BCM reFIREment Fund

person holding leafed plant

Upending the FIRE game through DeFi stablecoin yield farming

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a broad term that refers to projects on Ethereum and other smart contract platforms that are rebuilding the world’s financial infrastructure on the blockchain. While it is certainly risky, the rewards are currently beyond anything available within traditional finance. Just look at your “savings” account. The amount of yield currently available among DeFi projects can put financial independence within reach for many people. Here, I take a deep dive on how I positioned myself for reFIREment, and allocated an emergency fund that will hopefully pay for itself and allow me to live my dreams.

I won’t get into the details of fiat on-ramps or using the Ethereum network, nor do I endorse blindly following my any of my positions. Black swan exploits and rug-pulls are still a huge risk, and my purpose here is to discuss the analysis and decision-making process that I went through in order to mitigate some of that risk. I hope you find it useful.

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COVID Dairies: Day 398

Nanobots feel great!

Well here I am, all bright and shiny after yesterday’s sleep-deprivation. I went to bed at ten last night and slept like a corpse. And I’m none too worse for wear with my second Pfizer COVID vaccine either. I had been expecting to be a miserable wretch today, but I don’t feel bad at all besides a soreness in my arm. I think the two spicy chicken burritos that I had for lunch yesterday did me more damage. I did eat some garbage yesterday.

It’s hard to fathom that we’ve been dealing with COVID for over a year now. I went back through the blog archives just now and this time last year we had been under lockdown for a month already, and the household was in the midst of battling some sort of infection. My doctor eventually diagnosed me with bronchitis, but I still suspect we may have had COVID. One of our neighbors worked at the local hospital, and their child and Younger passed around some soft of respiratory ailment. I got antibody tests eventually, which were negative, but I was well past the six month antibody detection.

And that six-month period tells me that we’ll be dealing with COVID in a semi-permanent way, probably getting booster shots every year or so from here on out. I don’t understand what some are concerned about, I get a flu shot every year, COVID’s precautions have pretty much wiped that out.

I think we’re fortunate here in the US. Despite how badly we handled the pandemic, America has actually been handling the vaccine rollout very well. Seems we’re the only ones that can really get our hands on it. My brother in Germany tells me that they don’t expect to have it any time soon, and I just read Ontario is putting restrictions back in place. Apparently India is on fire right now. (I just finished reading Shantaram a few days ago, I can’t even imagine COVID raging through Bombay’s slums.

We’ll probably be wearing masks for some time, although I’m wondering how things will be by the time I get to Miami in June. I think it’ll be safe to assume that anyone who wants one will be able to get one by the end of May, so I think it’ll be safe to assume that anyone who isn’t wearing a mask and hasn’t been vaccinated by June is just a self-centered asshole.

I’m not sure how our international travel plans are going to look. Things are too far out to really speculate about that right now. A lot will depend on finances. I’d still like to get out of the country, but we’ll have to see how things look post-retirement.

Despite my sleep-deprived state yesterday, I did manage to attempt some coding work. I was looking over Banteg’s feil-proposal yesterday and trying to wrap my head around it. Somehow they figured out how to exploit Fei Protocol’s MCV, and would have been able to redeem FEI for $1.90. I don’t think they ever went through with it, but it’s still useful to see how to set up scripts in eth-brownie. I’m not sure I get it yet, but I think the attack tricks the MCV to allow the rugman to disable the burn mechanism, maybe even reverse it.

I’m still trying to get my tooling squared away. I managed to figure out my issue with pyenv and pipenv (can’t run --python x.x.x against the active pyenv version) and managed to import and query the Vesper.Finance vWBTC vault. I think my first step is building some soft of vfat.tools that will give me a readout of my current vault positions, and give me a daily/weekly/annually estimation of payouts. I’m not sure how well brownie is suited for continuous async scripting –bots, in other words — so I may have to go back and revisit JS node at some point.

But first, I’ve got writing to do. I am very close to being done with my stablecoin yield farming piece, that’s my priority beyond playing with the kids and getting the house clean. Then I can start working on the SetProtocol docs.

It’s a beautiful day.