Swimming in Liquidity Pools

So the big news this weekend in crypto was the launch of the Big Data Protocol’s liquidity mining program. The project quickly locked up six billion dollars in it’s BDPMaster contract, causing concern for some. Sam Bankman-Fried’s Almeada Research apparently threw in one billion on their own. I gave myself a minor panic attack as I pulled liquidity from several pools and projects to ape in, burning about five hundred dollars in gas as I exited positions that were earning a measly sixty percent interest.

The project itself is a bit underwhelming to me, it’s founded by an existing data provider company, basically they’re using the tokens to provide access to their feeds. They’re actually using two tokens, $BDP, which is the utility token, and $bALPHA, which is a subscription token that one can burn for access to the data sets. BDP is earned by staking one of twelve assets (wBTC, wETH, USDC, Tether, et al,) for up to a week, at which point no more BDP tokens will be minted for at least two months. The bALPHA tokens are released by staking BDP and bALPHA LP tokens, and those two pools were still pumping quadruple digit APYs three days after launch.

Despite my excitement yesterday, I feel like I was probably late to the party, and that ultimately it will wind up a bit like treading water, a lot of physical activity that gets you nowhere. The worst part is that I am pretty sure I read about the BDP launch some time ago, but wasn’t really interested in it. I just FOMOed in because of all the excitement. I’ll be lucky to earn my gas fees back, and I honestly deserve to get rugged or lose my capital over this.

I’ve forced myself to write before I access any of my wallets. Younger woke me up before dawn this morning and I laid in the dark in that in between sleep state thinking about this, and knew that I needed to write about it. I’m forcing myself to write five hundred words before I allow myself to check my charts and wallets. My CoinTracking is probably going to have at least thirty transactions from yesterday. Sometimes I am a fool. The GasNow plugin in my web browser is mocking me: gas is only eighty, don’t you want to check? Oops, now its ninety, everyone is waking up. You better check your IL and get out why you still can.

I dreamed about changing my LinkedIn profile to cryptoanalyst. Nansen.AI posted a tweet that their hot contracts feature alerted their pro subscribers to activity on the BDPMaster contract Friday night. I imagine having that information could have paid for the $1500/month subscription fee. I signed up for a trial. The basic service has some interesting features, such as address alerts, which an address for tokens or transfers or, most importantly new contract deployments. I imagine this would be very useful for watching star developers like Cronje or Banteg, or Uniswap factories to see when a new LP gets created. I can only begin to imagine. I had been looking at a GlassNode subscription a few days ago to get access to their current data sets, and the number of metrics that they have there are just staggering. Their cost is much cheaper than Nansen, that’s for sure.

I’ve already got a Messari subscription, and it’s not doing that much for me, to be honest, but it’s a business expense, so I justify it along with the 2021 CoinTracking subscription. I still have a day job, and projects to do that not interest me in the slightest anymore. I figure if I can just survive this market for a few more months without doing anything stupid (a big if!) then I just might make it.

My BadgerDAO holdings are giving me some pause, since most of my positions are tied up in LP or staking there. DIGG, which I had started to hoard, is hemorrhaging, but Badger, which I’d been selling, is holding. Go figure. I’m hoping DIGG will start moving once BTC makes a new ATH, but it looks like my previous prediction about it catching the peg with BTC’s price was either naive or will take a lot longer than I predicted.

So for now, I’m going to take a deep breath, slow my thrashing, and try to tread water for a little while longer while I assess my surroundings.

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