper ERC20s and had some kind of mechanism to prevent selling. For a short-term sniping opportunity, the key is getting in as soon as the pool is launched, so actually watching the mempool for these type of transactions is going to give a bit of an edge.

I was able to put together short script that can call the Alchemy API and get the on-chain event logs. Now I have to figure out how to turn it into a websocket that can watch it in real time. That will be something that I’ve never done before. An async function watching a websocket. If I can get that to just log the events, then the next step will be doing the token lookups. I’m not sure if Alchemy is the best place to do that, as Etherscan has a API that can make sure we’re looking at a legit token.

Coingecko might be a good place to check as well.

One user story that we could build out would be to dump the token description and website details into our Discord server, just so we could keep an eye on it. Of course eventually we would want it to execute trades on it’s own. Even further, if I could find a way to scope new token creations from blockchain directly or from Etherscan, Coingecko or Dextools, we might be able to find and vet targets more easily.

Exciting times.

Derisking II: Halfway there

The de-risking continues. Badger dropped just enough past the last major support lines last night that I felt compelled to pull a quarter of my funds out. I completely liquidated my Sushi LP, keeping the wBTC but converting the Badger to USDC via Binance. I spent a lot of gas. I haven’t even added it up: unstake bSLP, withdraw SLP (twice, as vfat mis-calculated the gas,) approve SLP on Sushiswap, withdraw liquidity, send Badger to Binance, trade Badger for tether, trade tether for USDC, withdraw USDC to wallet. My god, what a mess. Here’s hoping I can get the cost basis right on that one.

I’m not really sure what’s precipitating the selloff, maybe it’s people like me who are just profit-taking. There’s a lot of bBadger moving to Pancakeswap on BinanceChain, but that doesn’t require selling Badger, so I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m still keeping an eye on things. BTC is up today, which means that Badger is falling against BTC, but as long as it can hold in USD here I may hold on. If not, I’ll have to dump the remaining Badger LP. That belongs to commingled pool of funds that belongs to the “family business”, so I’d have to split the wBTC proceeds with them — USDC profits would be held for taxes and “management” fees.

I’m feeling pretty good about it even considering the heights from which it’s fallen, down about twenty percent overall, based on my eyeball figures, which mainly consists of a series of daily screenshots saved in a notebook. I’m now just over halfway to my retirement goal. I started going over the Curve vaults yesterday, trying to put some sort of risk matrix together based on the underlying tokens. I’m thinking some linear algebraic matrix to weigh each token might work, but I have no idea how I’d even lay something out like that in Excel. I’m probably overthinking it way to much as well.

I might as well just pick a Yearn vault and call it a day, but my brain is locked on the problem and won’t let go. The reporting end of it is probably what I’m going to be focusing on most. Once deployed, how to I monitor the funds that I have and the interest being generated? How do the web front ends for Curve and Badger work, and how can I build my own dashboards to track performance over time? Can I do something with TheGraph, or do I need to use web3 to write to a database or spreadsheet? Figuring out how to do that would be a valuable skill.

De-risking

I’ve written about IDEX here on several occasions. Yesterday, I sold my entire stash.

It’s probably most telling that despite owning their tokens, I never once used the market. On-chain exchanges are gas heavy and slow, and IDEX never got anywhere near their goal of being a fully decentralized product. They had on-chain orderbook nodes, which I ran (at a loss) for about a year. They finally got rid of that a few months ago in favor of a lightweight staking node. The truth is though, despite having about ten times the minimum stake requirement, I never got more than a few dollars in ETH rewards. The tokens did accumulate, but despite everything going on in the markets I felt like my money was better put to use elsewhere. Time will tell.

So I’m currently sitting at a little over one third of my “retirement fund”. I’ve still got over two months left to get the other two thirds. It’s going to involve some hard decisions. The majority of my funds are locked up in Badger DAO, so I’ve got to figure out how I want to pull funds from there. It’s going to be a difficult decision, although I did wake up this morning ready to pull the trigger after this latest dump. I’m still up significantly, but don’t want to risk losing capital.

So it’s quite fortuitous that I ran across this Badger Improvement Proposal on putting the USDC treasury to use. Basically, it would have eighteen months of runway set aside (with a growth multiplier, at that,) and the rest of the funds would be put to use. The author, Mason, proposed a three tiered tranche system, based on risk ratings, which would rate the various USDC vaults and projects, such as Curve, Yearn, Maker, as well as riskier ones like Float and Dollar protocol.

I thought it was a brilliant solution to the problem that I’m not facing. How to preserve funds in a stablecoin while still maintaining yield and returns. I immediately copied the spreadsheet and put my numbers in it.

As you can see, allocation 1 and 3 provide nearly identical returns with less risk. I’m actually quite comfortable with allocation 4, but decided to go with 1 to be conservative. Another Bager commented that no more than 40% of any tranche should go to one project, but after some consideration of gas costs, I think it would be too much trouble to need to manage nine positions compared to six, so we’ll say that no more than half of a position should be deployed in any one vault.

The risk rating of each project is going to take some though. I’ll need to do some research to see if anyone has put a framework together already that I can build off of. For example, there are about a dozen or more Curve vaults with various stablecoin assets and returns up to forty percent. Some have one, three or four underlying tokens such as DAI, USDC, USDT, as well as other newcomers like USDP, GUSD and so forth. Each one will need some sort of risk rating. Then we have Yearn vaults which build on top of those Curve pools. Could a Yearn vault still be “safer” than one of the newer Curve vaults? How to we rate the Yearn V2 vaults versus V1?

Then there’s the matter of these newer projects like Vesper, Float Protocol, Fei, and Dollar Protocol. Those are going to require serious consideration. Normally I’m willing to stake funds in practically any single-asset vault for liquidity mining, but when you’re talking about an elastic rebasing token or sienorage token things are a bit different.

As of right now, I’ve got funds staked in the Curve USDP vault, considered tranche B (med. risk) by Mason, and I’ve got enough ready to stake for one of my tranche A low risk vaults. I’m leaning toward the yCRV vault with 34% APY. I’ve also been checking out these other projects closely to assess risk.

More research will be done.

More insomnia

Yesterday I had a board meeting with Elder. It’s another idea I got from the Business of Family podcast to maintain a connection with her. Once a quarter, you basically take a half day to spend some time together. We went out to do some shopping and to to a trampoline park. We stopped by a couple of discount stores to purchase some housewares, and she went a bit crazy in the dollar store buying candy. I let her pig out. Then we went to the trampoline park to bounce for ninety minutes. It was, according to her, the best day ever.

I however, was less than thrilled, we were both overdressed for the strenuous activity, and our facemasks made it even worse. By the time we left we were both exhausted. And it really served to remind me how out of shape I am. I managed to make it to the top of one of the climbing walls, but my upper body has really atrophied lately. I’m feeling it this morning.

I went to bed at a decent hour last night, and was punished for it when I woke or was woken at 3:30AM and couldn’t fall back asleep. I tried meditating, listened to a podcast and tossed on the couch for the past two hours or so, but I finally gave up. My mind couldn’t stop thinking about crypto, OFC, and trying to figure out what to do next.

I’ve still got to wire seven thousand dollars to close our mortgage refi. Most of it is closing costs, but part of me just wants to cancel it and pay the whole thing off, but the problem is I can’t figure out what I want to divest myself of to do it. So much of my investments are heavily weighted toward a few large assets: bitcoin, both spot and GBTC; Voyager, in my IRA; and BadgerDAO, three different LPs for Badger and Digg, as well as staked versions of both. So I won’t be paying the house off, at least not this week.

My short term goal remains stocking up on USDC in my trading accounts, while rolling over my IRA funds to a crypto wallet. It remains slow going. I’ve only got access to $5k ACH transactions via FTX because they haven’t completed my verification, so I’ll have to bug them to get that lifted, or submit a wire request to them or Kraken. It’ll take me ten weeks at the rate I’m going, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t want to take a year to roll funds over.

I’m having a real hard time exiting my larger positions. I’m even finding it hard to sell five figures of a relatively obscure DEX token that I’ve been holding for a year and a half. Maybe it’s all the work I put into it years ago, but part of me is waiting for it to have another run. If I can bring myself to sell it I’ll be about one-third of the way to my June 1st goal.